Maayan’s Story

Amanda: This is Ryerson Rewind — a podcast featuring alumni, sharing their fondest memories from Toronto Metropolitan University.

Maayan: My name is Maayan Ziv. I studied RTA for undergrad and graduated in 2012, then I came back to Toronto Metropolitan University and did my masters in Digital Media and graduated in 2015. So right now we’re at the Mattamy Athletic Centre, we’re here for the Alumni Achievement Awards, and I’m excited to be on the list of awardees. So it’s pretty cool. They’ve transformed this whole room. It used to look like a gym but today it’s like a fancy gala room. I’m excited to celebrate. Since Toronto Metropolitan University I have built my company called “Access Now” which was basically, the beginnings of it started in my Masters program as a thesis project. In a nutshell Access Now is a platform that allows people to search for and discover accessible places, places that meet their needs of any kind. And the way that we share that information is through the power of crowdsourcing. So anyone from the community can go on Access Now and rate places based on their level of access and provide that to the rest of the community. My masters program was basically the catalyst that led to the development of Access Now. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the Masters, I found myself interested in the space of accessibility, and within the first week of classes I had kind of hit on something that was really close to my heart. I have used a wheelchair throughout my whole life. And so wherever I go trying to figure out if places are actually accessible for me has been a constant challenge. And that’s really what started me down this path of what about technology as a solution. You know there are apps for everything, you can search for anything you want online but for some reason you couldn’t find out if a place was accessible. From that, I just basically started focusing all of my attention, all my class projects towards this idea and eventually that led to the development of Access Now. I basically launched Access Now as a website the week I graduated, and within a couple weeks we’d reached The Toronto Star, we were in The Metro News, we were kind of getting all this really cool publicity because it was during the Pan AM and Parapan-AM games, and I used that kind of as a leverage point to share something that was pretty much top of mind for people which was navigating a city that was new to people, especially if you had any type of disability. We used that kind of as the initial momentum and since then we’ve grown from just being Toronto based to having people share information about accessible places in over 35 countries and counting. And that’s really kind of  what we’re focused on, building a community of people who contribute to this effort and if it’s true give people the answers they need to get around. The Masters of Digital Media program at Toronto Metropolitan University was clearly the best option for me of anything that I looked at. It was entrepreneurial, it had that flexibility and freedom that I really loved, it was holistic in that students came from all different backgrounds, and it really kind of spoke to the kinds of specific areas I was looking to study further. That’s kind of what really brought me back to school! I would thank Toronto Metropolitan University for creating an ecosystem that allowed me to explore and nurture my talents that I might not have been aware of. Being able to reach out to people for help or just bounce an idea off of another entrepreneur. There is this entire environment outside of the classroom that Toronto Metropolitan University has really nailed and that is a very welcoming and supportive environment. And I really thrived in it I think, and it’s kind of proven itself because out of grad I went off and built a company that I started at Toronto Metropolitan University, so that’s really what I take away and I’m really grateful for. 

Amanda: This podcast is a production of the Ryerson University Alumni Association. I’m Amanda Cupido, a proud member of the board of directors, and the producer and editor of this podcast. For more stories like the one you just heard visit torontomu.ca/alumni.