and invent rs Entrepreneurs CursiveLogic

WHAT? Cursive curriculum

WHERE? cursivelogic.com

HOW MUCH? $20

Although Dallas ISD says its schools still teach the art of cursive writing, more and more schools across the nation are cutting it from their curriculum. It’s time-consuming to teach, and does anybody even use it anymore?

But what if there was a way to teach cursive that’s easier than traditional methods? East Dallas neighbor Prisca LeCroy thinks she might have the key.

Her mom, Linda Shrewsbury, came up with a method while tutoring a 23 year old who just wanted to learn to sign his name in cursive.

Shrewsbury was eager to teach the man the loopy lettering, but she was afraid the traditional way of going through the alphabet wasn’t efficient or effective.

Dr. Jonathan Clarke

WHAT? Digital house call

WHERE? mendathome.com

HOW MUCH? Prices vary

Lakewood neighbor Dr. Jonathan Clarke is using new technology to bring back an old fashioned style of medical care: the house call.

“My grandfather was a physician who made house calls in East Texas,” Clarke explains. “So I grew up with stories of him going out late at night, visiting families and bringing home chickens as payment. That sort of down-home doc.”

When Clarke practiced medicine in the military, most of it was done outside the walls of a hospital or clinic.

“So I was doing my own house calls,” he says. “And when I moved here to Dallas and started practicing as a civilian emergency physician, I started identifying a lot of the pain points patients were having to face as a result of the way we practice medicine.”

Not only did it bother Clarke that neighbors had to transport themselves to a clinic while sick, but he also worried about the fact that the services weren’t affordable and

She needed an easier, faster way, so she wrote out the lowercase alphabet and studied it until she recognized a pattern.

“Every letter in the lowercase alphabet fits into one of four basic shape patters,” LeCroy explains. “So ‘i’ and ‘p’ are in the same category. A lot of people group ‘p’ with ‘o’ because of the loop, but it’s based on the initial stroke.”

Shrewsbury grouped the letters and strung the similar ones together. She wasn’t sure if her method would work, but when she showed it to her student, he picked it up within 45 minutes.

Shrewsbury didn’t think much of it, but that doctors weren’t being transparent about costs. then a year later she was tutoring a 16-yearold student and decided to use the same technique. He was also able to pick it up right away, and she realized she might be onto something. nomically for things that actually don’t cost much money. An urgent care clinic costs between $2-5 million just for the facility, and then you have the overhead of all the staffing. So we’ve just taken that and made it much more efficient.”

“We sought to change that,” he says.

In early 2015, Clarke launched a healthcare start-up called Mend that provides same-day or next-day urgent care visits with healthcare professionals, and it’s available by phone and computer as a free IOS app and website, making it the “Uber of healthcare,” Clarke says, which is what allows Mend to cut out some of the costs involved in typical healthcare.

She wondered if her method could help schools rekindle the ability and desire to teach cursive, so she teamed up with her daughter, LeCroy, to develop a curriculum.

In 2014 they officially launched their company, CursiveLogic.

“It’s super hard to break into the education market,” LeCroy says, but already a handful of schools have adopted the curriculum.

Home healthcare isn’t an original idea or even a new idea, Clarke points out; Mend an old idea with a new twist, and it’s the first service of its kind to hit the market in Texas. It has taken off in the last year, and Clarke has been able to fully devote his time to Mend, as well as support a full-time staff of six healthcare providers, he says. Recently Mend landed a partnership with Children’s Health System of Texas.

“Children’s was interested because they realized that healthcare is changing, so they want to make sure they’re staying ahead of the innovation curve,” Clarke says. “So they look to us to bring that innovation into their fold, and this will allow us to grow to other geographic locations, even across the state in the next year and expand our services to incorporate things like telemedicine.”

“A lot of healthcare isn’t that expensive,” he says. “They’ve just escaladed prices astro-

To learn more, download the Mend app or visit mendathome.com, or call the customer service number 469.458.MEND.

Lula Mae

WHAT? Cotton pillows

WHERE? Facebook.com/lulamaepillow

HOW MUCH? $50

Cotton pillow producer Lula Mae was born out of the perfect matrimony between health concerns and good old-fashioned Texas pride.

“When the recession first hit, it bothered me how the once mighty Texas had weakened,” says neighbor Jim DeSimone.

DeSimone and his wife, Maria, both had the desire to start their own business, but doing what? The thought would keep Tim up at night.

He knew he wanted to create something that would “represent an improvement above the norm. Something Texas-based and natural.”

Then it hit him — cotton.

That led him to consider the pillow, since most pillows sold in America come from China, he points out. The catch, of course, is that most of our pillows aren’t made from cotton; they’re made from polyester — a product that’s “harmful to environment, made of alcohol, coal and formaldehyde. Sprayed with chemicals,” Tim says. “And we sleep on this?”

After a little research, Maria jumped on board with Jim’s idea.

“I’m the mother of two boys, so I started looking into polyester and formaldehyde and all these things that are bad for your kids’ health,” Maria says. “Of course you put your kids before everything else, so we both really believed in it.”

They took out a loan to fund the licensing and research necessary to develop a prototype, and what they ended up with was an allnatural, all-American cotton bed pillow.

They pitched their product, and JCPenny and Tuesday Morning welcomed it on their shelves. Although for now they’re focused on promoting the Lula Mae pillow, they’ve considered expanding their bedding business.

“Maybe later on down the line we’ll have Lula Mae sheets and other things,” Maria says.