[Zoom Service] Friendship in the Digital Age

Laura Sniderman will speak on the topic, Friendship in the Digital Age.  Laura’s presentation will unpack the current landscape of loneliness, its impacts on our mental, physical and spiritual wellbeing and the role that friendship and technology must play in reducing loneliness worldwide.  She will share her own mental health challenges and discuss how embracing mutual vulnerability, generosity, reciprocity and no-going energy in her relationships lead to the development of a methodology that aims to help everyone, everywhere make meaningful friendships online.

Laura Sniderman has a Master’s in Clinical and Counseling Psychology from Columbia University, with a concentration in Mind/Body Spirituality. Her research focused on the importance of generosity in meaningful connection.  Laura was also previously the Founder of an International Women’s Retreat company called The Get Together. Through analyzing the anecdotal learnings from the retreats, as well as her research on community and relationships, she developed a methodology for meaningful connection based around four pillars: mutual vulnerability, generosity, reciprocity and consistency. Her most recent venture, Kinnd, was born out of a desire to test whether this methodology for friendship could be translated from an in-person setting to a digital space. Over the past year and a half she has discovered that it works incredibly well as a mechanism to help people make new friends online.  In its first incarnation, Kinnd (pronounced like the word “kin”) was and is a rapidly growing Facebook group with over 13.000 members from 100 countries. Their app is launching this Spring 2023 and she couldn’t be more excited about it!