Introduction
I chair a Parent Advisory Council at a large elementary school. This is my second time in the seat. I am there because it is my kids' school. The tools around it add a lot of extra weight.
I have onboarded, offboarded, and come back. That cycle showed me where cleaner workflows would help most. Less admin toil for the lunch coordinator. A proper handoff when a chair leaves. Individual logins instead of a shared inbox. A clearer story for parents about where family data lives.
I also have twenty-five years of shipping software. Twice I was an early engineer at startups that had to invent, build, and earn the next customer. PAC Hub is that loop again, pointed at a problem I live every week. This is not a pitch. It is why I am building it, what it can make easier, and why I am committed to seeing it through.
What a PAC Actually Does
If you have never sat on one, a PAC is easy to underestimate. In Canada, a Parent Advisory Council is the volunteer parent body at a public school. In the United States the closest cousin is a PTA, a Parent Teacher Association. It is not the district. It is not the principal's office. It is parents, elected by other parents, running the community side of school life.
That work is real. Hot lunch. Fundraising. Volunteers for events. Meetings. Newsletters. The jobs rotate every year or two because they are volunteer roles. The school keeps going. The people holding the accounts change.
Schools get district tools. PACs get a pile of consumer software glued together, plus lunch software that is antiquated, with poor workflows and a lot of extra overhead for volunteers. Every PAC figures it out on their own.
The Stack That Is Not a Stack
Parents still show up when something actually matters, even when the software is rough. At one of the largest schools in the district, most families still register for hot lunch.
The opportunity is to give them one home for the all of PAC life, modernized and focused on the work.
Lunch lives in one product. Volunteer slots live in another. Meetings on a video tool. A website builder for the PAC page. Forms for surveys. Short links for posters. Spreadsheets for the rest. Four to six logins. None of them know about the school year. None of them hand off cleanly when a chair leaves.
Privacy belongs in that picture. Shared logins and family data spread across vendors were never chosen as a careful system. They are what you get when each job needs a different site. Parents notice. Chairs notice. A single hub is a chance to do this more calmly.
There is a quieter opportunity too. School office staff often send parent email on the PAC's behalf, turn PAC notes into the weekly newsletter, and host PAC pages on the school site. That team has its own job. A PAC-owned hub lets us take that work back, so the office can stay focused on the school.
I wanted one place the PAC actually owns. One login per person. One year cycle. One home that survives the next election. Less juggling. Less toil. More of the energy going into the community, not the logins.
What I Am Building
PAC Hub is that home. Each school gets its own hub. Parents and PAC executives sign in with their own accounts, with roles that match the job. Hot lunch, volunteers, events, messages, the school year, and the rest of PAC life belong in one product under one annual subscription. Lunch sits in the core. It is not an upsell. Give lunch a modern home, and the rest of the year has somewhere to live.
Revenue is the PAC subscription. No ads. No selling parent emails. If the business depends on keeping family data, the incentives stay pointed at the council, not at a contact list.
I am shipping this as a solo founder. Auth, members, calendar and volunteer signup, messages and inbox, and billing are in the product. Hot lunch is the current focus, the part that has to be good enough to take a real school year. I am aiming to pilot with the PAC I chair. First customer is my own school, on purpose. I will feel every missing button.
I am honest about what is not done. Fundraising modules wait on legal review. Some of the content tools are still ahead. An all-in hub is the promise. It does not mean every module is live on day one. Claiming otherwise would be the kind of software I am trying to replace.
Why I Will Finish This
I have wanted to build products since those early startup years. The difference this time is that I am the customer. I know which volunteer jobs take the most toil. I know what September feels like when last year's treasurer has already left. I know how many extra hours a lunch tool can add when it was never built for this work.
I also know how to ship. The civic work (six years on a city child care advisory, including as chair) taught me the same lesson as engineering leadership. Get the right people aligned. Make decisions with incomplete information. Be honest about what you do not know yet. PAC Hub is that applied to a product I intend to run for a long time.
This is a passion project with a company shape. I am building full-time. I am using it as Chair. I will take it from my school into the district through relationships I already have, then across B.C. The same job exists for parent organizations in the rest of Canada, and for PTA and PTO groups in the United States. I care about that path. I care more about the hub in front of me being something I would be glad to hand to the next chair.
This is not a distant product. I will see the families who use it at pickup.
Conclusion
PAC Hub exists because I lived this work and I could build something kinder to run it on. One login. One parent community. A PAC-owned system that still works when the volunteer team changes.
I am not waiting for someone else to make this. I am making it.