Brian and Meghan Fitzgerald
Co-Founders and CEO/CLO, Tinkergarten
TBD
Steering Committee Member
The Basics
Company Name: Tinkergarten
Location: Northampton, MA and Brooklyn, NY
Founded: 2014
Full-Time Employees: 19
Products: Outdoor learning experiences for families of kids ages 0 to 8 years old through expert-led classes in local greenspaces and DIY content and kits sent direct to parents.
Social: Instagram // Facebook // Twitter
Claim to Fame: We get families playing outdoors all 4 seasons in all 50 states. We flip the script on daylight savings and get tens of thousands of humans across the country to join in a Lantern Walk every Fall when we turn the clocks back.
The Culture
Demographics (Optional):
26% Male, 74% Female, 0% Non-binary // 68% White, 5% Black, 0% Latinx, 5% Asian-American, 5% Native Hawaiian Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander. 16% Prefer Not To Say
The best thing about working at tinkergarten is:
The incredible people and the photo feed that floods you with images of joyful outdoor play every day.
When we’re not working, we’re:
Whipping up cakes and pies in a mud kitchen.
What we’re reading:
Adult— Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad; Ageless— After the Fall by Dan Santat
What we’re listening to:
Podcasts— The Longest Shortest Time and Circle Round; Spotify Playlists —ranges from Iron and Wine to Run the Jewels.
If they made a movie about our workplace, it would be called:
Rebels with a Cause
Inclusion in the outdoors matters because:
We all share a connection to the natural world, but we don’t all enjoy equal access. Legacies of violence and exclusion along with unequal access to safe outdoor spaces limit access to nature for many people of color—especially the Black community. Every child, every family and every person should enjoy equally and as fully as possible the social, economic, health, learning and spiritual benefits of time spent in nature. The more we connect to nature, the more we thrive as individuals, families and communities would better thrive, and the better we care for one another and our planet.
Five years down the line, it’s our hope that:
We are serving as the trusted guide to purposeful outdoor play to families in every corner of the US and beyond. We’ll be able to sustainably make accessible a range of super high quality learning experiences for family, both in person and virtual, helping every child we can reach to grow into healthy, curious and capable citizens who are ready to contribute to their world.