What if an extra bedroom could make housing more affordable for a student while helping an older adult stay in their home? Alison Donnally founded Joey Co. to pair students looking for housing with older adults who have space to spare and could use help with everyday tasks. Students pay rent, earn money back through agreed-upon work, and gain a different kind of connection to the community around them. Donnally talks about what makes these matches work, why home sharing is still unusual in the U.S., and what this model reveals about how many housing options we’ve left off the table.
Hi, 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 cities' most pressing challenges. They remind me that even though sometimes I feel like our cities are utterly doomed, there are creative solutions out there, and these stories really do give me hope for what might be possible in our communities.
When you look at suburbia, stroads, and sprawl, sometimes I think it's easy to feel like this is just the way that it is. But every time I have a guest on the show, I'm reminded that's not true. There are people working on truly creative and inspirational solutions, and today's guest is one of them.
I'm joined by Alison Donnally. She is the founder of Joey Co., a company where she matches students looking for affordable housing and work with older adults 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 led 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's a fan of and I promptly forgot it, so she'll have to tell you.
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?
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?
It's where my dad's family is from, and my grandmother used to scream at Donovan McNabb in my living room every Sunday. That was enough to put midnight green in my blood.
All right. Philly is a great city. I've only been one time, very briefly, but I really enjoyed the brief amount of time I got to spend there. You're not in Philly anymore. You are in the Bay Area. Can you set the scene a little bit? Tell us about yourself, maybe about your professional background, and how you found yourself deciding to start your own business.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to tell the story. 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. 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.
The more that I 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 slowly and then all of a sudden very quickly? My godmother, my aunt Judy, was living by herself in South Florida. She had a wonderful church community. She lived a couple 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. 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? That had nothing to do with the healthcare system. It had everything to do with seeing her and being seen by others, and that is something that you can't really replicate with healthcare.
That was the first nugget of starting this company, and there were plenty of other nuggets along the way. I mentioned I'm a mom, and relearning that childcare in this country is incredibly unaffordable. As I was trying to understand how to care for my own kids, I learned about the au pair program, which is a relatively affordable way for American families to bring care into their homes. There was no equivalent for older adults, so you can't have an au pair take care of an older adult family member.
I just kept wondering, why can't you do that? What's going on here that makes us not able to care for our older adults with a live-in, affordable, supportive extra set of hands, while we can do that for kids? Why can't we do that for older adults? That really was the genesis of Joey Co., and we're a couple years in past that insight.
I want to slow down the scene, so to speak. Can you remember when you decided that you were going to go all in on this idea and actually 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 saying, 'But we're here to change healthcare.' They were saying, 'Right, but can you sell paper now?' One of my team members affectionately called it the Dunder Mifflin of Amazon.
That was what I was just thinking. I was thinking, how can I make an Office reference now?
I still laugh thinking about that comment. She was spot on. As a manager of people, I don't take people's livelihoods lightly. My first priority was to make sure that my team was good, that they had a place to land, and 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. That was priority number one through this messy transition.
But while this was happening, I kept asking myself the same questions: what do I actually want to do next? What job not only will pay me, but will fulfill me heart and soul? I kept looking around. I tried to find another healthcare 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 said, 'Hey, you've got to check in on your dad. We're not sure what's going on, but he's really disoriented, and he's driving the wrong way down the road.'
Man, that's so scary.
So scary. Professionally, I was having this massive transition, and personally, I just kept noticing the same thing. That was the moment for me. It was 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, healthcare, 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 community, or just with your family or friends? What were you hearing? 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. Of course, my cousins were so much closer to it than I was. It was my aunt and my uncle, and it wasn't me living it with my parents. The more that I interviewed, learned, and connected, I really understood, one, how different this process is. We all go one direction in life. You're aging, I'm aging. We're all aging together for the first time, and we all only do it once. 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.
One of the stories that really sticks with me is from one of my friends. His mom had stopped getting dressed in the morning. She wore her pajamas most of the day, and she always knew when someone was coming to the house. 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 wear her pajamas.
That one sticks with me for so many reasons because it showed me the act of being seen, physically seeing another human being, is service, is care. That really shapes the way that we designed Joey Co. and the service, and it has 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 seeing other humans is a joy and a privilege. I think we all need to remember that as often as possible.
When you talk about finding childcare, but then you also talk about having presence around as you're entering your sunset years, I can't help but think about how both of these challenges are a result of how we've approached community design in our country and the extent to which the assumption that self-reliance is a top priority. I'm curious if you found yourself connecting those dots. If you did, were you thinking about the designed loneliness problem or the designed motherhood-load problem? Has that clicked for you, and where are you on that side of things? Because when I hear it, I immediately think, yeah, it's because we don't have villages anymore. Yes, because we all live so far apart. Yes, because everyone has to drive 15 minutes to get to everybody, and it's culturally not considered normal to have intergenerational households. What are your thoughts on that?
I'm just nodding along for the podcast listeners. I'm nodding along: yes, yep, absolutely. A lot of my research designing Joey Co. was international research. To your point about multigenerational families not being viewed as normal culturally in the U.S., the way that the rest of the world pretty much manages the care of older adults and the support of family members, whether mothers or aging parents, is through multigenerational living or community villages.
What's been really interesting in bringing a service like Joey Co. to a ruggedly individualistic America is, one, we provide the appropriate dose of capitalism to formalize a social good that exists without funds exchange in a lot of other countries. 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. There is a clear dollar exchange for this is what the room is worth, and 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 U.S. say, 'Well, this is a fair exchange. I'm doing this. I'm paying for this, and I'm paying for that, and it is a transaction.' 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. 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 rain anymore.' 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 Co. In a way, you all are proving demand for unconventional products and unconventional arrangements. I think America has been convinced that the single-family suburb with the car is all that Americans really want. That's the only thing there's demand for. When I see solutions like this, it gets me so excited because you are providing a service and solving a problem, but you're also providing a signal that says, hey, there's actually appetite for what we would call an unconventional housing arrangement, even though you could also call it a traditional arrangement. You see this with ADUs. You see this with people embracing parking minimum reform and liberating cities from parking minimums. You see this in so many sectors. We're starting to bust the myth that this hyper-self-sufficient, independent, convenience-oriented arrangement of our private lives is the only thing there's ever demand for, and I just find that really exciting. You started to touch on this already, but can you give our audience an overview of Joey Co.? Your elevator pitch, or maybe just describe what it is, how it works, who the people are that you're bringing together, and how it benefits the two people that you're targeting, which are the college students and older residents.
Absolutely. 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. That'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 whatever that may be. Meal 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.
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. We have undergraduates. We have graduate students. We define student pretty broadly, so if you come to us and say, 'Hey, I'm a student at XYZ certificate program,' we are very open to that, and to returning learners who are much older. We have students from really diverse backgrounds and pursuing really diverse fields.
We do lots of vetting and screening on both sides to ensure safety and compatibility of all of the pairs. Then we match and help with contracting. 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 joeys understand as well.
We don't disappear after the match and move-in. Once our hosts and joeys are moved in, there are all sorts of little things that come up, and we stay super involved so that, 'Hey, can you not use that blender at 6:00 a.m.?' doesn't turn into, 'I need this person out of my house now.' There are all sorts of micro-communications that we can build when it's small, so that we can manage things as they change because it's life, it's housing, and it's real, deep, important things for both sides. Things change. Whether it's a health status or 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 duration.
On your website, you touch on several challenges that you're hoping Joey Co. can be a part of solving. You mentioned the loneliness epidemic, the need for work, housing insecurity among college students, and just the basic need for more support for men and women who are older. I'm 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 as you got going and then you started to see how they all came together? What was that like for you?
I was definitely coming at it more from my older adult family member perspective at the beginning. When I realized you couldn't have an au pair for older adults, I tried to understand different populations or think through different people who might be interested in this type of scenario. This goes to what you were saying about proving out 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 out of Temple University. There's an institute called the Hope Center, and they do research on the ground at universities across the country. It turns out about half of all college students are housing insecure, and their research validates that year in and year out for the last several years. It's a massive problem.
As I continued to educate myself, I went from casual YIMBY, yes in my backyard, absolutely more housing, we should be doing more, all that kind of thing. But 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. It's really at the forefront of what Californians are thinking about from a policy perspective and how to design their communities. 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.
I think it's really wonderful how intersectional it can be. When we're looking at housing, it's an answer today in the near term, not once we can get a developer approved through all of the different processes that we have in towns and states. It's now, and it solves the needs of the older adults too. 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 all are using? What does that pushback sound like, and how do you respond?
All the time. Skepticism is part of the job. There's a lot of, 'I don't want a stranger moving into my house. I don't need a stranger in my house. I don't want a stranger.' 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-in. Everyone's opting in. We're fully consenting here, so there are no strangers.
I also just want to validate and understand the concern that people are complicated, and it 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 change, and that can be hard. Whether it's a stranger or someone you've known forever, it is big to invite anyone into your home. I know my mother-in-law super well, and if she moved into my home, that would be a change in my household. That's a real concern that we need to understand and acknowledge and not belittle. 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 about being on call all the time. The metaphor that comes to mind sometimes is the little bell, the servant bell, like Downton Abbey.
Abbey.
Right. It's almost like a reversion to something that we're trying to get away from, and that couldn't be further from the truth. 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. We coach them on boundaries. We communicate on boundaries. But they also don't want to feel like they're being waited on. The hosts that we work with actually struggle almost in the opposite direction: '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 or being on call all the time. 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.
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. We have matches all across California. We are working with hosts in L.A. and Riverside down in Southern California, and we've got hosts all the way up through the Bay Area and into Sonoma County in the North Bay. 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, in the Oakland area. He's an attorney, and he lost his wife a couple years ago. He was processing the grief and the loss, and he has a beautiful, supportive family who is helping him with that. He decided he wanted to bring a student into the home to help him with his dog for the most part, but also the big trips to Costco. He's still a big Costco fan.
We found him an 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, and he's going into all the details of how the insurance is going to work and making sure that she's well protected. It's the sweetest mutual respect that they have, and you can hear a change in his voice and the vibrancy that he has now that there's another sweet person in his home.
Another phenomenal example is in the South Bay, below San Francisco, closer to Stanford University. We have a husband and wife. The husband has a diagnosis, so he has some health challenges. The wife is still relatively young and vibrant in her own ways, and both of them decided to invite a Stanford medical student into their home. She's an absolutely incredibly accomplished young woman, and she started to join some of the wife's book clubs. She is listening to a consciousness podcast with the husband to explore what's next for him and where he's going in the world.
These really deep and beautiful relationships build 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, what is consciousness and where are we all going, or insurance paperwork together. There are the little things, too. We've talked about blinds and there's too much sun coming in this room, and what are we going to do about the windows? There are always the little things, too. But it's so great to see as folks jump into the deep end with each other when it comes to the connection.
I can imagine that these partnerships really do help provide an opportunity to build a sense of connection, a sense of relationship and community that is really difficult. I think it's been interesting to hear these stories that you're telling because you have these individuals and you've said they have really great families, and it's just interesting how family is not always the same as community. It's not the same as having those types of connections that are embedded in everyday life. I think that's a big challenge for our country, for our culture, and how we think about family, friendship, and community. The way that you've structured this, where you don't just have helpers who come over, but people living together, I can imagine that completely changes the dynamic in terms of the relationships that they build.
Absolutely. The social contract of a TaskRabbit coming by and completing something for a household, 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.' There's this continuity that builds and layers. 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 personal event that happened and there was some tension or stress on Tuesday. When you go take that trash out on Wednesday, you can check in and say, 'Hey, are you okay? I noticed there was something going on yesterday, and I just wanted to check in with you.' It's a completely different relationship and social contract when there's that continuity over time.
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 not the right word. Hiring. What have you heard in terms of more of the transactional side and the economic element to this, whether that's providing more affordable housing, providing work, or providing renters to improve housing stability? What have you heard on that part of it?
A couple 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. 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 to: I pay it at the beginning of the month, I work throughout the month, and then I earn some of it back. 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. That local, cyclical-economy nature is really attractive to students, and they absolutely love that. It does feel much more affordable when they're coming in because their hours are guaranteed 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. Maybe they need X, Y, and Z around the house 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. 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 want to be dealing with. That's what we hear inside the home.
It sounds like you're improving stability on both sides, and so much goodness happens when you improve the stability of somebody's life. I know this from firsthand experience, but when things are stable, it's like little parts of your brain just go back online. It's, okay, I don't have to worry about that. I can be creative now. I can grab coffee with somebody now because I'm not managing the uncertainty. Now I have bandwidth to do other things. I can just imagine what a relief, what a breath of fresh air it is to be able to support these individuals and improve their stability in life. There are so many intangible benefits to that that you can't ever capture with a dollar. Even just knowing that you're going to get part of your rent back, imagine the savings you can be doing or the travel you can do to go see family because your stress is lowered around money. It just has so many ripple effects, the way that you set this up.
I have a term for what you were just describing, which I call joy span. We talk about health span, but we love expanding the joy span of those things. The 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. Or 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. I just wanted to put that term to it.
That's genius. I love that, and I think it gets at the fact that it's not just that you're expanding money. You're not just saying, '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. They have agency, and it's the agency combined with the practical support, combined with the community relational component, that I think translates into stability. Stability often translates into joy because your feet are on the ground a little bit. You're grounded a little bit more. I just love that. I think that's genius. I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time. What's next for Joey Co.? What are you excited about?
I'm so excited about our team, our clients, our hosts. I joke with our team: we fall in love with our hosts every time. There's this process of, 'Oh my God, this is my favorite person in the whole world. I love working with them.' We fall in love with our joeys 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 successful. One of the things that's been really important to me is to not build this as a hyper-growth, hyperscale 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 to scale so quickly that I can't actually deliver that.
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, and we need to make sure that we're providing a real beacon of opportunity and hope: this can work. This can be something that we can all choose as an option as our lives change. In order to do that, we have to go slow. We have to stay focused, and we have to really focus on each and every host and joey. That looks like really nailing California right now.
I can imagine that you have a pretty straightforward process for finding joeys. How do you find hosts, or do they find you?
I like to say we're always one degree removed from a new host. 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 degree removed from the person that needs us.
The way we find them is to let them know we exist. For the most part, it's awareness and education, so you know we exist and here's a little bit of how it works, because people don't know this is an option they can choose. It's really important for us to explain that it's an option that you can choose. There are home health agencies. There's TaskRabbit. There's Uber. There's grocery delivery. There are all kinds of 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, to your point with joeys, if you're looking for something that has a little bit more to it, that has a little bit more connection to your community, a little bit better financials, an opportunity for you to earn that back, once we explain that we exist, the right people find us. That's been the fun of coming up with something new. If you explain it well, it really resonates with people.
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 the country. I'm experiencing a housing pinch right now, and it's 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 this summer that the light bulb is going off. 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? It just blows my mind. I don't understand why we have allowed this assumption to dominate. 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. I feel this with transit, and I feel this with housing. We've got to allow lots of unconventional, interesting, surprising solutions to enter the room and have a seat at the table because people are interesting and people are different and people go through all kinds of things in life. At multiple stages in life, you do not need a three- or four-bedroom single-family house with 2.5 bathrooms and a fence and two garages. You just don't. I don't know why it's so difficult for people to understand this. It's life. Have you lived? Do you not understand? I don't know why it's clicking. I don't know what snaps sound like on a podcast, so I'm not snapping away over here.
I mean...
What you're providing just makes my point. It's a perfect demonstration of this. Look at all the stages and seasons that a person can go through in life, and then you constrain the way they get around their city and where they can live into these artificial, hyper-reductionist options. There's something artificial about it. I'm not really sure of the word, but it just feels very strange to me, the way that we've reduced options for people in a way that doesn't honor at all the amount of variety we encounter with just being human.
I'm nodding, snapping. How many ways can I agree? The joy of the work that I get to do every day is seeing how different each host is, seeing how different each joey is, and meeting them where they are every time. We have deeply altruistic, very caring people. There is some self-selection, but man, is it different every single time.
Nearsighted is maybe the word that comes to mind. How narrow it is to say all of these people should have one solution, or all of these people should have one type of housing that they're looking for, or one type of job that they're looking for. I call them my beautiful, complex humans. We are all deep and beautiful and complex. I'm not going to change anyone who's our client. They're not going to change. We're all different in the best, most beautiful way. To think that we all want to live in exactly the same manner just doesn't resonate with me. It doesn't make sense. I feel for the policymakers. I feel for the people. There are lots of really good actors trying to do good things, and for whatever reason, to your point, the forces that be, whatever they end up being, channel us all into a very monochromatic world. More color, less straight lines. That's the name of the game. More Richard Scarry.
Basically, yeah. Mom to mom, you know exactly what I'm saying. A pickle car, a banana car, a cheese car. I love looking at those books. I'm just like, Richard Scarry understood. He understood. Alison, this has been a lot of fun. I would love it if you would share a little bit about your neighborhood where you live. I know that this episode is not super neighborhood-centric, but I always ask this of all of 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?
I live just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. My town is called Corte Madera, but it's in broader Marin County. The absolute best thing about Marin County, in my opinion, is Sol Food, which is an unfamiliar answer.
I did not see that coming.
Not S-O-U-L. It's S-O-L Food. 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 Sol Food. It is a fantastic Puerto Rican food restaurant.
That's amazing. I grew up with soul food, so I'm thinking of the category. Obviously, you're saying the name of a specific place. I'm thinking of the category, so that just blew my mind. I did not see that. I was thinking, she's from California. She's going to say, 'I love this Cal juice bar,' but no.
I love the Bay Area. I love Marin. It is always a bit of a curveball. It does get a laugh sometimes. But yeah, Sol Food is the best. I grew up in South Florida, so I would go to a place called Pollo Tropical, where you would get the grilled chicken, the frijoles, the platanos, the maduros. I just loved that. That was my comfort food growing up, even though I am not Caribbean in any way. Coming to Marin and finding Sol Food, S-O-L Food, brought me back in a really sweet way.
That's wonderful.
Highly recommend.
Okay, well, Alison, 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 nod and snap along on so much. Have a great rest of your joy span.
Exactly.
There we go. To our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. If there's someone in your community who you think we should have on the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form. I'll be back soon with another episode. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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