Recess in the Neighborhood

The idea

I moved back to West Michigan and noticed how private everything is here. Every house has its own trampoline and its own playground, and almost none of the shared spaces you find in other countries. Recess was meant to be one of those spaces: pay-per-class programming across art, music, STEM, movement, and life skills, plus licensed daycare and a place for parents to work and gather. Classes were $30 for an hour, ages three to nine.

The pitch was community ownership. Each location would be owned locally by the families who used it rather than franchised, with a token structure that made a membership a real stake instead of plain access.

What I built

Over about three months, on my own with AI tools throughout, I produced the full plan:

• Financial models covering every program, every staff role, and every cost center, with an interactive calculator for changing the assumptions.
• Competitive and regulatory research across the Grand Rapids children’s-activity and daycare market: pricing, licensing, staffing ratios, capacity.
• A community-ownership structure, iterated into its seventh version, plus an investor-facing website and the pitch materials.
• Facility concepts and a go-to-market plan: raise around $100,000, run a local media push, and pre-sell memberships that were actual ownership stakes.

It’s close to what a small consulting team would hand you. The financials hold up, the model works, and I still wish the place existed.

Why it’s paused

The planning was work I could do alone, and I did it at a high level — research, modeling, systems design. The next phase is a different job: raising the money, building the community, hiring and running a large staff. That phase needs a co-founder to own it. The plan is sound and finished. It’s paused for lack of the right partner, not lack of a market.