Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a small update from our side.

Over the past several months, we have been running and relaunching Nooks in different ways, learning directly from families, spaces, and facilitators along the way. More than anything, this phase has reminded me that the need is real. Parents are looking for support that feels local, trustworthy, and human. They want spaces where their children can play and be cared for, while they themselves can work, breathe, connect, or simply have some space nearby.

For the time being, we are pausing Nooks for a few weeks to work through some operational matters, especially as more interest has started coming in. Running and growing something like Nooks is not a small task, and I feel deeply grateful for the support of parents and our wonderful space partners as we have tried to build this, often in a scrappy way.

What has become clearer to me through these repeated launches is that Parents’ Nook is really about something deeper than a single program or a few sessions at a time. Families do not just need “childcare” in the conventional sense. They need better neighborhood support systems.

As work and family life have changed, many parents are no longer living inside the rhythms that traditional care systems were built around. More parents are working remotely, freelancing, caregiving, homeschooling, or putting together lives that do not fit neatly into older models. And yet so much of our care infrastructure still acts as if those shifts never happened.

That is part of what Parents’ Nook has helped me see more clearly.

Nooks began as a practical experiment: could we create small, warm, neighborhood-based spaces where children could engage in open-ended play while parents stayed close by and found support too? This work started back in 2018, and by 2020 we had created many Nooks across the Bay Area and San Francisco. When we started relaunching in 2024, sometimes through bigger sites and sometimes through smaller Nooks, I was also trying to understand whether the need was still there after everything had changed so much since the pandemic.

By early 2025, Nooks really began to take off again. But one of the hidden challenges in this phase was that we were no longer building with the same parent base as before. Many of the earlier families had naturally outgrown Nooks as their children got older. So this phase was not really about simply continuing. It was about beginning again with a new set of parents and trying to understand whether the need would repeat itself.

That mattered a lot to me. I wanted to understand whether Parents’ Nook had only resonated with one earlier group or whether new families would feel the same pull toward it. A large part of this phase has been about testing that in the real world.

We also failed many times over the past year.

At times, families wanted the Nooks to continue, but we could not maintain continuity with the space. At other times, we were able to find a space, but it was in a different neighborhood, which made it difficult to carry the same group of families forward. These have been very real lessons from this phase.

And yet, even through all of that, our revenue kept growing over time. That growth did not come from broad marketing success. It mostly came from a small number of families who kept believing in us and kept returning. That has taught me something important.

It has also made me question whether parents are really looking for something through broad online groups at all. Facebook groups, for example, have not worked very well for us. What seems to matter much more is trust: parents hearing about something through people they know, through repeated experience, and through spaces and communities that already feel credible to them.

That learning is shaping how I think about the next phase. I am increasingly interested in building Parents’ Nook as something families can truly trust, something that grows through relationships, referrals, and real community belief.

We are now taking time to focus on the next stage of this work. I am thinking more deeply about the infrastructure behind Parents’ Nook: what it would take to support trusted, local care networks in a way that is sustainable and repeatable for the families who depend on them.

At this stage, I find myself thinking about Parents’ Nook less as a marketplace and more as a network of malleable nodes. By that, I mean small local care communities that can take shape differently depending on the neighborhood, the families, the space, and the facilitators involved, while still being supported by some shared underlying structure. We want to understand what it would take to support something more relational, where trust can grow locally, where participation can deepen over time, and where these communities can form and adapt without losing their human core.

That is the work I want to better understand in this next phase. It includes fundraising, product development, and clarifying what Parents’ Nook should become from here. And of course, it also means continuing to make the play space better every day, and finding ways to operate in spaces more officially and more steadily. We are doing a set of announcements this week. Stay tuned.

I know many of you have followed Parents’ Nook with warmth, curiosity, encouragement, and trust. Some of you brought your children into these spaces. Some of you partnered with us. Some of you simply kept reading and cheering from afar. I want to say thank you. Your presence has mattered more than you know.

At this point, I want to invite you all to build alongside us as we move into the next phase of Parents’ Nook.

I will continue sharing what I am learning as this next chapter unfolds.

With warmth,
Tanaya V.S

P.S. If you have been part of a Nook in any way, or if this work resonates with you, I would love to hear from you. Replies are always welcome.