The Co-Living Exchange Pairing Students and Seniors

0:00Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution Podcast. I'm your host Tiffany Owens. One thing I love most about hosting this show is the chance I get to listen to people who are finding really creative solutions to some of our city's most pressing challenges. They remind me that even though sometimes I feel like our cities are utterly doomed, there are creative solutions out there. These stories really do give me hope for what might be possible in our communities, even though when you look at Superb again, you look at strokes, you look at sprawl, sometimes I think it is easy to feel like this is just the way that it is. But every time I have a guest on the show and verse to remind it, that's not true. There are people working on truly creative and inspirational solutions and today's guest is one of them. Join by Alison Donnelly, she is the founder of Joey Co. A company where she matches students looking for affordable housing and work with older

1:03adults who have an extra bedroom and are looking for an extra set of hands around the house. Prior to entrepreneurship, which I'm sure has been nothing short of an adventure, Alison let teams at the forefront of healthcare innovation at Amazon Care and Kaiser Permanente. Alison started her career in media and technology at the National Football League. She is a mom of three living in the Bay Area and I believe she told me the team she is a fan of and I promptly forgot it, social have to tell you. But I'm really excited to bring you this conversation with her today. Alison, welcome to the bottom up revolution podcast. I guess you can go ahead and start by telling us what is your favorite football team since I think. Thanks so much for having me and it's always a good day when you can start with the Philadelphia Eagles. There you go Eagles, okay, that's what I was going to say. Philly, how did you land on Philly? And it's for my dad's family is from and my grandmother used to scream at Donovan, McNab in my living room every Sunday and that was enough to put midnight green in my blood.

2:03All right Philly is a great city. It's a hit. I've only been one time very briefly but I really enjoyed the brief amount of time I got to spend there. So you're not in Philly anymore, you are in the Bay Area. Can you just kind of set this in a little bit, tell us about yourself, maybe about your professional background. And how did you find yourself deciding to start your own business? Thanks for giving me the opportunity to tell the story. So I was working in healthcare for a while and I was really dedicated to serving patients and supporting patients. I was in a business role but I really wanted to focus on the projects that delivered health and well-being to real people. And I had some real people in my life who experienced aging by themselves and that was not a healthcare event. It was a life and human connection event. And the more that I was kind of focused on healthcare, I realized I was missing this thing that my family needed, which is how do you support someone who is changing very

3:08slowly and then all of a sudden very quickly. As I really explored my godmother, my aunt Judy, she was living by herself in South Florida and she had a wonderful church community. She lived a couple of miles from her daughter. She was well connected but she was aging by herself. She was living by herself. She fell in her shower and no one's entirely sure how long she was in that shower before someone found her because she was so disoriented when they found her. She is now in memory care and she is still so sweet and chats with my mom all the time and I obviously still adore her. But that moment of, wow, as a family, what happened? How did we get to this point where one of our loved ones had this event and that had nothing to do with the healthcare system and had everything to do with seeing her and being seen by others. And that is something that you can't really replicate with healthcare.

4:09So that was the first nugget of starting this, starting this company and there's plenty of other nuggets along the way. I mentioned I'm a mom and relearning about childcare in this country is incredibly unaffordable. So as I was really trying to understand how to care for my own kids, I learned about the OPAIR program, which is a relatively affordable way for American families to bring care into their homes. And there was no equivalent for older adults. So you can't have an OPAIR take care of an older adult family member. So I just kept wondering why can't you do that? Like what's going on here that makes us not able to care for our older adults with live in affordable, supportive, extra set of hands. While we can do that for kids, why can't we do that for older adults? And that really was the genesis of Joey Cohen and where a couple of years in past that insight. So I want to slow down the scene so to speak.

5:11Do you remember when you decided that you were going to go all in on this idea and actually like build this out as a company? What was that moment like for you? It was a really tumultuous time. I was working at Amazon Care. Amazon had just decided to shut down Amazon Care. So I was a people leader. I was working with my team. A bunch of my good friends were laid off. My team was moved to a different section of Amazon that was selling staplers and paper. And we were all like, well, we're here to change health care. And they were like, right, but can you sell paper now? One of my team members affectionately called it Dunder Mifflin of Amazon, which I was just thinking that. I was just thinking, oh, how can I make an office reference now? I still laugh thinking about that comment she was caught on. And so as a manager of people, I don't take people's livelihoods lightly.

6:13So my first priority was to make sure that my team was good, that they had a place to land that each of them had a job that not only was going to pay them, but that they were excited about and had chosen for themselves. So that was priority number one through this messy transition. But while this was happening, I kept asking myself the same questions, like, what do I actually want to do next? What job not only will pay me, but will kind of fulfill me heart and soul? I kept looking around. I tried to find another health care job. And this was really the same moment that I heard about my godmother, my aunt. I heard about my uncle who was driving the wrong way down the road. And the cops called my cousins. And they were like, hey, you got to check in your dad. We're not sure what's going on, but he's really disoriented and he's driving the wrong way. That's so scary. So scary. And so professionally, I was having this massive transition. And personally, I just kept noticing the same thing.

7:13And so that was the moment for me. It was just this bouncing back and forth between professional and personal and asking myself what part of all of this do I want to be? Do I want to be a family caregiver and support my aunt and uncle? Do I want to use the skills that I've developed across business, across health care, across strategy and design to come up with a better way to do all of this, not just for my family, but for lots of families. You get this idea. What were you seeing as you started talking about it within your life? What were your community? Or just with your family or friends? What were you hearing? What were some of the, how were you seeing it resonate with people around you? The first couple conversations were so helpful to, pressure test my own experience with family members. And of course, my cousins were so much closer to it than I was.

8:16It was my aunt and my uncle. And it wasn't me living it with my parents. So the more that I interviewed, the more that I learned and the more that I connected, I really understood one, how different this process is. We all go one direction in life. You're aging, I'm aging. We all go one direction. We're all aging together for the first time. And we all only do it once. And it's different for each of us. It's different every single time. The family dynamics are different. The housing situation is different. The ability to afford different options for care and support is different. But some of the stories that really stick with me, one of my friends told me, his mom had stopped getting dressed in the morning. She just wore her pajamas most of the day. And she always knew when someone was coming to the house and then she would get dressed for the days that someone was coming to the house. But if someone wasn't coming, she just wouldn't get dressed. She would just kind of wear her pajamas.

9:17And that one sticks with me for so many reasons because it showed me the act of being seen, like physically seeing another human being, is service, is care. And that to me really shapes the way that we designed Joey Coe and the service and has just settled in my heart and my bones in a way that is hard to explain. So much of our lives happens digitally and online at this point. And I, seeing other humans is a joy and a privilege. And I think we all need to remember that as often as possible. When you talk about finding child care, then you also talk about having presence around as you're entering your sense at years, I think is the proper, is the term. I can't help but thinking about how both of these challenges are a result of how we've approached community design in our country and just the extent to which the assumption

10:19that self-reliance is a top priority. I'm curious if you found yourself connecting those dots. If you, were you thinking about the design loneliness problem or like the design, mother hood load problem? I'm just curious kind of when that has, I don't know, has that clicked for you or like where are you at kind of on that, on that side of thing? Because when I hear it, I immediately think yes because we don't have villages anymore. Like yes, because we all live so far apart. Yes, because everyone has to drive. If you're going to see it to everybody. And it's culturally not considered normal to have intergenerational households. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, I'm just nodding along for the podcast. I'm nodding along like yes, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of my research designing Joey Coe was international research. I mean, to your point about multi-generational families not being viewed as normal culturally in the US, the way that the rest of the world pretty much manages the care of older adults

11:27and the support of family members, whether mothers or aging parents, is through multi-generational living or community sort of villages. And what's been really interesting in bringing a service like Joey Coe to a ruggedly individualistic America is one, we provide the appropriate dose of capitalism to formalize a social good that exists without sort of funds exchange in a lot of other countries. So what I mean by that is we fairly price the room that the student is renting. We fairly price the work that the student is performing. So there is a clear dollar exchange for this is what the room is worth. This is what the work is worth. Some of that is a regulatory necessity in California. You have to do those things. But it also helps all of us individualists in the US say, well, this is a fair exchange. I'm paying for this and I'm paying for that.

12:28And it is a transaction. And I think that makes it a little bit more approachable. The other thing that I think has been really wonderful is the people that are attracted to this do view it as normal. And it's not going to be for everyone. But there's a beautiful altruism in our hosts. They see the same housing crisis that you and I see. They see the same challenges of the infrastructure that we have today. And they want to be part of the solution. And so they're saying, well, I do have this extra room. And I don't really use it that often. And I don't really want to walk my dog in the brain anymore. So that all seems to come together where I could provide this room at an affordable rate to a student who really needs it at the nearby community college or private college. I think that's what's so interesting about ideas like Joey Coe is that in a way you are approving demand for unconventional products and unconventional arrangements that I think America has been sort of like convinced that single family suburb with the car is all

13:32that Americans really want. That's the only thing there's demand for. And so when I see solutions like this, it just gets me so excited because I'm like, well, you are providing a service and you're solving a problem, but you're also providing a signal that says, hey, there's actually appetite for what we would call an, I mean, you could say a traditional arrangement, but what we would call, you know, an unconventional housing arrangement. And you see this with ADUs, you see this with people embracing parking minimums, you see like liberating cities from parking minimums. You see this in so many sectors where slowly we're starting to bust the myth that this hyper-suffice and you know, convenience-oriented arrangement of our private lives is the only thing that there's ever demand for. And I just find that really exciting. We started to touch on this already, but can you give our audience kind of an overview of Joey Crowe? So like your elevator pitch, maybe you could just describe what it is, how it works, who, you know, the people that you're bringing together and how it benefits, you know, the two

14:34people that you're kind of targeting, which are the college students and older residents citizens. Yeah, absolutely. So we work with older adult homeowners who have an extra bedroom and would love an extra set of hands around the house. I mentioned the dog earlier. It's a great example. We work with a lot of dog and pet owners. Trash cans is another one that comes up all the time. I don't want to bring my trash cans up and down the hills anymore or, you know, whatever, whatever that may be. Neal prep and planning or groceries is another example. We hear all the time from our hosts. But really, it can be anything around the house that you consistently want off your to-do list. And those older adult homeowners rent their extra bedroom to local university students. Those university students come to us in a variety of stages of their studenthood. So we have undergraduates. We have graduate students. We define students pretty broadly. So if you come to us and say, hey, I'm a student at XYZ Certificate Program.

15:39We are very open to that. And, you know, returning learners who are much older. We have students in from really diverse backgrounds and pursuing really diverse fields. We do lots of vetting and screening on both sides to ensure, you know, safety and compatibility of all of the pairs. Then we match and help with contracting. So in California where we're operating, there's all sorts of regulation that governs housing and employment that we are experts in and help our hosts understand and our joys understand as well. And then we don't disappear after the match and move it. So once our hosts and joys are moved in, there's all sorts of little things that come up. And so we stay super involved so that, hey, can you not use that blender at 6 a.m. doesn't turn into like, I need this person out of my house now. There's all sorts of microcommunication that we can build when it's small so that we can manage things as they change because it's life, it's housing, it's real, deep, important

16:43things for both sides. And things change, whether it's a health status or, you know, a breakup, we're there to help navigate how life changes so that there's always someone there to talk to and support the communication and the changes that invariably will come over the course of the durations. On your website, you touch on several challenges that you're hoping Joey Coe can be a part of solving. You'll mention the loneliness epidemic, you know, the need for work, housing and security among college students, and just the basic need for more support for men and women who are older. I'm just curious, were you thinking of all of these challenges when you got started? I'm especially curious if you were thinking about the housing challenge, especially in California, or did some of these emerge kind of as you got going and then you started to see how they all came together. What was that like for you? Yeah, I was definitely coming out of more from my older adult family member perspective

17:48beginning, at the beginning. And when I realized you couldn't have an opair for older adults, I tried to understand different populations or think through different people who might be interested in this type of scenario. This kind of goes to what you were saying about proving out the demand. I didn't really have an analog that I could look to and say who would want to live and work like this. I learned a lot from local students and from some really wonderful research actually out of Temple University. There's an institute called the Hope Center and they do research on the ground at universities across the country and it turns out about half of all college students are housing insecure. And their research validates that year and a year out for the last several years. It's a massive problem and as I continued to educate myself, I kind of went from casual yin-bi, yes in my backyard. I was like absolutely more housing. We should be doing more all that kind of thing.

18:50But I wasn't as educated, I wasn't as active. I didn't really have the housing bug yet, so to speak. But now it's so central and so important to what we do. California is going through the housing element process and we have required housing that different towns are grappling with. And it's really at the forefront of what Californians are thinking about from a policy perspective and what, you know, how to design their communities. And I think home sharing is an underutilized and undervalued component of that conversation. It's an answer to how do we house today, not just how do we house once we can build more units. And I think that it's really wonderful how intersectional it can be, but when we're really looking at housing, it's an answer today in the near term. But once we can get a developer approved through all the different processes that we have in towns and states, it's now and it solves the needs of the older adults too.

19:56And the win-win is what keeps me going every day. It's hard and rare in today's world to find win-wins where it's not, let's divide the pie and if I get a bigger piece, you get a smaller piece. It's really mutually beneficial and that's what keeps me so motivated. Have you ever experienced any pushback on home sharing or just the model that you are using and what does that pushback sound like? How do you respond? All the time. I skipped. This was in part of the job. There's a lot of, I don't want a stranger moving into my house. I talked to, you know, host all the time, I don't need a stranger in my house. I don't want a stranger. And the short answer to that question is you have every opportunity to get to know this person before they move in. No one is forcing you to have somebody move into your house on both sides. Everyone's choosing to do the move and everyone's opting in. You know, we're fully consenting here. So there's no strangers. And I also just want to validate and understand the concern that people are complicated and

21:01it doesn't really matter how much vetting we do on both the host or the Joey things come up, things change. There's always going to be a change and that back can just be hard. So whether it's a stranger or someone you've known forever, it is big to invite anyone into your home. You know, I know my mother and law super well. And if she moved into my home, that would be a change in my household. And that's a real concern that we just need to, you know, understand and acknowledge and not a little. So the stranger piece we can usually address, but having someone move in is a big one. The other one I hear is on the student side that they would be concerned being on call all the time, you know, being kind of the metaphor that comes to mind sometimes is the little bell, like a servant bell, right? Like, like, like, and down from Abby. Exactly, right? Like it's almost like a reversion to something that like we're trying to get away from.

22:03And that's that couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, what's really nice about the hosts that want to work with us and the students that want to work with us is they really understand boundaries. So we coach them on boundaries, we communicate on boundaries, but they also don't want to feel like they're being waited on. The host that we work with actually struggle almost in the opposite direction that I don't need any help. I'm okay. I'm good. It gets back to that individualism that I can manage it myself. And we see much more of that from hosts than needing to be waited on hand and foot and being on call all the time. So valid concerns on both sides, but not stuff that we've actually seen in our lived experience once we started matching and really seeing what happens. Yeah, I want to talk about that. Can you share any stories about some of the successes or just the results that you've seen so far? Absolutely. So we have matches all across California.

23:06We are working with hosts in LA and Riverside down in Southern California. And we've got hosts all the way up through the Bay Area and up into Sonoma County as well in the North Bay. So we're all across the state. And the stories are the best part of this job. We have a host over in the East Bay. So over kind of in the Oakland area, he's an attorney and he lost his wife a couple years ago. And so he was processing the grief and the loss. And he has a beautiful supportive family who was helping him with that. And he decided he wanted to bring a student into the home to kind of help him with his dog for the most part. But also, the big trips to Costco, he's still a big Costco fan. And we found him incredibly sweet young woman who's studying in the East Bay. She's pursuing her degree in social work. And I was just chatting with him yesterday. He's helping her review her employment paperwork for her new internship.

24:09And he's going all into the details of how the insurance is going to work and making sure that she's well protected. And it's just the sweetest mutual respect that they have. And you can just hear a change in his voice and the vibrancy that he has. Now that there's another sweet, sweet person in his home. Another phenomenal example is in the South Bay, so kind of below San Francisco, closer to Stanford University. We have a husband and wife that has a diagnosis. So he's, you know, has some health challenges. The wife is still, you know, relatively young and vibrant in her own ways. And both of them decided to invite a Stanford medical student into their home. So she's an absolutely incredibly accomplished young woman. And she started to join some of the wife's book clubs.

25:09And she is listening to a consciousness podcast with the husband to kind of explore what's next for him and like where he's going in the world. And it's this, this really deep and beautiful relationships built so quickly because you are sharing space and that proximity matters. But it's again, that self-selecting person. These are really caring individuals that have chosen to live in this way. And that engenders that connection so quickly that you can jump right into, you know, what is consciousness and where are we all going? Or insurance paperwork together, right? And there are the little things, you know, we've talked about blinds and, you know, there's too much sun coming in this room and what are we going to do about the windows? Like there's always the little things too. But it's so great to see as folks kind of jump in, jump into the deep end with each other when it comes to the connection. Yeah, I can imagine that these partnerships really do help provide an opportunity to

26:12build a sense of connection, a sense of relationship in community that is really difficult. I think it's been interesting to hear these stories that you're telling because you know, you have these individuals and you've said, you know, they have really great families. And it's just interesting how family is not always the same as community, you know? I think it's not the same as having those types of connections that are embedded in everyday life. And I don't know, I just think that's, it's a big challenge for our country, for our culture, how we think about family, friendship and community. And I think in the way that you've structured this, where you don't just have like people who come over, helpers, people living together. I just, I can imagine that just completely changes the dynamic in terms of the relationships that they build. Absolutely. Yeah, the social contract of, you know, a task rabbit coming by and, you know, completing

27:15something for a household, you know, they build a piece of furniture, I'm sure they do a great job. And then they leave. That's a very different social contract than I'll see you tomorrow. Yes, I'll drive you to that appointment on Sunday. Absolutely. I can take out the trash on Wednesday. And there's this continuity that that builds and layers. So it's not just building a piece of furniture on Monday and taking out the trash on Wednesday. But noticing that maybe there was a, you know, a personal event that happened and there was some, some tension or some press on Tuesday. And when you go take that trash on Wednesday, you can check in and say, hey, are you okay? I noticed, you know, there was just something going on yesterday and I just wanted to check in with you. It's just a completely different relationship and social contract when there's that continuity over time. Yeah. What have you heard on the housing side in terms of how Joey Co is helping both students and the older adults, I guess, adopting them is what I want to say, but I know that's

28:18not the right word. I guess hiring. What have you heard in terms of, I guess, more of the transactional side and more of the economic element to this, whether providing more affordable housing or providing work or providing rent areas to improve like housing stability. What have you heard on that part of it? Yeah. A couple of interesting insights within the household and then a couple more broadly. Within the household, I hear from students that they are just excited that there's an opportunity to earn their rent back. That when they pay it out at a larger apartment building or maybe to their school, it's gone. And then maybe they get another job and it comes back. But there's this really nice cyclical nature too. I pay it at the beginning of the month. I work throughout the month and then I earn some of it back and it feels more affordable by the end of the month because I know that I can plan for those hours and it's all within the household. So that that local cyclical economy nature is really attractive to students and they absolutely love that. So it does feel much, much more affordable when they're coming in because their hours are

29:20guaranteed in the household. On the flip side, we have some hosts who are using this as an opportunity to afford to stay in their homes. That maybe they need X, Y, and Z around the house that they that are new payments. Lots of older adults are on fixed incomes or retirement. So they don't have that extra disposable cash, but they do have a home and they're able to use that home in a way that helps them live more joyfully and take the things off their plate that they didn't really necessarily want to be dealing with. So that's kind of what we hear inside the home. Yeah, it sounds like you're improving stability on both sides and so much, so so much goodness happens when you improve the stability of somebody's life, right? I know this from firsthand experience, but just when things are stable, like that it's like little, I don't know, it's like part of your brain just goes back online. It's like, okay, I don't have to worry about that.

30:22I can be creative now. I can like, go have coffee with somebody now because I'm not managing the uncertainty. Now I have bandwidth to do other things. And I can just imagine what a relief of what a breath of fresh air is to be able to supplant these individuals, be able to improve just their stability in life. There's so many intangible benefits to that that you can never capture with a dollar, but I can, yeah, I can just, I can just, I mean, even just knowing like that, you know, that you're going to get part of your rent back. I mean, imagine the savings you can be doing or, you know, the travel you can do to go see family because your stress is lowered around money. Like just, it just has so many ripple effects, I think, the way that you've set this up. I have a term for what you were just describing, which I call joy span. So we talk about that. Oh my God. We talk about help span, but like we love expanding the joy span of like, yeah, those things that stability is there. And I can go on that trip to Italy that I've always been dreaming of that's on my bucket list.

31:23Or I can go back and see my family during Thanksgiving instead of staying on campus because I couldn't afford the trip home. There are so many things in that joy span category. And that's what you were just describing. So I just wanted to put, you know, that's genius. I love that. And I think it gets, it's not just that you're expanding money. You're not just feeling like here's more money. I think it's right that you've called it joy because you've given them agency, which is very different from just giving them money. Right? So they have agency and it's the agency combined with the practical support combined with the community relational component that I think translates into that feeling of like that translates into stability. Instability often translates into joy because you just defeat her on the ground a little bit. You're grounded a little bit more, right? I just love that. I think that's genius. I'm going to be thinking about this now for the rest of her for a long time. What's next for Joey? What are you excited about? Yeah, I'm so excited about our team, our clients, our hosts.

32:26I joke with our team. We fall in love with our hosts every time. Like there's this process of like, oh my god, this is like my favorite person in the whole world. I love working with them. We fall in love with our joys and can't wait to see where they go. We're just getting started in Southern California. So I think a lot of our focus is really making sure that California is really successful. One of the things that's been really important to me is to not build this as a hyper growth, hyper scale company. I think in the type of work that we do, I can't show up in someone's home and say, I'm going to do absolutely everything you need from us. We're a very high touch service. And then turn around and try and scale so quickly that I can't actually do that. So we are well funded and well financed by values aligned investors who understand that we're really focused on one client, one Joey at a time. So we can really nail this. It's not common in America to live like this.

33:30And we need to make sure that we're providing a real beacon of opportunity and hope. Like this can work. This can be something that we can all choose as an option, as we, as our lives change. And in order to do that, we have to, we have to go slow. We have to stay focused and we have to really focus on each and every host and Joey. And that looks like, you know, really nailing California right now. I can imagine that you have a pretty straightforward process for finding Joey's. How do you find hosts or do they find you? I like to say we're always one degree removed from a new host. So there are all kinds of people. And truly any time I'm talking to anyone, I always say, is there anyone in your life that this reminds you of? Because everyone has one little, you know, one degree removed from the person that, that needs us. The way we find them is let them know we exist. For the most part, it's awareness and education. So you know we exist.

34:31And here's a little bit of how it works because people don't know this is an option they can choose. So it's really important for us to explain that it's an option that you can choose. There are home health agencies. There are, you know, there's taskrabbit, there's Uber, there's grocery delivery, there's all kinds of like different options that we come up against. But if you're looking for that human connection, if you're really looking for someone around the house or on the flip side, you know, to your point with, with Joe, is if you're looking for housing that has a little bit more to it, that has a little bit more connection to your community, a little bit better financials and opportunity for you to, you know, earn that back. Once we kind of explain that we exist, the right people find us. And that's, that's been the, you know, the fun of coming up with something new is if you explain it well, people, it really resonates. Yeah, it's so interesting to me because I think what you're doing proves the point that variety is a huge part of the solution to the housing crisis, afflicting cities all over

35:34the country. I mean, I'm experiencing a pinch, a housing pinch right now and it's just like blowing my mind. I have been part of strong towns for a very long time. I have listened to people talk about housing for a very long time. I have read articles about housing for a very long time. And it is like this summer that I'm like, oh, the life is going off. And I'm just like, why are we all being, why is it that we have assumed that we can be a country of millions of people and yet function like all of those people need the exact same product when it comes to housing? Like it just blows my mind. I'm like, I don't understand why we have allowed this assumption to dominate. Like variety is not only the spice of life, but it is truly a solution to so many of our challenges when it comes to cities. And I have, I feel this with transit and I feel this with housing. It's like you've got to allow lots of unconventional, interesting, surprising solutions to enter the room. Like, obviously at the table because people are interesting and people are different

36:37and people go do all kinds of things in life. And at multiple stages in life, you do not need a three, four bedroom, single family house with 2.5 bathrooms and a fence and two grudges. Like you just don't, I don't know why it's so difficult. People people don't understand this. It's like life, have you lived? Like do not, I just, yes, I don't know why it's clicking on a snap zone like on a podcast. So I'm not snapping away over here. But, yeah, I mean, like what you're providing just like makes my, it's just a perfect demonstration of this. Look at all the stages and seasons that a person can go through in life. And then you, you constrain the way they get around their city and where they can live into these artificial, artificially, there's something artificial about it. I'm not really sure the word, but just like hyper reductionist, I guess, you know, it just feels, it just feels very strange to me the way that, the way that we've reduced options for people, in a way that doesn't honor at all, like the amount of variety we can counter

37:43and that, let's just being human, you know, let's be in human. It's, I'm notting, snapping, you know, how many ways can I agree? I, the joy of the work that I get to do every day is see how different each host is, see how different each joy is and meet them where they are every time. And it is, I mean, we have deeply altruistic, very caring, like there is some self-selection, but man, is it different every single time? Yeah, I can imagine. How, how near sighted is maybe the word that comes to mind, how narrow, how narrowing it is to say all of these people should have one solution or all of these people should have, you know, one type of housing that they're looking for or one type of job that they're looking for, it is, I call them my, you know, my beautiful, complex humans, right? I mean, like we are all deep and beautiful and complex and, you know, I'm not going to

38:44change anyone who's our client, they're not going to change, you know, like we're all different in the best, most beautiful way and to think that we all want to live in exactly the same manner, just doesn't, doesn't resonate with me, doesn't make sense. And I, I feel for the policymakers, I feel for the people, like there are lots of really good actors trying to do good things and for whatever reason to your point, like the forces that be, whatever they end up being, channel us all into, you know, a very monochromatic world, more color, less straight lines, that's, that's the name of the game. More which it's scary, basically. Yeah, mom to mom, you know, exactly what I'm saying. Like a pickle car, a banana car, I love looking at those books. I'm just like, Richard scary understood, he understood. Um, Allison, this has been a lot of fun. I would love it if you would share a little bit about your, your neighborhood where you live. I know that this episode is not super new for Hitsonship, but I always ask this if all

39:44of my guests at the end, tell us a little bit about your town, what you love about it and what are two or three little local businesses you like to recommend people check out if they come to visit. Yeah. So I live just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. My town is called Cordon, Madera, but it's in broader Marin County and the absolute best, best thing about Marin County in my opinion is soul food, which is an unfamiliar, not to that coming. Yeah. So not just OUL, it's S O L food. So it's a Puerto Rican restaurant, bad bunny, frequented there when he came to visit. He was doing a show in Oakland and he came from Oakland over to, over to soul food. It is a fantastic Puerto Rican food restaurant. That's amazing. I grew up with soul food. So I'm thinking of like category, kind of obviously, like the name of a specific place. I'm thinking of the category, so that just blew. I just did not see that. I was like, she's from California. She's really, you know, I love this Cal Juice bar, but I know I love the area.

40:47I love Marin. It is always a bit of a curveball. It does get a laugh some time, you know, but soul food is the best. I grew up in South Florida. So I would go to a place called Poio Trappical, which was like, you know, you would get the, you would get the grilled chicken, the free hole, you would get the platanos, the maduros. And I just loved that. Like that was my comfort hand. Not too bad. Even though I am like not Caribbean in any way. And coming to, coming to Marin and finding soul food, S-O-L-Food, what like brought me back in a really, really sweet way. So that's wonderful. I highly recommend. Okay. Well, Allison, thank you so much for taking time to come speak with me on the podcast and share your story and your vision and what you're working on. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks so much. It was really great to meet you and not and snap along on so much. And have a great rest of your day. Joy Span. Exactly. There we go. To our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in.

41:48If there's someone in your community who you think we should have on the show, please let us know using this Gessie guest form. I'll be back soon with another episode in the meantime, keeping which can, to build a strong town. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non-profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at Strong Towns.org slash membership.