Holly McHugh

Member Since: October 2009

Type of Member: Basic

Holly makes it to Office Nomads about once a week to be surrounded by a community of like-minded folks.  She will carpool in the 45 minutes from Maple Valley with her boyfriend, Troy, so as to take advantage of the HOV.  Then she settles in at ON while he’s off to OR.   Talking to Holly, it is a bit of a surprise to learn that she lives out in Maple Valley as she exudes the urban green lifestyle many of the folks of Seattle lead.  Instead, she’s a country girl, well, a displaced city girl in the country.

Originally, Holly hails from Portland but left there to work in China for 8 years in the manufacturing capitol of the world.  “I wasn’t living healthy there and my body wasn’t handling it well.” She returned stateside, back to Portland before meeting a lovely man who lived in Maple Valley and, so, she moved up there.  Such a shift from a city of 13 million to a town of 20,000 can be hard.  “People drive to their mailboxes!”  That does sound like the country.  Although living so far from Capitol Hill, Holly is hooked and loves to come to ON on days when there is yoga. “I like a place where I can do yoga and there are ‘Your Mom’ jokes.”  She is lending a helping hand to Sustainable Capitol Hill by giving them some worms for their worm bin projects.  “If there was a Sustainable Maple Valley, I’d be involved.”

Life brought Holly back to the states where she continues to do similar work as she did abroad. “The company I work for works with brands and their importers to help their manufacturing partners, factories or an agent meet the requirements of local labor law in China…For example, let’s say, a women’s clothing brand is our client. We do classroom training for all their suppliers. We also get a select group of their select manufacturing partners and we do training specific to them to help them build compliance capacity.  And, we work directly with individual factories to help them meet requirements of the local labor law.” Turns out, Chinese labor laws are actually stricter that US laws so Holly and the consulting firm for whom she works, advise the companies and factories as to what can be done and what needs to be done so the partnership is beneficial for all.

Her job sounds like it takes a lot so she knows how to have fun.  Holly loves to mountain bike, and the family is a big fan of going bike camping.  With 3 kids in the house, life is busy and it sounds like it’s pretty fun.  “My daughter is a rockin’ guitarist. “  Holly gets a proud look on her face, “She’s learning Enter Sandman.”

With her life full of family, music, yoga, and bikes, it’s easy to understand how Holly always is buzzing with positive energy.  We love having her at Office Nomads and can’t wait for the next Wednesday when we see her again!

Office Nomads currently is the lucky “temporary home” for “The Garden of Hope,” a gorgeous piece in our main conference room by Bellingham artist Kuros Zahedi. We have been housing it for over a year now, and would love to make this amazing piece a permanent part of the office!  We need your help to do it.  Here’s the story:

“The Garden of Hope” was created as a part of Sustainable Capitol Hill‘s 2008 summer festival – Imagine Capitol Hill.  Much of the festival was planned out of Office Nomads, with weekly volunteer meetings and volunteer trainings happening in the space.  Kuros responded to an RFP we put out for the event for creative, collaborative art pieces.  For his piece, Kuros gathered a group of volunteers the day before the festival to collect trash from around an area of the neighborhood.  After it was all collected, he spent the entire day of the festival putting the trash onto these four doors with the help of any festival attendees who wanted to come.  The result was awesome!

After much time art-sitting this piece, Office Nomads would love to make The Garden of Hope a permanent installment at Office Nomads.  Not only would it be great to know it’s going to stay, but it would support the work of an artist we greatly respect (and who has been a featured artist in the space before!)  Kuros has adjusted the price significantly for our purchase of the art, as he really wants us to have it.  So, we need to raise $2500 to secure these pieces for Office Nomads’ future.

Want to chip in?

We could use the help!  Office Nomads is accepting donations (not tax-deductable, sorry!) of any amount to raise the funds to buy this gorgeous piece.  If you are a regular user of the main conference room, you know how great the panels look in there, and how they brighten the room.  They also tell a great story of the type of projects Office Nomads loves to be a part of.  We’d love to keep the story alive and collectively raise the money to purchase this piece and support an artist we adore.

If you’re interested, head over to the front desk and let us know how much you can contribute.  You can write a check, add on an amount to your monthly bill, or empty your spare change into the jar on the front desk.   Anything helps!

All the love,
Susan, Jacob, Alexandra, and the rest of the ON crew