her audience tell us about where you were born something about to turn out well i'm youngest of five children and i'm fifty years old and my oldest sister is sixty seven so my mother spaced us all five years which was brave but she wanted a big family so that's how she did it and i grew up on long island i tended school there and i got to running because i used to play field hockey and i wasn't very good but i thought i was good i really liked the uniform and i did my hair and more day the coach came up to me and said i'm going to take you over to meet the track coach and i said oh ok why and she said because you are really not a very good feel like a player but you can run there was in junior high so at fourteen i i did not want to do this but i did and i went over and met  you know where he is he's the best coach ever and he i ran the eight hundred for him a few times and then i made varsity track when i was fourteen and it was such a great feeling and you know you go where the accolades are you grow you especially as a youth and it was such a such an important part of my life running and carried me through to university and then carried me through the my life i really picked it up  again i've always run but i really picked up the racing after about thirty nine years old i went to southern methodist university in dallas texas which was a little bit of a switch but i was able to run there which was great it really taught me a lot and so i worked she told me it was great to be a stockbroker so i thought well that's great so she got me a job at oppenheimer and i was an assistant and got my series seven and i worked as an assistant and then a stockbroker for a while where i met my husband and his two daughters mr darling so i was able to change from mary brewer to mary darling when i was twenty three  still married and i have two children during the time where you were running around in terms of traffic or you know what i was running but there was the eighty's if it was eighty seven and central park looked very different i think about it every day when i'm in that park how different the park looked how different the makeup of the people and you know coming home at night and running in the park it just it didn't look the same to me the park is so beautiful and safe now it really wasn't that but i did run i ran around often i ran with a lot of men and but i really didn't i always ran but i got very active in the new york running scene through new york road runners but through my st person who saw me and a because you were away from home well it was there were eight o'clock at night at the armory ok but i met great people and it sparked my we sparked my interest in running again and that sort of set the tone i would say from my forty's which was a great member of the civil war how did you get to switch over i ran a little bit for another running team and i met john actually it was his st new york marathon or maybe a nd but i remember seeing this person running it was i think it was  thirteen marathon he ran unbelievable it was thirty five years old and i was injured i was sort of trying to come back and we talked after that and aside from becoming one of my greatest friends he really helped me get back on the track to racing again and marathoning and track work and things like that so he's it's been a good fit and i've met some really unbelievable bridget and about forty five years old or forty four i decided i was going to go back to school and so i went to n y u and got a social work degree something i always wanted to do and i was going to become a professional runner so i thought maybe i should do something else and i've i've served on boards i i'm on the society board for memorial sloan kettering i do a lot of charity work but it just i felt like it would it would be it was something else it kind of fit into my life  social work and through that i have always run speaking of running and how this is so or continuous in my life as i one of my greatest running palace was geoff irvine's wife she and i became friends became running partners we did i think gosh london two or three times together although she's a lot faster than me geoff and i became great friends as well as my husband and our children became friends so i was going to social work school jeff was starting this business bridging this bridge really listens and jeff we talked a lot about it and then geoff i'm not going to say you pushed me but you didn't push me but you encouraged jeff encouraged me with because being a social worker you have you're giving out resources and so with that i love to network people together i think it's a strength of mine people have been so kind to me in my life and through networking through i know somebody new yorkers are great about networking so many one hundred i meet you i mean it's people are friendly people come up people want to help people want to connect could not turn it over to  so tell us why it was necessary to find brutes if you'd asked me twenty years ago what i'd be talking here talking today about brigid the answer would be now i grew up in pennsylvania i'm a c p a by training i went to call the business school  got an m b a in finance i worked on wall street as a banker and then ran hedge funds and private equity funds so that's what i did for the st fifteen or twenty years of my professional life unfortunately i was introduced to someone who was a bad person i figured to the f b i and they took action and they took actually convicted they got put away and then they got out of jail a few years later and then got deported outside the country and then they put up a web site that attacked me and so it was it was revenge and they went up and they basically described me as a bad person and a horrible person just like that and the internet today it's written in ink and so people google you st and they ask questions later so all of a sudden i went from a very outgoing gregarious person very positive and productive to a person who was worried about everyone googling may figure out recourse mechanisms on how do i fix my problem it's not true when someone posts something online that's not true how do you get it down  and so i spent the next four and a half years learning how to do that creating nexus where i could do and engage the courts and learning everything about the law privacy and digital privacy and ultimately i led me to conflict resolution and restore of justice which was all about solving the problems of of bulling not only adults but with kids who really need it i hear you but it's amazing twenty two years ago but your character was totally assassinated to fame and because somebody could put up a website and do is saying anything about you and you had no recourse here's what i did i started googling everything i got my lawyers involved i went to the us i s p that was hosting the site i got them to take it down because i said it is defamation for say i became an expert in defamation defamation for saying the u s and one hundred and forty other countries where they have all been place the person who did it pull to put it went to another i s p internet service provider who could post the content of the website with the website in belize which had no treaties with the us so i can do anything there and then i started to go after bullies on the move district court under chief judge holderman one of the leading ip lawyers in the country and i was able to get nexus there through a credit card receipt of all things and then we served him and we certainly electronically had been deported out of the country and he was so arrogant so then i spent the next three and a half years in court proving my case and i finally won and i did this because i'd gone st to google and said please take this down and sesame street like we don't take anything down without a judgment so i had to go through the law but the law hasn't kept up with technology which the judge when he finally did rule and i went before him in the court i said you know this is really changed my life but it's not only affected me it's affected my family my kids of course all my social relationships my old social support group i had totally a different opinion about me whether they said so or not ultimately solve my problem but i met all these kids and parents of kids who were there having had to had to be pulled out of school permanently now because you couldn't put them back in school someplace else because the internet is everywhere our kids who are cutting are kids who had taken their lives already so as i was certain finding my solutions i was along this journey and i met all these people who had it so much worse than i did and i was like no one solving this problem we're just letting it get worse the answers are out there and the researchers had been restored of justice and character education and social emotional learning what it thrown the curve ball into the equation was the internet because you can be anonymous in terms of attacking or communicating a lot of times it's not meant to attack it's just poor communication we don't teach our kids how do you how to communicate on social media we don't model behavior we do on a face to face level we have forever but how do you model digital behavior what classes do you go to what are your parents tell you how do you how do you describe the big unknown right right so as we started to look at the problem we looked at the whole problem from beginning to end were like we need it's about community it's about support right kids need to find their support groups and they need their social groups and that's what they spend a lot of time and force a six hundred and seventy eight grade they're trying to establish themselves well now they're trying to establish cells both on a face to face level but also on a digital level and so we're not giving them the amount of education and understanding about themselves and those around them that they need to what is pretty rigid school is a digital platform that incorporates incident reporting management and resolution to mitigate harmful behavior in school communities both on and off campus and on and off line with bridget will be able to understand the scope of their problems we're just going to give us the tools to surely  fine what bullying is bridget allows you to notify parents staff and security about an incident instantly and confidentially from any computer tablet or smartphone with just a few clicks quickly learned of harmful behavior access real time data of your school's climate summit restorative responses the have both short and long term results comply easily with state mandated reporting requirements at my school had bridget i think i would have just been the only one seen i think friend steals lunch money away from me because of technology the bullies can reach even after we are trying to run for her but junior's parents and teachers can't see them like many kids junior isn't comfortable having face to face conversation with an adult what if the bully see him in the office junior feels like he has no where to turn the courage to report this we go in and we give education to the parents the students and the teachers and the moderators are going to manage that so we're going to talk strategy with them so they get it they do their evaluation as to whether or not it's true maybe it's bowling maybe it's not thawing maybe it's a fight which lie maybe it's false it's just teasing but you want to get the information and communication because it's all about teaching the kids to get understanding about what the problem is and why what they said or did hurt or bothered someone online we don't really we're not there to judge the bully or the bullied we're there to help on the kind of provide support activities for the victims or the the people that are targeted and we provide support activities and restored over support activities to the boy so instead of the bully typically getting a going to detention and sitting at a desk for half an hour he still may get a detention but he'll get a reflective reflective exercise no i think mary you mentioned that every school in new york state has to have a reporting system so that it does it isn't of bullying or harassment or somebody is hurt harming themselves they have to report it so i think bridget has to kind of component as well to yes you know right now our whole life yeah we can track that we have a whole workflow for the makes it very easy to manage the situations you get real time feedback loop so principals can see now see we are sat on the academic side all the time and we tell teach the test and everything like that so we know exactly where our kids academically but now you'll be able to see exactly where they are socially if they're if they're upset if they're withdrawing if if they're being bullied or not  five percent of all incidents of bullying that go on in the schools are seen either by a teacher or by students and so being an ops than or which is saying something or standing up doesn't happen and it doesn't happen because on a face to face level the risk is too great because if someone's up standard there the likelihood of them becoming a target is very high and so they won't take that risk and so that's why we wanted to use technology because the kids are constantly working on on on their phones and make it very easy for them to communicate anonymously to the rest of the community confidentially to someone of authority who is tasked with the actual human courage bystanders to take some action and report it on the printed up absolutely things can happen see bullying as a disease is there a shot you can take i think it's interesting that's a great question well only because we just i said from the beginning this is a wellness issue and it's interesting because a lot of the insurance kind ace insurance companies are dealing with this as well and we've been working with them but also a pharmaceutical companies one in particular when we went and spoke at a bowling summit did a workshop they were there sponsoring this and so they're going into each school they've got thirty five dollars schools that they're going in and they're addressing the problem and that's they've engaged bridget only because now you can map that issue you can map it and then get it then get the remedy for it at the get help  on the way and just one other statistic jeff is five percent you say you know bridget works even if it's only five percent of that community is reporting that's great you've changed you've changed the way people communicate summits that we've gone to is you can put a reading readiness program and any school across the country and you will not get the percentage that you check that you will get by putting a bowling bowling or anti bullying platform in the school it's a love in percent if if if a happy happy school or happy kids make a happy school and i think great great point goes up eleven percent you know you won't get that for math readiness program reading  so across the board it's it's not just it's it's so important and the more i work with jeff the more i'm working at bridges and hearing stories and looking at the statistics from the from the studies and just looking at in our school seeing in our schools i didn't realize i got everything i didn't realize there was like over fifty different programs that schools can go to besides great what makes your program question different unique why should a school consider yours because our programs in the can the sense that it integrates the best of technology with the best of character education in real time there is nothing like ours there are a lot of great social  motion learning programs out there in curriculum and we don't pick anyone over the other put it into that embrace it we embrace it but the technology allows you to see the behavioral relationships of those in your community for the st time no one has  no student information system nobody out there has really put that together and we have so you can now see over time by problem type how different students are interacting with other students you can identify outliers early and get them the support they need and if sustainable well it's a sustainable solution it's turnkey if you have it turn turn around administration this is this is something that doesn't doesn't require one person leaning to make it to reactivate it again it's you should you should every parent when they walk into a school and i can tell you i did not do this when my children were applying to school who are going to school every parent should ask  an administrator upon that child entering school what is your platform on going how do you deal with situations and if they say nothing as one of our top principal said dominic angelo pull the cat out  plan you got a plan for the state so you want to supplanting to so how to besides word of mouth because you've been doing this for a couple of years and you're probably in dozens of schools at this point in time hundreds of schools we spent a couple years  working on the product with the schools to get it right and we launched our st cohort of schools this past fall so we're now over thirteen schools right now school so how do those schools and parents get your program to their they can go online to bridget dot com  united states to other countries bullying problems we don't leaders in bullying or the problem is you think the problem is everywhere and nobody has their hands around it because it's over so overwhelming and the digital it overwhelming were right now we're in talks of the ministry of education in puerto rico we have other central and south american countries translating it into the software into arabic and albanian as well all you have to do story but also with jeff because it really running led me into this and just really enjoying it and it's been a work in progress and no one works harder than joe it's an important work and i keep all the credit you were able to resolve your problem after four and i have here probably cost you your fortune but you were able to give back to the community to get back to society have to resolve your problem you're an expert