Adventure Nannies Turns 14

May 24, 2026  |  Adventure Nannies Team

Adventure Nannies is fourteen years old today.

For those of us around here who can't help but read into a number, fourteen turns out to be a quietly fitting one. Add its digits together and you land on five, and five has always been the number of motion. The wanderer's number. The one who learns by going, who can't fully understand a thing until they've stood inside it and felt it for themselves. We did not plan our fourteenth year around a numerology chart. But looking back on it now, the number got there before we did. This was a year of going.

It started, the way these things tend to, with deciding who we were before we went anywhere at all.

Last June, just a few weeks into this fourteenth year, we became a Certified B Corporation. After more than a decade of saying that we believed nannies were professionals, that domestic work was real work, that a company could put its values ahead of its own convenience and still be standing at the end of the year, we wanted something outside of ourselves that would hold us to all of it. 

The B Corp certification involves an in depth audit of how a business treats its people, its community, and the world around it. It is not easy to earn. That was precisely the point. We planted a flag in the ground that said: this is who we are.

This year we had the chance to find out what that actually meant.

* * *

In August, we gathered almost our whole team at a horse farm in Connecticut, the same one where we had hosted our very first Nanny Camp the year before. We told ourselves it was a working retreat. Planning, strategy, the practical business of being a company. But our team is scattered across states and time zones and an entire ocean, and many of these people had spent years building this thing together without ever once being in the same room. Two of our Philippines-based teammates flew all the way over for the week. For one of them, it was her first time ever setting foot in the United States.

Here is what we actually learned at our working retreat: the work was never really the point. The distance collapsed in about a day. People who had only ever been names in an inbox came to life, with the way they laughed and the things they carried and all the small particular details you only ever get in person. One teammate reflected on finally got to hug a colleague who they had worked with for years. You cannot do that over a video call.

When we asked the team months later for their favorite memory of the entire year, the retreat came up more than anything else. Not because it was a spectacle. Because it was real, and because it quietly rearranged how the work felt afterward. We had gone to plan a company. We came home having met one.

That was the first time the year tried to tell us something. It would not be the last.

* * *

In February, four of us got on a plane to the Philippines, and the lesson arrived again, louder this time.

We went, on paper, to check in on operations and to spend real time with the teammates who keep so much of this company running from the other side of the planet. What we found was Intramuros, the old walled city of Manila, and a horse-drawn carriage rolling over cobblestones in afternoon light that does not seem to exist anywhere else on earth.

We found a bike ride through the Palawan Islands that felt suspended outside of ordinary time. And we found dinner tables, and the people sitting across them, and the quietly moving experience of finally understanding in full what we had all been building together for years.

This time, we came to them. To where they actually live, to their time zone, their city, their world. They told us afterward what it meant to be visited on their own ground, to be known as whole people and not as names in a Slack channel. One teammate said the trip made her feel more connected to the work itself.

That phrase stayed with us, because it named the thing the year kept circling back to. One of our team described our whole web of colleagues and candidates and families as a beautiful cycle of care, and you do not arrive at language like that from a values document. You arrive at it from a dinner table in Manila. The wanderer had gone looking for an operations check-in and found, instead, that the company was a circle of people taking care of each other.

* * *

Between those two trips, we kept going, and the world kept handing us the same lesson in different packaging.

In January, we brought our community together in Washington, D.C. for our Winter Warm Up: a day of workshops and conversation and the very particular electricity that fills a room when caregivers who spend their working lives feeling invisible suddenly find themselves surrounded by people who understand. Someone said, on the way out the door, that they had come because they needed the community and stayed because they had found their people. We have not stopped thinking about that sentence since.

In April, our team fanned out across the country for International Nanny Training Day in Denver, Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin, Houston, and Dallas. We went to teach and to speak, and we ended up watching the very same thing we had watched at a horse farm in Connecticut and at a dinner table in Manila: people finding their people. A whole movement of caregivers deciding, together, that this profession is worth investing in.

* * *

This is also the biggest team Adventure Nannies has ever had. And in a year so defined by other people’s voices, it started to feel strange to tell the story in only one.

So we did something we have never done before. For the past eight or nine years, our birthday blog has been written by our CEO and owner, Shenandoah. This year, we handed it over. We asked the people who do this work every single day to tell us what they thought about the year, what this work means to them, why they show up for it, and what they wish the rest of the world understood about what we do. We expected kind, tidy answers. We did not expect to be quite so disarmed.

Almost everyone, in their own way, said the same thing about what outsiders tend to get wrong: people imagine this work is a simple transaction. Introduce candidates to a family, collect a fee, move on to the next one. What no one sees is the conversation living inside a job description, the care inside a single reference call, the hours spent genuinely understanding a household before a name is ever put forward. What no one sees is the decision to say no to a search that is not right, even when yes would be the easier and more profitable answer. People assume an agency is a machine. Our team kept insisting, again and again in their own words, that it is anything but.

And when we asked them why they show up at all, the answers stopped reading like answers and started reading like origin stories. So many of the people on this team came to this work from something deeply personal. A parent who did domestic work. A childhood spent watching that labor go unseen and unthanked. Years spent as a nanny themselves before crossing over to this side of the desk. Not one person's reason was abstract. Every single one was rooted in a real life that came before this job.

One answer seemed to hold all the others inside it. The reason to show up, this teammate said, is that the work, when it works, creates a real win on both sides at once. Nannies find roles with professional pay and clear expectations and employers who genuinely respect them. Families find the kind of support that lets them return to their own lives, to go back to work or chase something or simply be fully present when they are present. That cycle is the whole thing. That cycle is what the wanderer had been finding, dressed in different clothes, in every city all year long.

And yes, because we did ask what surprises people most: our team will happily confirm that the reaction Shenandoah still reliably gets, ten years into running a nanny agency, is genuine surprise that she is not the one personally doing all of the nannying. She would also like it on the record that with some of our travel positions, she rather wishes she were.

* * *

By the time the year's traveling was done, the pattern was impossible to miss. Everywhere the wanderer went, a horse farm, a walled city, a hotel ballroom, a training day in a city far from home, it set out for one reason and came home holding the same other thing. People. Connection. Care, moving in a circle.

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That, in the end, is what fourteen had to teach us. A wanderer who keeps finding the very same thing in every place she goes is not lost, and is not really wandering at all. She has been circling something the whole time. We spent a year going everywhere we could, and what we found everywhere was this: we were never only a company. We are a community, one that happens to be spread across states and time zones and an ocean, held together by people who take real care of each other and of everyone who comes to us for help.

This August, Nanny Camp returns, and the waitlist is already longer than last year's. The nannies from that first camp never really left each other. They text, they call, they show up for one another in ways that have nothing to do with us anymore and everything to do with what happens when you give people the room to find their people. We cannot wait to do it all again.

We are endlessly grateful to the families, nannies, educators, and community members who have trusted us for fourteen years, and to our team, who took this blog into their own hands this year and filled it with far more honesty and heart than we had any right to ask for, and reminded us exactly why we started.

Happy birthday to us. And to Brandy, who we share this day with, always.

Here's to the next adventure.

- The Adventure Nannies Team

Questions, or thoughts about where this industry is headed? We'd love to hear from you at marketing@adventurenannies.com.

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