About

We are SunshineHouse.

A small collective for public-good digital work — designers, developers, strategists and artists, founded by Ren Lovejoy in 2016. We work with non-profits, local businesses, and social-good companies to help build the world we want to live in.

The team

Two people who do the work — no account managers in between.

Ren Lovejoy

Founder & Principal Engineer

Waldo, Maine

Ren has spent the last decade building digital tools for people doing public-good work — environmental scientists, civic researchers, food-system organizers, conservation districts. SunshineHouse is the studio they founded in 2016 to put that work under one roof, and the one they now run full-time.

Most of the work now is Next.js applications: decision-support tooling for people making calls on incomplete information, first-party data architecture, AI automation that connects research to the systems that actually use it. The throughline is translation — taking technical work and making it usable by the people on the ground.

Ren runs digital experience for a national snack-food brand. Before that, four years as an environmental scientist at Skelly and Loy in Maryland: stream restoration, wetland mapping, and geomorphic surveys for state agencies and engineering firms. They built drone-based mapping workflows and automated reporting pipelines that cut analysis time by 8+ hours per stream mile. Same job, really.

B.A. in Anthropology and Geography. Permaculture Design Certification, Permaculture Institute of Australia.

Julia Reese

Principal Designer

Chicago, Illinois

Julia is a designer who also handles content operations — a rare combination, because most designers don't want to think about metadata and most ops people can't draw. She does both.

Her design work is end-to-end: brand websites, motion graphics, photography, creative across email, SMS, social, and long-form video. The content ops side is the unsexy work that keeps everything running — managing a brand's product information across hundreds of SKUs and multiple retailers, the structured-content discipline that's the difference between a site that looks great at launch and a site that still works two years later.

Julia manages digital shelf eCommerce for significant clients. Before that, multi-disciplinary digital at a national snack brand. Earlier, editorial work on organic farming and food systems for The Odyssey Online.

Why we do this

The world we want to live in.

Ask us what kind of world we want, and the answer is almost embarrassingly simple. One where people help people — directly, without waiting for permission. Where a neighbor turns a glut of grapes into jelly and ten jars go to the food bank, because what you don't need, you share. Where the school and the clinic stay funded because a community understands that an educated, healthy neighbor is the whole point — not a cost center.

It's a world where automation is good news. Where nobody fears the machine taking their job, because their needs are met either way — so when a role becomes obsolete, the person doesn't. They're freed to make the next thing. Where what gets people out of bed isn't piling up possessions, it's watching the place they live get better.

It's less hierarchical than the one we've got. Fewer kings, more tables. Decisions made by the people closest to the work, in plain conversation. Equality of opportunity wide enough that bigotry runs out of oxygen — and people spend their energy mastering their craft instead of each other. A world that thinks broader than a border.

We know a studio can't build that world. But we can help the people already trying — the food banks and land trusts, the co-ops and mutual-aid crews, the small businesses run by people who'd rather do right than do big. We take the occasional larger contract too, and treat it as fuel: a way to fund the work that matters. That's the whole reason SunshineHouse exists.

And how we try to work like it

Non-hierarchical

You talk to the people doing the work — no account managers playing telephone.

Transparent

Open pricing, shared docs, honest timelines. You always know where things stand.

Values-aligned

We work with people doing good, and we vet for it. It keeps the work — and us — honest.

In it together

Cooperative by structure. When the work goes well, the people who made it share in it.

Waldo, Maine · Hanover, Pennsylvania · Chicago, Illinoisall in one workshop