About
My grandmother ran a preschool in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina for four decades. I was one of her students. I went from there to Harvard.
I want to be careful with those three sentences, because it would be easy to turn them into a claim they cannot carry. Her preschool did not get me to Harvard. What it did was not hold me back, and that is the part worth paying attention to.
She had no training. No curriculum. No records beyond what was in her head. No qualification anybody recognised, no premises anybody had inspected, and no fee she could count on, because some weeks a family paid her and some weeks somebody arrived with a watermelon instead. Most people there worked whatever job was going at whatever the hourly rate was that year. She ran it out of her house, with forest on every side, and the children were outside in it for most of the day.
That is what people mean when they say informal, and they usually mean it as a criticism. Forty years of children went through that house. I was one of them, in the middle of the run, and she was still going when I left for university.
What I have built
I founded Empathy School Bali in 2020. It started at a birthday party, with a sentence said out loud, and several parents saying yes before the afternoon was over. It is still running. Its preschool and kindergarten have had a waiting list continuously since they opened.
I helped open a nature based daycare in the mountains of North Carolina, which grew to about ten children and kept its families.
A network of micro schools and preschools in Poland took a curriculum of mine and taught it well. Getting it into their teachers required me to build video training modules by hand, one at a time. That is the moment this company began, although I did not understand it at the time.
Before that
My career began teaching refugees, which is where I learned that the people who most need an education are rarely the people a system was built for.
I spent twenty years building education companies across Asia. As an admissions consultant I placed more than four hundred and forty students into top universities, which showed me what the end of a child's education looks like and how early the useful part of it starts.
I have an Ed.M. in Educational Leadership from Harvard and I completed the Stanford Seed Transformation Program in 2025.
Built from school experience
I design and develop the products around the work of running a preschool: preparing lessons, supporting teachers, keeping records and talking with families.
The aim is practical support that a small school can use every day, shaped by my experience building schools and working with their teachers.
Why this exists
Every month somebody writes to ask how to build a school like ours, from the United States, Thailand, Japan, Korea and South Africa. More than ten have said they want to open their own.
For years the honest answer was that I could not help them at any scale, because helping meant me, in a room, one school at a time.
My grandmother did it alone for forty years with nothing, and it worked, and it should not have had to be that hard. This company exists so that the next woman doing it has what she was never given.
There are longer versions of some of this.