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On any given day in Los Angeles county, the roughly 8,000 frontline homeless workers in the region are desperately trying to help their unhoused clients find a pathway to a permanent home and a new life. For those trying to help parents living on the street make the jump, the significant lack of childcare facilities and daycare can make an already challenging effort seem like a Herculean task. [Photo: Paul Vu] At a former Dennys in Reseda, California, a first-of-its-kind experiment in offering on-site childcare to homeless parents in hopes of making the path to recovery that much easier. This new daycare and early childhood education facility will help make the adjacent Woodlands, a former hotel turned transitional housing site for homeless families, into a more holistic service center. The preschool and community centera $3 million renovation project which just held an opening celebration in early August and will begin operations in early Septemberfills a void in most homeless housing and service centers. Services for children and families remain very hard to come by, preventing many single parents and families that are unhoused from transitioning to a more stable and secure housing situation. The Betty Bazaar Center is the first state-licensed childcare center to open adjacent to homeless housing. [Image: courtesy Hope the Mission] According to a 2023 statewide survey in California by the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, roughly 7% of participants were adults in homeless families, typically with one child with a median age of 7. Ken Craft, CEO of Hope the Mission, a nonprofit that operates 33 housing shelters in and around L.A., and worked with Childcare Resource Center (CCRC) to staff the center adjacent to the Woodlands, said kids in this situation experience real hardships. [Image: courtesy Hope the Mission] Families at the Woodlands, the former motel turned into a family-centric homeless shelter focused on single moms, is a 100-unit, 400-bed facility that opened in the spring of 2023, also run by Hope the Mission, and designed by Kadre Architects. Families seeking space must go through the traditional homeless intake process and qualify for housing vouchers. Studies have shown that kids that become homeless are four times more likely to have developmental problems as they go through school, and that’s because of the instability of their living situation and poor nutrition, he said. Many homeless shelters will have volunteers come in to watch the kids, but there typically isnt the budget, staff, or space to create a true preschool environment. [Photo: Paul Vu] Craft said he was thinking of all the single moms who struggle to work and provideoften taking long trips on public transportation and failing to find reliable, affordable childcarewhen Hope the Mission was able to take control of the old hotel that would become the Woodlands. He saw the dilapidated former Dennys as an opportunity, and reached out to CCRC and the Mary E. Bazar-Robin Foundation to discuss funding and operating a space for kids. The design of the 4,500-square-foot center reflected the architects desire for a vibrant, colorful building on Venture Boulevard, a main thoroughfare, that would create both a landmark for the neighborhood and an inviting place for children. Nerin Kadribegovic, founder and lead architect of Kadre Architects, has deep experience working on homeless housing, transitional homes, and tiny home shelters. [Photo: Paul Vu] Designed to reference airplane wings and aviation motifsthe namesake Betty Bazaars family fortune came from aerospace and selling aviation antennaethe exterior of the building and roofline contain layers of blade-like pieces of aluminum, painted white and perforated. It creates a layered, almost ghostly facade that wraps the building and gives it an elevated presence. The extensive solar array on the buildings rooftop provides enough power to make it a net-zero facility. [Photo: Paul Vu] Kadribegovics designs also called for scraping away the fume hoods and HVAC systems on the top of the former restaurant, and creating a roof with a series of skylights and a carved ceiling that offers the appearance of an abstract belly of a plane. [Photo: Paul Vu] Add in the colorful walls, filled with blocks of bright paint meant to reference the contours of microchips, and the building offers an engaging space for kids. Open space on the campus between the community center and housing includes outdoor play space for children; roughly half of the 400 residents of the Woodlands are under 18. These kids arent just playing or being babysat during the day, said Craft. Theres important education, reading, social integration, and elementary preparedness taking place with CCRC staff. Were excited to be on the tip of the spear and help make this happen, said Craft. What we’re trying to do is to build really a complete, cohesive center that really addresses all the needs of a mom, of a child, of a teenager.
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E-Commerce
Reigning National Football League MVP Josh Allen met Therabody founder and chiropractic doctor Jason Wersland at his first Buffalo Bills training camp in 2018. Three years later, Allen became an investor in the company (along with a laundry list of other athletes and celebrities), and now he is becoming the brands first-ever performance adviser. The move reflects a broader trend of brands expanding the job description of ambassadors to go beyond mere promotion, with roles that include key investors or roles in product and R&D. We’ve seen it with On and Zendaya, David Beckham and IM8, even the Kelce brothers and Garage Beer, among others. “For me, it’s not just about the recovery, it’s about preparing and being ready to perform,” Allen tells Fast Company. “I’m excited to bring what I’ve learned that works for me on the field into the product development side to help push some innovation forward.” Allen says Therabody products like the Theragun Pro Plus, JetBoots Pro Plus, and ThermBack LED wrap play a significant role in his preparation, training, and recovery routines. The company is launching a new ad campaign starring Allen, as well as two exclusive Josh Allen Performance Bundles in the U.S. from September 7 through November 22, built around products Allen uses in his personal routine. Make it official Therabody chief marketing officer John Solomon says that making Allen an official performance adviser is just formalizing a process and relationship hes already had with the brand since that first training camp. We wanted to formalize that process with Josh, as a longtime investor and Therabody user, but also as someone who is having a huge moment right now, Solomon says. It allows us to get insights quicker and for him to be a part of the process, which makes him an even more enthusiastic advocate when products are launched. This new role is aimed at strengthening the brands place in sports and performance, which has exploded with copycat and competitive products since the first Theragun was launched in 2016. In more recent years, the company has branched out to include wellness (pain, stress, sleep) and beauty (focused on antiaging). Since expanding, Solomon says the company has seen double-digit year-over-year growth, only recently interrupted by tariffs. Authentic Allen Allen says that his relationship with Therabody is rooted in the same process he uses for all of his business and commercial partnerships. It’s really about the authenticity of itnever putting my name on something that I personally don’t believe in or I wouldn’t use, he says. In the past year, Allen has starred in ads for Gatorade, Pepsi, and Snickers. He credits his close advisers and some Hall of Famers with helping him navigate this side of his career. I’m very fortunate to have a really good team around me, obviously with my wife and my family, he says. And then, I’ve had small talks with guys like Peyton [Manning] and Tom [Brady], because they’ve done pretty well for themselves off the football field as well. Earlier this year, Allen signed on as the first New Era brand ambassador to have a direct investment stake in the headwear company, and he also joined the Cashmere Fund, a Nasdaq-listed interval fund led by former Endeavor exec Elia Infascelli. He sees this latest move with Therabody as another way to utilize his present to help secure his future. At the end of the day, you can only play football for so long, but you can use your expertise in other fields just like this, Allen says. It’s a chance for me to help a brand and become better at something outside of the game of football.
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E-Commerce
On 10 wooded acres outside of Tallahassee, Florida, a curved, wood-paneled home juts out of the natural landscape like a ship thats been permanently grounded on land. Its the only residence designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the whole state, and its currently on the market for $2.1 million. [Screenshot: NAI Global] Nicknamed the Spring House after a nearby natural water feature, the home was completed in 1954 as a commission for husband and wife George and Clifton Lewis. According to the Spring House Institute (the organization responsible for the propertys preservation), the Lewises asked Wright to design a space for them with the stipulation that they had a lot of children and not much money. The resulting 2,000-square-foot structure is an example of how Wrights experimentation with complex curved geometries shaped the tail end of his careera fascination that’s also apparent in his design for New York City’s iconic Guggenheim Museum. [Photo: Swcopeland/Wiki Commons] What the Spring House has in common with the Guggenheim For most Americans, the name Frank Lloyd Wright probably calls to mind a structure dominated by artfully arranged parallel lines and hard anglesthe kind of geometry exemplified by some of Wrights most iconic buildings, like the Fallingwater home in Pennsylvania or the Ennis House in Southern California. However, in his later years, Wright became more interested in understanding how carefully conceived curves could change the utility of a space. This curve-based approach, termed Wrights hemicycle style, involved designing semicircular floor plans behind large curved glass walls to allow the building to receive the full arc of the sun during the day. In the Spring House, thats most evident through the homes back wall, which features a sweeping semicircle that looks out into the back yard and is almost entirely paneled in glass. Per the Spring House Institute, the Spring House is one of just 11 hemicycle houses designed by Wright, and one of only two hemicycle houses with its “unusual boat-like shape,” derived from the intersection of two arcs. John Waters, preservation program director at the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, says he believes the Spring House is a reinterpretation of an earlier design known as the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs Second House, which similarly employed a curved exterior to let in maximum light. “There are a number of aspects of the Spring House, like the way its second story is suspended from the roof, that are similar to the second Jacobs house,” Waters says. “But there are also some really interesting tweaks. Either end of the interior balcony gracefully extends out beyond the glazed wall to exterior balconies on either side. I think it’s just a very elegant design in that way.” [Photo: NAI Global] Waters notes that Wright used similar design principles to simultaneously create the Guggenheim Museum, recognizable for its interior of concentric white circles, as well as the David and Gladys Wright House, which features a circular spiral design. “It’s probably a chicken-and-egg situation in terms of which design was leading the others, but they are all sort of conceptualized at the same time,” Waters says.
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E-Commerce
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