2025 Award Recipient
Javier Maisonet
Javier’s Idea: Sensory Toolbox—a beta rewards-based app designed to help neurodivergent children and their caregivers co-regulate through guided sensory strategies.
Javier has developed the Sensory Toolbox app, a digital tool currently in beta that helps caregivers and young children co-regulate through guided sensory strategies, featuring a built-in reward system where kids earn points for completing activities that can be redeemed for real-life incentives to build consistent habits and emotional awareness. The long-term vision includes a professional dashboard allowing therapists and educators to customize plans and track usage data, bridging the gap between daily family life and professional care by making tools easy to use, engaging for kids, and meaningful for providers.
Javier is motivated and inspired by the need for families — particularly in the ages 4-5 range when emotional and sensory development rapidly unfolds — to have real-time tools to navigate moments of overload, as many parents feel stuck and unsure how to support their child or regulate themselves during these critical situations. Through both his professional experience and personal parenting journey, Javier witnessed how early support can prevent future struggles, while caregivers in his community consistently asked for practical, immediate help that doesn't require waiting for diagnoses or appointments. The problem became especially clear in the lowest-income communities, where children face months-long waitlists for therapy access, leaving families without support during the critical early childhood window for building emotional and sensory regulation skills. Javier saw an opportunity to bridge this gap by creating tools that empower both children and adults to navigate challenging moments together, working toward a more equitable and inclusive model for early mental health intervention that complements rather than replaces professional care.
Pilot Year Impact
What started as one dad's fix for his son is now reshaping how families everywhere handle meltdowns.
That's the impact of Javier Maisonet's 2025 Imagine Award pilot.
As a neurodivergent dad of three, Javier watched his son navigate a Tourette's diagnosis — and the paper worksheets that came with it. Worksheets that got left in the car, forgotten at home, or reprinted again and again.
So Javier built Sensory Toolbox, an app that puts sensory and behavioral regulation tools right in a family's pocket, alongside a dashboard so clinicians and teachers can stay in the loop too.
With support from the Imagine Award, Javier ran his first pilot with 10 families of young children, partnering with a neighborhood martial arts studio whose owners already had deep ties to their students' mental health. He let families use the app on their own terms, then listened to what came back.
What he learned surprised him. Families using the app cut tantrum times from 30–45 minutes down to just 5–10. Siblings who weren't even part of the pilot started asking to join in on the deep breathing exercises. And more than one parent told him the same thing: using the app to help their child regulate made them realize they needed to regulate themselves first.
Receiving the $20,000 in funding meant Javier could finally pay himself after months of building on faith alone, cover the operating costs of a growing app, and provide stipends and support for the families in his pilot.
Beyond the funding, Promise's mentorship helped Javier sharpen his business model and gave him a sounding board for the big questions — who his idea was really for, and how to get it there.
Q&A with Javier
We recently sat down with Javier to hear what he learned from his pilot and how Promise shaped his work.
Here are some highlights from our conversation.
What did you learn from your pilot?
“So the pilot that we did, we really focused on the core model of the app. Within the app we have grand ambition around putting in sensors and using wearables with families and doing all of that to connect within the app. Within the pilot, we focused on the core loop. So it was utilizing families to use the app, providing data back to the partner that we were working with and just collecting as much feedback as we could during that time. So what was really cool, there is a neighborhood martial arts studio that my kids attend. The owners are absolutely incredible. They are extremely committed to the mental health of their students so much so that they have gone and received credentials to do additional work around pediatric mental health. So they've been providing community, I don't want to say community clinics, but they've been providing community workshops, not just at the studio, but also in the community as well.
So the idea was we would take the four to six-year-olds within that group, work with their families, and provide them with a couple workshops. We would introduce them to the app and we would allow them to utilize the app as they would normally do.
We tried to not get involved with them using the app. We really wanted them to have the experience as if they were doing it just on their own. So we had an initial startup and onboarding and that was specifically done because within the app, we're still working through a lot of things in the beta, showed them how to use it, showed them what some of the strategies were in there, but then also provided time for the families to really communicate and learn from each other. They were really excited to be able to see that they're not the only child that is struggling or has some additional difficulties or needs in their program. Throughout the pilot, I would meet with the owners of the studio and provide them with some of the data that we were collecting. At that time, it was just in a spreadsheet or a graph, I would just show them and they were like, ‘Wow, we didn't realize we had so many neurodivergent students or family members that thought that their child were neurodivergent but haven't been diagnosed yet.’ So that was really impactful for them as a partner to take a deeper look at who their students actually were.
Throughout that, we had a lot of families who were using the app and then would say things like, ‘I didn't realize how dysregulated I was before I tried to regulate my child.’ That again, right there, was something that we weren't necessarily planning for and didn't account for in the data, but it was something that came out in the stories that the families were telling us.”
How did the Imagine Award's funding and support help you and your pilot program?
“We were at a point where we had an idea and Promise took a chance. And for me, that was massive. We had $0. I was also trying to figure out where funds would come from. We always hear, ‘Oh, raise money from friends and family.’ I don't have the type of friends and family that we could raise the funds to get something moving.
So for Promise to come in and say, ‘Hey, we believe in this idea. We believe in you and we believe in the company, we will contribute.’ and provide us the $20,000 award – that was able to get us through for quite a while. It allowed us to get into the pilot phase. It provided us with mentorship that we needed. They came in and really acted as a team to help us succeed. So for me to have access to Promise after we got that award was just something that set us apart from being where we were to where we wanted to be.”
Learn More About Javier
Javier Maisonet is the founder and CEO of Sensory Toolbox, a mental health tech company creating responsive, accessible tools for families navigating sensory and self-regulation challenges. With a background in education, public policy, and nonprofit leadership, he brings deep experience in designing programs that drive equitable outcomes for youth. His approach to product development is rooted in co-design, prioritizing bi-directional trust between families, professionals, and young people. Javier is committed to building tools that are clinically informed, user-driven, and built for real-world impact.