January 5×5 Night at Start Garden
Voting Closes:
January 20, 2025 11:59 pm
Impact
Our goal is to provide an elevated community sauna & cold plunge experience that improves the mental, physical, and social health of our guests. The impact is the mental, physical, and social health improvement in our community.
For mental health: sauna and cold plunge both show promise as interventions to reduce stress and treat anxiety & depression.
For physical health: sauna and cold plunge are commonly used to recover from athletic training. Sauna has been shown to improve cardiovascular health and reduce blood pressure. In one study, regular sauna bathing was shown to reduce the likelihood of all-cause-mortality by ~40%.
For social health: In a New York Times article Nicholas Kristof said "Loneliness is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and more lethal than consuming six alcoholic drinks a day". Conversely in the famous "Blue Zones" that produce unusually high numbers of 100+ year old humans, community is always very important. We think that the community aspect of our sauna is at least as important as the hot-cold contrast therapy.
What I'll do with $5,000
This has been our first season in operation. There were many successes and many more learning opportunities. The biggest learning opportunity has presented itself in our effort to find a long term home for our sauna. There are few places close to the city center that have natural water that people want to bathe in. It has also been quite difficult to find landlords private or public, willing to lease us a beautiful plot of land. For these reasons we have decided we would like to create our own beautiful piece of land and create our own artificial bodies of water. We want to rent an empty lot and build a garden ala Outside Coffee Co. We will park our sauna, and set up really nice cold plunge tubs. The $5,000 would go towards the landscaping and the purchase of cold plunge tubs built by local artisan David Stoffer at Nightjar Sauna.