Before MyWhatIf was an organization, it was a question.
One person asked it. Then other people arrived with questions of their own, and built a foundation around them.
At twenty, our founder Omer Golan survived a suicide bombing. The physical injuries were catastrophic, but he lived.
The part that lasted longest had nothing to do with his body. Years later, one of the hardest effects of PTSD was the inability to imagine a future. Every year, he was surprised to still be here.
That is where the question came from, and it is all the origin story this page needs. What the question became →
MyWhatIf did not become a foundation because one person had an idea. It became one because other people saw something in it too.
Everyone brought a What If.
Nobody arrived for the same reason. People came because of a war, a patient, a study, a son, a friend they had lost, or a conviction that there had to be another way. Each of them showed up with a question of their own.
What if this could help a veteran who would never walk into therapy?
What if a young person could learn to imagine a future again?
What if we reached someone before hope disappeared completely?
What if help did not depend on where you live or what you can afford?
Built by people who chose to show up.
We did not build MyWhatIf for them. Many of us are them.
For a long time this was donated work. Expertise, evenings and lived experience, given before there was any sustainable way to pay for it, by people who thought the work should exist.
Many of them are veterans. Some live with PTSD or other experiences of trauma themselves. Others came because of someone they love. The rest came through clinical work, science, technology, ethics, law, storytelling and social impact.
It was built across borders, mostly by people who have never been in the same room.
We built a nonprofit so the mission stays the customer.
The people who built this wanted the mission, and not the market, to decide where the technology goes. Access to trauma recovery should not be settled by ability to pay, by geography, or by whether a population looks commercially attractive. A company structure would keep telling us to go somewhere else.
That is also why volunteers gave their expertise before there was an economic model at all. Philanthropy helps build and validate the work now. Over time, reimbursement and responsible licensing of our models are intended to make the Foundation operationally self-sustaining, with 2030 as the goal.
The technology matters. The human capacity it serves is the point. How the technology works →
Good intentions are not enough.
If you are building technology for people living with trauma, caring about them does not qualify you. The work has to be examined by people who know what can go wrong, and who are willing to say so.
Clinical and research expertise that challenges how MyWhatIf is designed, studied and deployed. Members are drawn from Columbia and NYSPI, the University of Toronto, Yale, Sunnybrook and clinical practice. This is the group whose job is to tell us when something is not ready.
Nine directors with named officers, covering trauma psychiatry, philanthropy, technology, nonprofit operations and international growth. Named on the Team page →
Advisors on ethics, participant data, transparent reporting and where we should not go. The questions they exist to ask are about power and consent rather than architecture. How safety and privacy actually work →
Outside counsel on regulatory strategy and compliance, rather than our own opinion of our own work.
Studies are designed and run with university and hospital teams, under their review and not ours. See the projects →
The people behind the mission.
MyWhatIf is built, governed and challenged by people across lived experience, clinical care, research, technology and social impact.
To advance a new model of trauma recovery and rehabilitation that restores hope, agency and dignity, helping people regain the ability to imagine and move toward a better future, and to make that support broadly accessible.
A world where trauma does not get the last word on someone's future.
MyWhatIf was built by people who asked whether something better was possible. We are still building it.
What if you helped?
Time, expertise, funding, research or clinical collaboration, technology, an introduction, access to a community that needs this. All of it is useful, and we would rather hear from you than guess.