Five years in, Happy Holler Circle is ready to plant some serious roots. We have been given a very unexpected opportunity to grow our beautiful community in a permanent home, and we need your help to make it happen!

 

For the past four years, we have been renting our classroom on Central Avenue Pike. We now have almost forty families showing up each and every week, building this beautiful village together. We have welcomed second siblings. Then third siblings! We have supported each other when parenting feels overwhelming. We have shared wisdom, and we have commiserated over challenges. We have celebrated a successful nights' sleep and birthdays and first steps, and we're ready for so much more of that.

 

Purchasing the space means a lot of growth and newness, and it also just means MORE of the same community we know and love.

 

The nuts and bolts:

The building we rent is a part of an office "duplex". The other side of the building is almost a mirror image - but wider and longer. It is currently rented out, and that arrangement will need to stay for a bit to 1.honor their lease and 2.help get our financial bearings. The building also has a very large basement. Technically two, divided similar to the upstairs duplex. It’s a concrete slab and cinderblock walls.

 

(The billboard over the building is owned by Lamar, so it’s there to stay.)

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The dreams:

Some of these we can set up pretty quickly with your help, and some of these are just ideas right now. I want you to know what I have been thinking about:

• A toy library. Let’s clean up that basement and put the storage space to use!

• A Montessori homeschool work space with materials to share. Montessori’s 3-6 materials are expensive. I have a lot. Let’s use them together!

• Parenting workshops with space for onsite childcare!

• A sensory area for breaks when class gets overwhelming.

• Gross. Motor. Movement. In the classroom! There’ll be room for it!

• Being a hub for other businesses that do amazing things with little ones. This could be several bullet points on its own (art classes! birth classes! movement classes!), but I’m going to stop myself...

 

The finances:

The building costs 200k. I have been approved for a loan from the Small Business Administration. (This has been WORK, and I am glad I didn’t know just how much when I first started, or we might never have made it this far.)

 

I am specifically raising funds to cover the downpayment, which is 20k. Anything over that will go to improvements on the building itself and classroom materials. I really want that carpet gone!​

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This Community is bigger than me.

​Happy Holler Circle is a single member LLC (ie just me) and a for-profit business, so asking for help to bring *my* dream hits on every uncomfortable feeling in my entire being.

Independence is a part of my personality to an unhealthy degree, but the biggest gift Happy Holler Circle has given me has been showing me community in action. I know this group is so much more than me. I see that when I hear about friends who met in class going to the zoo together, or attending birthday parties years after graduating class, or being invited to brunch with a group of moms that originally met in my classroom.

 

This is OUR space, and I am so excited to see what we build together. Onto the next five years!