Indy entrepreneur chosen for MIT program
INDIANAPOLIS (Inside INdiana Business) — An Indianapolis entrepreneur has been selected for the MIT Solve’s 2021 Solver and Indigenous Communities Fellow Class. Katara McCarty is the founder of EXHALE, an emotional well-being app tailored for Black, Indigenous and Women of Color.
Solve is an initiative from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed to solve world challenges. The fellow class is broken into six teams, and McCarty is one of seven tech-based social entrepreneurs included in the Antiracist Technology team.
“I am thrilled and honored to be selected to participate in Solve’s 2021 Solver and Indigenous Communities Fellow Class,” McCarty said in a news release. “The Antiracist Technology class is all about using technology to support and scale positive impact for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and I look forward to working with the Solve team to continue EXHALE’s mission of providing resources for Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color to manage their mental health and emotional well-being.”
In a September 2020 interview on Inside INdiana Business with Gerry Dick, McCarty said the EXHALE app features meditations, coaching talks, guide breath exercises and guided visualizations.
“The app is catered to us as Black and Brown women,” she said. “The language in there – I speak directly to our stressors, directly to the mirco-aggressions that we face, the systemic racism that we face all the time, every day. I speak to our specific trauma, our hurt, our pain, our grief, our collective healing.”
As part of the fellow class, EXHALE will receive a $13,000 grant from Solve. An additional $200,000 will be available to teams and fellows, which will be disbursed and announced throughout the program, which culminates in a flagship event next at MIT next May.
You can learn more about the program by clicking here.