Tom, who is currently studying Business Studies at DCU Business School, and his colleague Colin take home $20,000 funding for their innovative crowd map app ‘Map The Way’.  Tom tells us a bit about his project and what winning the prize money will mean to them:

“With our enterprise Map the Way, we teach people with physical and/or intellectual disabilities how to add features that they need onto digital maps so they can know how accessible an area is. Using Openstreetmap, we can teach them how to add features such as traffic lights, zebra crossings and ‘street furniture’ onto the maps so they know how to navigate areas which are new to them.

I have been working on this project with a school friend Colin McAndrew.  We competed in and won the Young Social Innovators in 2016 with a different mapping project so it was a natural progression to start working on this project together.

With the $20,000 prize money, we will continue to build our network to teach as many people as possible. We feel that our project now has the capacity to make a real impact on the lives of people all over Ireland and the world.”

Congratulations to Tom and Colin on a fantastic achievement!