Spotlight

For young local professionals, specifically under age 40, the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce offers a unique networking opportunity every other month, starting with the first Santa Maria Connect event of the year on Feb. 28 at Far Western Tavern in Orcutt.  The chamber started holding the event in 2018 to help young professionals […]

Low-income, senior, and homeless community members can receive a range of affordable walk-in services for their dogs and cats at the C.A.R.E.4Paws mobile clinic, which hosts its inaugural Furever Valentine’s Pet Wellness and Adoption Day on Feb. 14 and an additional clinic on Feb. 21 in Santa Maria.   “While income level is by no […]

Ashlee Clark-McCaffrey and her family had already participated in various craft fairs over the years, showcasing their homemade soap and wedding favors, before deciding to start their own. The annual Orcutt Holiday Craft Fair originated in 2015 out of Clark-McCaffrey’s home and usually features more than 40 local artisans. After a successful four years, with […]

For more than a decade, Santa Maria High School (SMHS) teacher Cindy Quaid has incorporated the Stock Market Game, an online simulation of global capital markets intended for grades four through 12, into her business economics and marketing courses. The program, started by the SIFMA Foundation, is meant to spark participating students’ interest in economics […]

After  two years of planning and seven months of construction, more than 700 solar panels were installed at Hardy Diagnostics, a manufacturing company specializing in medical devices for microbiological procedures, in Santa Maria at the beginning of January. The panels, generating a total of 250 kilowatts of power, cover the entire roof of one of […]

Rebecca Picek’s history with Girl Scouts stretches back further than the existence of the branch she’s currently a part of. Girl Scouts of California’s Central Coast (GSCCC) wasn’t formed until 2007 after the merger of two former branches, but Picek, troop leader of Service Unit 550 in Santa Maria, first ventured into scouting decades ago. […]

The OASIS Center’s campaign to raise $4 million toward its proposed new location recently reached the halfway point after three years of fundraising.  The campaign launched in 2016 after the senior center acquired the 5-acre property where it plans to build a brand new 15,000-square-foot facility, which would include classrooms, a library, and a kitchen.  […]

The fast-growing, high-earning Central Coast tech firm Mindbody made a billion-dollar announcement just in time for Christmas. On Dec. 24, the SLO-based company announced an acquisition agreement with the San Francisco-based investment firm Vista Equity Partners, which plans to buy all of Mindbody’s outstanding shares for $1.9 billion.  The move will return Mindbody, which first […]

Abilities For Kids Inc., a nonprofit that originated as KindredCare Therapeutics in 2010, came to fruition under founder and current CEO Connie Chan, who sought to fill a need in the community she found was severely lacking. “We started the program because we were frustrated with the paucity of pediatric services in our area,” Chan […]

Chris Scott has known of the Salvation Army’s annual Angel Tree toy drive for years, ever since he worked at Best Buy, which would help donate toys.  But last year, the now five-year apprentice electrician made his first donation to the program as a father, which changed his perspective on the program. “We were looking […]

Power tools whirred atop the roof of a modest Santa Maria home as a work crew of 10 volunteers mounted a set of solar panels on a sunny November afternoon.  Once installed, the new solar grid would reduce the family’s electric bill by as much as 80 percent, the workers said. Their efforts, like the […]

Every year since she lost her son to a motorcycle accident in 2012, Suzanne “Sam” de St. Jean returns to the same place at the Santa Maria Cemetery in early December. It’s not where her son is buried, but the Angel of Hope statue is there, and so is a brick with his name on […]