Park Bench started the way most good ideas do: out of frustration, at a kitchen counter, trying to keep track of everything.
The origin story
I'm Clare, a mom of two and a lifelong New Yorker. Somewhere between soccer practice, piano lessons, school flyers, and the group text about the group text, I realized I wasn't managing my family's life so much as drowning in it.
And I noticed something else: I wasn't alone. Every parent I knew was solving the exact same problems, alone, at the same time, in their own kitchen. A flyer for the same art class sat in a hundred different inboxes. A hundred parents separately Googled “things to do with kids this weekend” and found nothing.
“The tools that existed were smarter, but they still forced one person to enter it all in. The load wasn't any lighter.”
So I set out to build something different: an assistant that doesn't just organize your family's chaos, but connects you to the neighborhood already living through it with you. That's Park Bench: your family's calendar, and your neighborhood's knowledge, in one place.
Our home
Park Bench is built and piloted in Rockaway, a neighborhood I know from the inside, not a market picked off a map. It's a place where people still wave from porches, where the PTA group chat runs half the neighborhood, and where “it takes a village” is just Tuesday.
We started here on purpose. If Park Bench can't make life easier for the families two blocks from the boardwalk, it has no business trying to do it for all of New York. Rockaway is our proving ground, and our home.
How we build
Park Bench isn't built in a vacuum. It's shaped every week by conversations with the moms, dads, and caregivers actually using it: on stoops, in group chats, over coffee, in the school pickup line. If something isn't working, we hear about it fast, and we fix it fast.
Before Park Bench, I spent two decades in product management, building tools that had to work for real people under real pressure, not just look good in a pitch deck. I'm bringing that same discipline to the hardest, least glamorous job there is: running a household.
At the end of the day, this isn't about features. It's about a kid getting picked up on time, a flyer that doesn't get lost, and a parent who gets five minutes back to just sit down.
We're just getting started, and Rockaway families are shaping what comes next. If that sounds like your neighborhood, we'd love to have you.