Hi there. I’m the co-founder of U Shape Us, a social enterprise I developed with my daughter Molly. We create non-competitive imagination games that aim to increase people’s sense of belonging by helping players imagine, share and create connection ideas together. Our two games, U Shape Us and Up To Us, are used in schools, families, community settings and senior programs.

U Shape Us began in 2019 during a time that felt marked by disconnection, both personally and globally.

I had spent over 30 years working across housing, homelessness, child welfare and disability, seeing firsthand how exclusion shapes people’s lives and opportunities. Like many people, I was deeply shaken by the rising forces of exclusion and “us versus them” thinking I could see around me.

Around the same time, my daughter Molly, who was six then, was struggling socially at school. At home, we started playing with a simple imagination game, combining prompts and brainstorming new ways to connect with other children.

One of the ideas Molly came up with was taking an elastic to school and inviting other children to play elastics. That one small invitation changed something. Molly started making friends. Other children began bringing elastics to school too, and eventually the school bought them. What began as a tiny act of imagination became a ripple of connection.

It made me start wondering: what if our game could help people feel like they belong more?

Soon after coming up with the idea, I met Dr Cindy Mitchell at the Mill House Ventures and brought along our homemade prototype – Molly’s drawing and scrappy paper cards. Cindy asked a question that completely shifted my thinking: “How could this foster empathy?” From that point on, I began seeing the game not just as a fun activity, but as a participatory tool for helping people imagine, share and shape connection ideas together.

The journey since then has been wonderfully meaningful and often wildly uncertain.

I pitched the idea to a room of Mill House mentors and began the GRIST program a few months later, but during that period I experienced a significant mental health crisis and had to step away.

Afterwards, the prototype sat on a shelf for a long time. I had convinced myself the idea was silly, unrealistic and probably a bit delusional.

But the idea kept following me.

I kept remembering that the Mill House mentors seemed to see something of value in it, even when I couldn’t see it myself. Despite all my doubts, I thought about the idea almost every day. It felt like a spark bigger than me, something that refused to be put out.

Over the following years, Molly and I kept slowly testing and refining the game with children, families, schools, seniors groups and community organisations. With support from CIT community development educators, the CBRIN Idea to Impact program and StartSomeGood’s Good Hustle program, we eventually crowdfunded the printing costs for our first game and launched U Shape Us into the world in October 2023.

Soon after, through a GRIST graduation showcase, I reconnected with the Mill House Ventures and met the wonderful Tom and Craig. I returned to GRIST for a second chance and completed the program in 2024.

Since then, several hundred of our games have been used by educators, school counsellors, allied health professionals, community program facilitators, families and social entrepreneurs. U Shape Us was showcased at SPIEL Essen 2025, the world’s largest board game expo, and at the Powerhouse Museum’s ALT: Games Festival in 2026.

We also launched our second game, Up To Us, an intergenerational game designed with older people in mind, which has since been used in seniors groups, family settings and community programs, including Canberra’s recent UpStageING festival.

The most meaningful moment of the journey came a year ago at Gordon Primary School in Canberra as I filmed our next impact reel. After years of wondering whether any of this mattered, I listened to children and teachers describe how they were creating their connection ideas at lunchtime and after school in their street.

One Year 4 student shared:

“If you’re a shy person like I was a long time ago. This game can really help you ‘cause it gets everything inside of you, all your doubts, enjoyment, everything onto either your whiteboard, a piece of paper, or anything you like, so then you can make new friends and show yourself to others, the way they never saw you before.”

For me, those moments matter more than any traditional measure of success. They remind me that social entrepreneurship is not only about building products or organisations. Sometimes it is about helping create the conditions where people feel safe enough to imagine, participate and invite others in.

If I were sharing something with someone just starting out in social entrepreneurship, it would probably be to start before you feel fully ready.

Some ideas arrive long before you fully understand what they are really about. Many social entrepreneurs spend a long time carrying private self-doubt, especially when working on problems that are deeply human and difficult to measure.

For me, social entrepreneurship has been less about having certainty and more about learning to keep moving alongside uncertainty, self-doubt and complexity.

Stay curious about the deeper conditions surrounding the problem you care about. As social entrepreneurs, we often create products, services or programs that we hope might contribute, in some small way, to large and complex social or environmental issues.  But over time, I’ve increasingly come to see social entrepreneurship not just as creating good things, but also as helping others to notice and understand the relationships, assumptions and conditions shaping the very problems we are trying to solve.

Social entrepreneurship can sometimes feel a bit like setting out in a small boat on a vast ocean. You cannot fully understand people’s lives by standing safely on the shore theorising about them. At some point, you have to set sail, participate, listen, notice patterns, build relationships and experience those conditions alongside others.