Longtime Arlington residents who founded a Rosslyn-based online university are donating $50,000 to help local small businesses.
In 1998, Yanping Chen and J. Davidson Frame established the University of Management and Technology, a fully online school enrolling national and international students, located at 1901 Fort Myer Drive. Their $50,000 donation comes from the Chen Frame Foundation, which they started to support educational causes across the world.
The countdown to 2021 with this year’s most-read ARLnow stories continues today. Falling just outside the top 10 were stories about a banner, a burglary, a bear, and an early coronavirus case in Arlington.
15. Yorktown Principal Apologizes for Banner Seen as Racist (May 21 | 37,228 views)
When Eddie Kaufholz and his family moved to Arlington nearly five years ago, they were not thinking about starting a business. They wanted to live in a place that was diverse, interesting and full of opportunity, with a school system they could rely on. Arlington fit.
In the years that followed, working out of a home office off Columbia Pike, he consulted with organizations across Northern Virginia and around the country: nonprofits, advocacy groups, mid-sized companies, agencies of various sizes. The work itself was good. But somewhere across all those projects, he started to notice a pattern.
”The agency model has gotten really bloated,” Kaufholz says. ”Layers, handoffs, middle management. The senior people who pitch the work often disappear once it starts. The idea with PILLAR was to strip all of that down; keep senior people on the work, approach each client with humility and care, do world-class strategy and execution, and pass the efficiency back to the client instead of absorbing it as agency margin.”
That thinking, slowly, became PILLAR, the Arlington-headquartered creative, communications and marketing agency Kaufholz founded.
PILLAR, he says, is built on an old idea. ”An idea that has always been possible but rarely practiced: that an agency should be structured to serve the work itself.” The team that delivers the work is assembled around the specific needs of each client and only stays as long as the work calls for them.
”The senior strategist on your kick-off call is the senior strategist writing your messaging,” Kaufholz says. ”Every person on a project is there because the work specifically calls for them.”
PILLAR’s recent work has spanned human rights, executive leadership, higher education, advocacy and direct-to-consumer ecommerce. The roster has included national nonprofits, a national multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer brand and a number of institutions navigating significant moments of strategic change. The model is built to scale up to be the agency of record for a national brand, or to scale down to design a logo for a neighborhood nonprofit. PILLAR takes equal pride and care in both.
What Kaufholz did not understand when he started, he said, was how much the County itself would matter in making any of it possible. (more…)
This regularly-scheduled sponsored Q&A column is written by Eli Tucker, Arlington-based realtor and Arlington resident. Please submit your questions to him via email for response in future columns. Enjoy!
Happy holidays to you and yours! I hope you are finding new ways to enjoy the season and connect with family and friends this year. I’m going to keep my final post of 2020 light and take a look at the most expensive sales in the DMV in 2020, something we all enjoy doing!
Mental health shapes how we lead, love, work, parent, communicate, and show up in the world—yet too often, these conversations stay hidden.
This Mental Health Awareness Month, join local nonprofit Rock Recovery for Strength Not Stigma—an unforgettable evening of honest conversation, community, and impact.
Don’t worry, bumble coffee — that concoction of orange juice, caramel and espresso over ice — is still on the menu at the cafe formerly known as This is Fine Coffee in Clarendon.
Kino Coffee has the same menu, but its offerings now include independent movies.
We’re excited to announce the opening of our second location in Arlington, VA! ❤️
📍 Opening June 1st
A woman who was sitting in her car the day after Christmas in Pentagon City was attacked and robbed by a pair of teens, according to Arlington County police.
The victim was in her car, on her phone — on the 1100 block of S. Hayes Street, near the Pentagon City mall — when one of the suspects allegedly climbed in the back of the car, punched her, and stole her phone. The suspect also tried unsuccessfully to steal the woman’s purse, police said.
A potentially rabid raccoon with a taste for human flesh is on the loose in the Donaldson Run neighborhood.
The raccoon bit a person last week on the 4200 block of 25th Street N., two blocks from Taylor Elementary School, according to the Animal Welfare League of Arlington. It ran off and “has not been located.”
Columbia Pike Resident Goes Missing — “ACPD seeks the public’s assistance locating Ms. Amanda Aniston, last seen Dec. 12, 2020 in the 1200 blk of S. Courthouse Rd. She is described as a Black female, brown hair, brown eyes, approx. 5’9″, 140 lbs. She may be in need of medical services.” [ACPD]
Did False Report Lead to Police Encounter? — “The head of the Arlington NAACP, Julius D. Spain Sr… said he would seek a meeting with Arlington Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and ‘if someone needs to be charged with making a false report, so be it.’ Crutchfield said in his complaint that ‘the neighbor who called the police lied about me taking pictures of the military base nearby to trigger a police response.'” [Washington Post]
Nilah Williamson, the Yorktown High School senior who was recently featured on Good Morning America for pursuing a pilot’s license before a driver’s license, will be attending the U.S. Naval Academy next fall.
Williamson said she wants to major in chemistry, a field that she is passionate about. After four years in labs, however, she plans to go to flight school, returning to the cockpit and trading in her goggles for a pilot’s uniform.
This is a sponsored column by attorneys John Berry and Kimberly Berry of Berry & Berry, PLLC, an employment and labor law firm located in Northern Virginia that specializes in federal employee, security clearance, retirement and private sector employee matters.
By John V. Berry, Esq.
