By Dawn Van Osdell On her early morning drive to her Oakland, CA, office Kristin Groos Richmond is already thinking about lunch. Not her own, but the more than 1.5 million fresh, wholesome meals her company will lovingly distribute throughout the week to schoolchildren across the country. She’s also thinking about the small details that […]
Amy Cahill of More Than Milk is Giving Back to Chicago–A Few Hundred Moms & Kids at a Time
By Lela Nargi Amy Cahill remembers the afternoon last December when she was shopping with sons Max, age four, and Logan, age 2, at the Target near their Lincoln Park high rise. Spotting two sparkly plastic princess crowns, Max turned to his mother and insisted, “We’ve gotta get those!” They were a perfect match for […]
Max Ventilla of AltSchool is Taking Tech–and More–to the Classroom
by Lela Nargi What makes a career tech guy chomp at the bit to open his own elementary school? The “disheartening” experience of applying for preschool on behalf of his own daughter. “It’s insane,” says Max Ventilla, founder of AltSchool, a four-location network of independent micro-schools in San Francisco, the first of which he opened in September […]
Corinne Cannon of the DC Diaper Bank is Making a Difference from the Botton Up
By Dawn Van Osdell Corinne Cannon, an expert on the effects of care on infant brain development, is more skilled in handling babies than most people. But back in 2009, awake in the dead of night with her inconsolable, colicky first child, Jack, she felt as helpless and alone as every other mother in that […]
Stephanie Morales & The Mother Nurture Center Offer a Respite Along the Parenting Path
By Dawn Van Osdell Stephanie Morales can peek out her living room window and get a good look at the old wood-shingled courthouse building on the South Bay’s Redondo Beach Pier. Inside its blue doors lies the Mother Nurture Center, which Morales founded in June 2014. The center is her dream come true. If you live […]
Colette Linton-Meyer’s Cobble Hill Ballet is the Happiest Ballet School in Brooklyn
by Lela Nargi There are some obvious differences between the rural Midlands of England, where Colette Linton-Meyer grew up, and brownstone Brooklyn, NY, where she and her family now make their home. Cows, for starters. Cowsheds, for another—including the converted cowshed in which, at age 3, she was introduced to dance by a beloved teacher […]
Ice Cream Jubilee’s Victoria Lai on Retooling the Five-Year Plan and the Importance of Pink Desserts
By Christina Bruce Five years ago, Victoria Lai accepted what she thought was her dream job. She left a law career in New York City to work at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a presidential appointee working on immigration issues. Even as a teenager in Houston, Lai, the daughter of first-generation Chinese parents, […]
For ConstructionKids’ Deb Winsor, Confidence Comes with the Bang of a Hammer
By Lela Nargi The 214-year-old Brooklyn Navy Yard is a three-acre industrial park that occupies a small cove just across the East River from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a major builder of battleships during World War II, it earned the nickname the “Can-Do Yard,” a title that moldered along with its buildings when the yard was […]
Chudney Ross is Bringing Literacy to a New Generation at LA’s Books and Cookies
By Lela Nargi On a low-slung strip of street halfway between the skate shops of Venice’s Muscle Beach and the boutiques of downtown Santa Monica, Chudney Ross has opened her kid-centric outpost, Books and Cookies. Twice. Aiming to provide what she calls a “literacy-based experience” for the area’s burgeoning young family population, in 2011 Ross […]