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Build for Good
Income Inequality

Stride

26 August 2025

Stride is a digital empowerment platform that supports individuals facing financial and social challenges to build sustainable habits that enhance confidence, well-being, and self-reliance.

The Problem

Many low-income families in Singapore face recurring cycles of financial distress and return frequently to social service agencies for help.

For instance, a substantial portion of ComCare recipients remain unemployed or underemployed, indicating difficulties in sustaining financial stability. These individuals often lack access to structured tools for goal-setting, habit formation, and ongoing motivation to implement long-term changes. This stems from:

  1. Cognitive overload: managing urgent financial and familial stressors leaves little mental bandwidth for goal-setting.

  2. Short-term focus: many view goals as distant, resulting in a “here-and-now” mentality.


Consequently, this burdens social service organisations and increases long-term costs for the Singapore economy and taxpayers.

The Solution

Stride helps low-income individuals build sustainable change by:

  1. Starting with values and identity: instead of asking “What do you want to achieve?”, Stride asks “Who do you want to be?”

  2. Breaking goals into habits: Leverages insights from behavioural science and cognitive psychology by helping users translate big, distant goals into small, daily habits.

  3. Boosting motivation through AI and community: To scaffold reflection, break down goals, and encourage progress.

  4. Real-time monitoring: Organisational dashboards allow social workers to track beneficiaries' progress towards their goals, reducing manual outreach while enabling targeted support.

Journey

We began Stride with an AI-powered reflection coach designed to improve self-awareness among low-income users. While effective as a complement to SELF’s programme, it was clear this did not meet the immediate and urgent needs of beneficiaries struggling to act on goals in the face of daily stressors.

Through lived experience and direct work in family service centres, our co-founder noticed a pattern: many beneficiaries remained stuck in cycles of financial and social dependence because their goals felt too far away, and they lacked the consistency to work toward them.

This insight reshaped our direction. We pivoted to a value-first, habit-building approach that empowers beneficiaries to:

  1. Anchor goals in identity.

  2. Break down goals into manageable, daily habits.

  3. Build consistency and confidence through daily steps progress tracking.

  4. Reduce the manual burden of social workers through dashboard insights, freeing them to focus on higher-level support.

Pilot Findings & Feedback

We are currently piloting Stride with 30-40 low-income users. The pilot focuses on tracking outcomes across five domains:

  1. Engagement

  2. Mood

  3. Self-Efficacy

  4. User Insights

  5. Feedback from social workers

Through the insights, we plan to:

  1. Validate Stride’s impact on engagement, mood and confidence

  2. Refine user experience, understand barriers to adoption, and evaluate how Stride can integrate into social workers’ workflows.


While we are still undergoing pilot testing, we hope to achieve these outcomes based on international research:

  • Higher Goal Attainment

  • Better Mood & Wellbeing

  • Higher Self-efficacy

  • Less Time Needed for Social Worker Follow-up.


Early feedback from our users in the pilot test hint at these outcomes:

"When I felt tired and unmotivated yesterday (to do breathing exercises), the reminder felt like a nudge from someone who believes in me." - R, mother of 2 with depression

Roadmap

Month 1–2:
Refine features based on user and organizational feedback
Secure 1–2 community partners
 
Month 3–4:
Expand to 150 beneficiaries
Begin pilot adoption within programmes
Pilot community features

Month 5–6:
Prototype gamification and voice activation features
Prepare for scale up with 2-3 partners
Expand to 300 beneficiaries

By the end of 6 months, we aim to have 3-4 community partners actively using Stride with their beneficiaries, while preparing for larger-scale rollout.

Stride demo 01

Try our product here: https://stride.self.sg/

For more details, email us: hello@stride.sg

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