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1. Tell us about your business:

   Project Night Night (PNN) is an award-winning nonprofit organization that equips children across the country living in homeless or low income situations with the basic nighttime essentials they need to feel safe, warm, ready to learn, and valued. While meeting the immediate needs of disadvantaged children, PNN also sets a foundation for lasting change by providing meaningful, hands-on volunteer opportunities to thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations each year.

   Families living in poverty are often stretching their budget just to pay for rent, utilities, and groceries; in these situations, buying items to reduce fear and anxiety in their children is simply not an option. Children in these families face a constellation of problems related to poverty and often lack healthy interaction and stimulation as well as a safe environment in which to learn and grow. These problems are exacerbated by a lack of the nighttime essential items that their wealthier peers take for granted. We help children in need: children who don’t have a book to read, or a security blanket to stop them from shaking with fear, a stuffed friend to whom to talk, or a tote to take their books to and from school. When young children don’t get access to these basics, they have difficulty learning. They have a hard time feeling loved, protected, and valued.

2. Why did you start this business?

   Before I founded Project Night Night in 2005, I was a corporate attorney. I had created many nonprofits for others, but had never seriously considered starting one myself until a confluence of events made it impossible for me to prolong what was very clearly becoming my destiny. My husband elected to get his M.B.A. a little later in life. We were both in our 30’s when he was accepted into the M.B.A. program at the University of Michigan. Unfortunately, we lived with our young son, in San Francisco at the time, and I was not licensed to practice law in Michigan. But we did move to Ann Arbor, and I found myself unemployed and home with my 18th month old in the middle of a Michigan winter. My husband was off drinking beer and “networking.” I was lost. I found respite in those few hours after my son went to bed but before I did. Getting Cole to sleep became a crucial part of my evening. I relied on a consistent routine that included a network of comfort items. Cole loved his blanket, his books, and his stuffed animal. With those items in his crib, with a familiar book read to him at night, he would fall asleep peacefully and easily. And I would exhale and regroup.

   One evening, I began to think about the victims of domestic violence. These are women who are often forced to flee in the middle of the night – lucky to escape with their child let alone their child’s favorite stuffed toy. When they arrive at the shelter, the shelter is at best noisy and unfamiliar, and at worst frightening and dark. The child has no blanket to which to cling, no stuffed animal to squeeze, and no books to pull at their imagination. Everything is amplified. Everything is worse.

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