Yoga is for Corporate Types Too!

We've all felt the stresses of a madcap day practically ruin our evenings.
The Hub has a way of relieving that tension. For the past few weeks now, our CityView and Chemical Heritage Foundation locations have been overtaken by brilliant yogis as they work to relieve busy office workers of their everyday stresses.
That's right, our friends at Deliver Me Yoga have found a key to a happy, balanced corporate life, and they're demonstrating it at The Hub.
Co-founder Alice Dommert, who worked for many years as an architect before trying out life as a yogi, said she came to the idea that yoga is a critical part of the corporate life after seeing "too many bright people who couldn't manage their thoughts. Yoga is really about turning off the workings of the mind." Making yoga accessible to corporate types, she says, is critical, since personal responsibility for health is such a basic issue, and often gets ignored in the rush of a busy day.

Corporate serenity in our CityView location makes this the perfect place to lay out yoga mats.

With that thought, she and Sarah Hill set about finding a way to introduce corporate workers to a better way of living. Her first step was finding a space that would recall corporate life, and thus evoke a level of comfort with busy executives. The Chemical Heritage Foundation space, she says, was a ringer for its thoughtful design, and our CityView space struck a chord with her for its wide-open views. "I will only do yoga in beautiful spaces," she says. "It makes a difference when you’re trying to practice yoga, because a lot of it is about the environment."
We're happy she and Sarah found us.

Alice and Sarah, left and right, respectively, are partners in a new movement to bring yoga to all stripes.

Deliver Me Yoga holds two classes a week in our facilities. Here's the class schedule for the Hub, which runs through August 11. Drop in any time for $20.
If you can't make it to one of our classes, though, Alice has two really important tips she wants to pass on to you.

• Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, three deeps breaths. "You're not chanting, you're not using Sanskrit words," she says. "You can do this in a meeting. Just take the time, every few hours, to breathe."
• Twist. Twist to your right first, and then your left. "This is really about squeezing the internal organs, and flushing them out," says Alice. "And don't forget to breathe."

Hot summer deals--how hot are they?

Ah, summer in the city. It's one of our favorite seasons for many reasons--Center City Sips, al fresco movies, and great summer sales.
But we also love it for another more quotidian reason--we use it as a big excuse to reward our clients for being just that--great clients.
Sure, we think Christmas is great for gift-giving, and spring is the season of renaissance and flowers, but what better time to remind our clients how happy we are to have them than the season of long days, outdoor barbeques, and general good feelings?
We like incentives in our office, so to celebrate the dog days of August, we're giving an iPad to event professionals who book $6000 or more with any of our three locations. Yes, really.
And, in keeping with our commitment to corporate social responsibility, we're also offering not-for-profits a chance to discover one of our favorite Philadelphia institutions, the Chemical Heritage Foundation. For $65 per person, in the months of July and August, NFPs can get to know our facility there, and our services.
To learn more about both of these summer offers, you can call The Hub at 1.877.843.4821

How do you reward your clients?

Hub Friday: Education is Elemental

We wrote a few months ago about our friends at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. (One of The Hub facilities is based there.)
This outstanding organization demonstrates that a potentially boring high-school subject (yours truly scraped by with a C-) can be fun and exciting, and even (gasp!) interesting. In fact, you need only look at one of their excellent competitions for high-school students going on right now to see just how much the folks at the foundation believe in their subject matter.
In the "It's Elemental!" competition, students are encouraged to mix old information with new technology: they're asked to submit videos based around an element in the periodic table. From there, their 3- to 5-minute video is judged on the obvious bits, like "presentation of scientific information" and "technical merit."

What will it take to make this interesting? The guys at the Chemical Heritage Foundation know.

But from there, the competition rapidly veers away from your run-of-the-mill science project: Students will be judged on overall artistry, and their videos will be carefully vetted to see that their chosen element is presented in a light that makes evident its historical and social significance.
At the Hub, we value education pretty highly. We think there's true social and historical potential in everything. So when we talk to new clients, we look at the potential to host their events as opportunities to educate the conference attendees that are coming in that day.
And we encourage our employees to continue to educate themselves too, on everything from social media to trends in meeting planning and events. This philosophy, we think, keeps us fresh, and it keeps us thinking in new directions when it comes to planning conferences for our clients.
Visit the Chemical Heritage Foundation's "It's Elemental!" contest here.
What's your philosophy of work?

Hub Day: Where and Why: The Chemical Heritage Foundation

In this series, we'll explore why and how we came about our individual sites. This week we'll explore the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

We have a secret: We almost failed high school chemistry. Our teacher, one Ms. Payton, was so popular that she intimidated us. And she tried so, so hard to make chemistry fascinating. But alas, she had to count us as one of her failures.

You know what? If we'd known about the Chemical Heritage Foundation back then, things would have been mighty different.
Just look at the place! Two-story video display! Funky-cool instruments! People, standing around, looking interested! This is nothing like Chem101 at 2:10 PM, when we're in our lunchtime slump....

But we digress. The Chemical Heritage Foundation is one of our favorite places. Aside from the fact that we've chosen it as a Hub location, it is the only space we know of with spatial provenance suiting its heritage and mission. Consider: Physician Benjamin Rush, who was America's first-ever chemistry prof, lived right down the street. And Ben Franklin lived within earshot.

Imagine living between this guy...

and this guy!

And then, there's also the fact that the Chemical Heritage Foundation tries is utmost to make chemistry accessible to everyone. They host art exhibits based around chemistry, and they never balk at some of the darker things that chemistry might encompass, like the creation of the atomic bomb and poisonous gas.

CHF is also a sponsor of Science on Tap Philadelphia, a monthly gathering that puts a short lecture or presentation on science in a bar--we know for a fact that the ensuing discussion is always lively. (Seriously, did you ever think geek could be so chic?)

Their weekly Brown Bag Lectures are good food for thought, too.

But we'll be honest and say that, although we may not want to pursue chemistry as a profession any more than we did in high school, the CHF has made it ever so much more interesting. They did it because they understand that chemistry is not just about reactions and things going bang; it's about the people behind it, and what drove them to discover what they did. They get how important it is to carry that view into the future, and anyway, CHF is the only learning institution we know of to make nanotechnology make sense.

Follow the Chemical Heritage Foundation @chemheritage on Twitter. Next week, why and how we chose CHF to be a partner.