Walksafe founder Emma Kay on making the streets a safer place for everyone

Continuing on Bdaily’s feature week investigating entrepreneurship, I hear from Emma Kay, the founder of Walksafe.

Walksafe is a platform designed to make walking at night safer for marginalised communities by providing information on safer routes home, local safety initiatives as well as ways to keep loved ones aware of where you are.

Emma told me that, “With personal safety being a basic human right and something we all deserve,” she set out to empower and inform Walksafe users to be able to access this right wherever they find themselves.

Emma has had a lot of experience dealing with unwanted behaviour and harrassment. However it was the birth of her daughter which was her call to action to establish Walksafe with her family.

With the goal in mind of ensuring Walksafe remains free to its users, Emma and her team developed other revenue streams. Walksafe developed a service for businesses which allows them to monitor staff safety, as well as Walksafe safety seminars for businesses.

The app has had a massive response from its audience, however it seems a bitter sweet moment for the Walksafe team when the app is as valuable as it is to its users. Emma said, “The response has been lovely, but its sad we live in a world where a safety app is needed.”

“We have always noticed that when there have been high profile cases in the media, are downloads soar. With all the mistrust in certain police forces, it has led our app to become a trusted brand for younger audiences especially to learn ways to ensure they get home safely. We’re really proud that people see us like that.”

Set on making sure that its users are aware of all the available means of protecting themselves when out and about at night, Walksafe has managed to interact with a variety of safety initiatives across the country.

“We are on a mission to put all safety initiatives into one place. So whether that be safe spaces, active bystanders, or if they’ve (businesses) got security that is operating 24 hours, seven days a week, and provides that sort of safe space for anyone who is in immediate trouble or feels unsafe, then we want to be able to highlight that on our map for our users,” said Emma.

This led to the creation of Londons first ‘angel beacons’ in Canary Wharf. In which security teams and safe spaces across Canary Wharf could help provide assistance to those in need. Discussing the affects of the angel beacons, Emma commented, “I think it’s such a wonderful partnership. I think that it really adds to the safety culture within that area.”

Recently, Bradford has also established it’s own ‘angel beacons’ in collaboration with Walksafe, but Emma has ambitions to take things to a national scale. Budweiser UK & Ireland partnered up with Walksafe to raise awareness of the apps potential.

Emma said, “I think that the amazing partnership with Budweiser brewing group UK and Ireland enables us to be able to reach more people. I think that it is really reassuring to see the tide turning to see more businesses engaging with personal safety, forward thinking businesses already have these things in place. I think all we’re trying to do is enable them, and give them that platform to to shout about it.”

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily

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