 Growing up in LA, I constantly witnessed homelessness and it really bothered me. Sometimes architects feel like things they built need to last forever, but everything is constantly changing, you know, things are in flux. Every city has an area that you can call Skid Row. In LA, it's an area where people are living in these horrific conditions and it's really unacceptable to me. I'm very lucky in my life, I personally haven't experienced homelessness. I just can't imagine how it is to live without basic necessities. As an architect, I knew I wanted to find a way to at the very least give people shelter. I was studying architecture at USC and I applied it to my desire to make an impact on the homeless issue in LA. It was a very ambitious project. That was a really courageous thing to kind of put herself out there and take that chance. I didn't know what it was going to be, but my first decision that I made about the project was what material to select. Cardboard is a really good material because it's readily available. It is lightweight and because there's air in the cavities of all the corrugation, it also is a naturally insulating material. So it could be surprisingly warm. So I started looking into origami in different patterns. The actual folding pattern is what gives it the durability and the stability. In structural engineering, when you add folds to anything, it'll add strength to it. So at a folded state, it was going to be very, very strong. But the question was what happens when she unfolded it and stretched out as far as she could. There were definitely moments where I wanted to give up. I was like, this isn't going to work. The beauty to something like that is understanding how to engineer it by its failures. It was really an amazing moment when she pulled it all together. I find it really warming as an educator to see that it's gotten this far and that she keeps pursuing it. Tina is very resilient. She's really able to change poison into medicine. So I approached Tina saying, let's take it to business. We formed a nonprofit together and as of 2010, we've established an organization. We've gone to Skid Row multiple times taking shelters with us for research and we really realized that people wanted it. But at the same time, it was only going to provide a temporary comfort. The research that we picked up from Skid Row is how we developed our four-step program to help people get off the streets. It's really about helping people with all of their needs in a holistic way, not just giving out another handout. We employed in a pilot program six homeless millennials so that we could essentially give them the training they need and we were able to successfully place all of our participants into permanent employment. Tina was really sweet. I actually met her through the Youth Employment at the LGBT Center. I was staying at their Homeless Youth Shelter. It was an opportunity that just opened up when I kind of needed it and it really kind of helped me get back on my feet. And thanks to that, I was able to get a job where I'm working at right now. I'm no longer homeless and I just try to get back as much as I can. Word spread online, you know, people started blogging about us. We've received multiple awards. I've received the Mother Convention Award from Toyota and one thing led to another and we were getting requests from different countries where they wanted to implement our programs or get shelters there. That was really overwhelming at the time. It was kind of difficult to see so much need for something like this and not be able to meet that need. Last year after the earthquake, we were contacted by multiple organizations in Nepal that requested shelters so that's been our first big deployment of Cardboard Gami. We currently have shelters being built by the Boy Scouts to do an Eagle Scout project, which is very helpful. Cardboard Gami is still an all-volunteer-run organization, including myself. I do work full-time as an architect and then I take care of day-to-day operations, nights and weekends. I've figured out a way to be very efficient at everything I do. Tina is a really passionate person. Her interest is really quite deep and very genuine, trying to help make this a better place. Putting your energies and bringing something to life, Cardboard Gami is like giving birth for six years and so, yeah, it brings me tremendous joy. It is something that I will always be working on because it addresses such a big need in the world. Seeing it grow from an idea to actually being able to help five people get a job or actually being able to protect a few people in Nepal after the earthquakes, that is what success means to me.