Who we Are…
Mrs. Hudson’s is a charitable consultancy providing design, building, and mentoring services for besieged neighborhoods, at-risk families, abandoned buildings, disadvantaged communities, resilient environments, threatened landscapes, legacy industries, and overstretched non-profits.
Unlike most A/E/C (architecture, engineering, contracting) organizations, Mrs. Hudson’s provides design services for needy clients at cost, and helps manage building projects that benefit the working poor by in turn helping to grow working communities in place, restoring functioning regions, and rebuilding this planet’s resilience.
(The only service Mrs. Hudson’s offers to secure families and wealthy companies is mentoring. (Very occasionally, executive coaching is introduced, but our mission is always respected. Thus, compliance officers, where regulatory compliance is seen as a profit center -- shall not be coached, trained or retrained by Mrs. Hudson’s Gear Table’s list of senior mentors.) The full fees charged these mentees will benefit disadvantaged students and stressed career-transitioners.)
Our name originates in the tragedy of Mrs. Katherine Hudson and her children, left destitute in 1611 by the loss the famous navigator and her husband Capt. Henry Hudson in the mutiny on ‘The Halve Moon’ in a northern bay of the Americas. To redress this wrong, Katherine pressed suit against the The East India Company (to be renamed the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670), thereby gaining a merchant’s passage to India, funding to purchase powdered indigo pigment there, and securing a place on London’s Royal Exchange to sell it. As a result of her persistence in following justice against the oldest corporation in existence, she herself, her family and their descendants became very, very, rich. In following Mrs. Hudson’s example, we use the resources and design traditions of the global south to solve the global north’s socio-environmental problems.
Donations of professional time and care are gratefully accepted on a discounted or tax-deduction basis. Cash donations are fully deductible, exclusive of any value received. Donations may in turn be made by (and reported by) Mrs. Hudson’s Gear Table to other tax-exempt public benefit non-profit organizations, as needed to fulfill our mission.
Based in the western mid-Hudson valley, we will be initially focusing our attention on the northern ranges of Appalachia: the ‘hillbilly’ stretches of the Catskills, Shawangunks, Hudson Highlands, and Allegany mountains. Here is found the legacy of the ‘borscht-belt’ hotel industry together with disinvested or abandoned canal and rail-based industrial facilities. Asset abandonment, ugly but functioning poverty and small city ghettoes are found across mid-Hudson valley and westwards to the twin tiers of New York and Pennsylvania, from Elmira and Binghamton to East Ellenville and rail-lands Middletown, to Washington Heights Newburgh and Northside Poughkeepsie.
We support the suburbanization and dispersion of poverty as against ghettoization. We propose the Tiny House building type (or the Sears Bungalow, or the Ontario Cottage) as a clustered solution to meeting the needs of the homeless – or those at risk of homelessness -- and of landscape conservation. Craft, handyman, ‘design fox’, and building trade skills should be cultivated and craft factories should be funded to counteract the decline of manufacturing jobs. We practice design activism as a solution to the stunning lack of imagination that western capitalism has thus far brought to bear on the environmental messes we’re now mired in. Solutions are found, instead, in the global south. There, just like Mrs. Hudson 500 years ago, we can cut the Gordian knot of socio-environmental problematizations that surround us here in the global north.
