Joshua David, Marc Kushner & Karen Wong join the board

The night Alysia Reiner threw us a party at her house, Joshua David stopped by the party. Since the start of + POOL, he’d been our unofficial mentor because of all he had done to make the High Line possible.  We really had no idea what we were doing, but Josh always generously offered his hard-earned advice when we asked for it, and encouraged us to keep moving. One major piece of advice he gave was to throw parties, and thanks to Alysia, we were partying in the name of + POOL.

Josh came up to us that night and said, “start a non-profit, build a board, and ask me to join it.” We were obviously stunned, because what that meant was more than a vote a confidence, he was invested in helping us make + POOL happen.

That next week we met for breakfast, and he gave us the foundational advice we needed to build a non-profit, which we’d call Friends of + POOL. Within weeks, we were sitting down for lunch, in tandem, with Marc Kushner and Karen Wong, two of the most inspiring and trust-worthy people we knew, and without thinking, we asked them to be the first to join the board of our non-existent organization. They said yes, and just like that, + POOL had a board of directors.

Karen Wong brings years of experience running a culturally important non-profit as the incredible Deputy Director at New Museum, and Marc Kushner brings experience building companies from the ground up, not only as Founder of Architizer, but as Cofounder of the architecture office HWKN.