One of North America's largest Ys traded a geographic name for a directional one - and kept doing the unglamorous work of raising kids, teaching swimming, and holding neighborhoods together.
Charles Bonello is the co-founder and CEO of Vivvi, a New York-based company reinventing child care and early learning by partnering with employers to make full-time and backup care more accessible and affordable for working families. Before Vivvi, he co-founded Grand Central Tech, one of New York's largest and most selective startup communities, and worked in investment research and venture financing. His work is driven by a conviction that child care is the single biggest pain point for working parents, and he has built Vivvi into a network of NYC campuses backed by $17.2 million in funding.
LifeCare is a Shelton, Connecticut-based provider of employer-sponsored work-life benefits, best known for its Backup Care Connection service and the LifeMart employee-discount marketplace. Founded in 1984, the company helps large employers and federal agencies support their workforce with last-minute child, adult, senior and pet care, along with senior-care management, tutoring, and everyday savings. LifeCare has served tens of thousands of client organizations covering roughly 100 million members and, since October 2020, has operated as part of Care.com (an IAC company) under the CareBenefits umbrella.
Vivvi is a New York-based child care and early learning company that partners with employers to make high-quality care affordable and flexible for working families. Founded in 2018 by Charles Bonello and Ben Newton, it operates a growing network of early learning campuses for children from six weeks to five years old, and layers on employer-sponsored offerings such as backup care, in-home care, virtual tutoring, and its Care Cash reimbursement program. The model turns child care into a recruiting and retention benefit for companies while giving parents full-day, year-round, research-based programs.
Angela Rachidi is a senior fellow and the Rowe Scholar in opportunity and mobility studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where she studies poverty and how federal safety-net programs shape the lives of low-income Americans. A former New York City welfare official turned think-tank scholar, she has become one of Washington's most-cited voices on SNAP, the Child Tax Credit, child care, and the link between work and poverty - testifying repeatedly before Congress and arguing that programs should pull families toward employment and self-sufficiency, not away from it. A Lancaster, Wisconsin native and four-time all-conference college softball player, she runs her own research firm and works from Middleton, Wisconsin.