Future Phases

Making life skills tangible, accessible, and enjoyable

Most of us were never really taught how to feed ourselves well, run a home, manage money, or build a community that holds us up. We were expected to figure it out. Many of us are still figuring it out, on our own.

The Chwalinski Foundation teaches the life skills that make everyday life work. Our next phases give those skills a home: real places where you can walk in, roll up your sleeves, and practice with your own hands, alongside people who want the same things you do.

These projects are in planning. The images on this page are early concept renderings, not final designs.

Ma Petite Polonaise

A learning and experience house in the city.

Ma Petite Polonaise will be the Foundation's home in Little Rock for experiential training and implementation. You will not just hear about a healthier, more capable way of living here. You will taste it, see it, and practice it.

Ma Petite Polonaise is not a full-service restaurant. It is a test kitchen, a grab-and-go market, a calm place to sit and connect, a curated resale shop, and a classroom, all under one roof. The only time we serve a sit-down dinner is our monthly supper club, and even that is built to teach.

What happens inside, and what it teaches:

• The test kitchen. This is where we cook, test recipes, and record the lessons you can watch from anywhere. We make clean, healthy food from scratch in small batches, and we are careful stewards of every ingredient we use. What we make is offered to the public through our vending and pickup. When a batch is gone, it is gone. Teaches: cooking from scratch, meal planning, eating well on a real budget, and wasting nothing. Program: Unboxing Better.

• Grab-and-go vending and pickup. Fresh, nourishing meals from refrigerated vending, or ordered ahead for quick pickup, with no long restaurant wait. Every meal comes with a recipe card and a link to a lesson, so you can learn to make it at home. Teaches: fitting healthy eating into a busy life. Program: Unboxing Better.

• A self-serve third space. Not home, not work. A calm, welcoming place to sit, eat, and connect with others who are committed to a cleaner, healthier way of living. Teaches: belonging, and building community around shared values. Program: Reclaiming Community.

• A curated resale shop. Beautiful, useful secondhand goods, carefully chosen and never cluttered. Donations are sorted, cleaned, repaired, and given a second life instead of ending up in a landfill. Teaches: stewardship and respect for resources, smart spending, mending and repair, and getting full value from what we already have. Caring for our money and caring for our planet turn out to be the same habit. Foundation: The Unbothered Budget.

• Hands-on workshops. Cooking, preserving, fermenting, gardening, sewing and mending, organizing a home, hospitality, and table setting. Teaches: the everyday know-how that makes a household run. Program: LifeOps Allies.

• Meaningful roles for elders. Elders volunteer, mentor, and pass on a lifetime of skill and wisdom, and their steady pace sets a calmer, kinder tone for the whole house. Teaches: purpose, respect, and connection across generations. Program: Empowering Elders.

Seven foundations, one house.

Our Foundation teaches life skills through eight foundations. Seven of them come to life at Ma Petite Polonaise, each one with a way to learn it and a way to actually do it. (The eighth, exploration, happens out in the wider world.)

• SpiritYOUality. Learn it: A moment of gratitude opens every supper club, and the third space keeps a quiet corner for stillness. Do it: Pause before meals, and join seasonal gatherings built around meaning and rest.

• Mind Remapping. Learn it: Small-steps workshops on how habits and thinking shape everyday choices. Do it: Take on a 30-day kitchen or home reset, with check-ins at the house.

• Emotions in Motion. Learn it: Cooking, mending, and gardening as calming, hands-busy practices, and hosting that builds real connection. Do it: Slow, sit-down time in the third space, and conversations with elders who share their stories.

• The Unbothered Budget. Learn it: Stewardship and respect for resources in the resale shop. Do it: Every meal label shows its cost per serving, and every recipe is built for a real budget.

• Unboxing Better. Learn it: Test kitchen lessons and recipe cards. Do it: Take home a grab-and-go meal, then cook it yourself.

• Reclaiming Community. Learn it: The supper club and the third space. Do it: Volunteer days and shared tables.

• Vocational Victory. Learn it: Internships and real roles in the kitchen, market, resale shop, and garden. Do it: Help run real parts of a small food and resale business. Everyone contributes to the community that feeds them.

What this means for Little Rock

Right now, good food is usually fast or healthy, rarely both. People who care about how they eat often end up eating alone, because so few places share their standards. And programs that hand out food rarely teach the skills, habits, and friendships that make change last.

Ma Petite Polonaise brings all of that together in one place. Picture a nurse grabbing a real meal between shifts. A family picking up a dinner they feel good about. An elder with a reason to get up in the morning and a place to belong. A young adult learning to cook, budget, and host for the first time. Neighbors meeting around a table who never would have met otherwise.

It is a place that makes healthy living feel beautiful, doable, and shared, and that treats every resource with respect: good for your body, good for your budget, and good for the planet. A place that means something. Something Little Rock does not have yet.

The side wall: a painted garden mural and a pickup window. Order ahead, drive up, and take a nourishing meal home in minutes. Early concept rendering.

The Supper Club

An evening at the Teaching Table.

Once a month, the house transforms. About 16 to 20 guests gather at long shared tables for an evening that is part elegant dinner, part show, and part class. It is the one time Ma Petite Polonaise serves a sit-down meal, and it is a finer dining experience from start to finish.

Each course arrives with its story: where the food came from, how it was grown, and how it was made. Between courses there is film, conversation, and live demonstration. You taste it, you watch it, and you learn it.

Every guest goes home with the recipes, access to the lessons, and a thoughtful take-home gift. It is intentionally rare, beautifully done, and the kind of night you talk about for weeks. Every ticket also helps fund the Foundation's everyday teaching.

Above: early concept rendering of the supper club room.

Potager de la Polonaise

A working kitchen garden in the country.

Potager de la Polonaise is a planned three-acre working kitchen garden, and its first job is to feed Ma Petite Polonaise. The food on your plate in the city will begin in our own soil.

We will grow and raise as much of our own food as we can, using regenerative gardening and farming. We do it for the health of the people we feed, and to restore the land in our care, leaving it better than we found it.

Nothing is wasted if we can help it. On the farm, we reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle, and gift, keeping as much as possible out of the landfill. Caring for the soil, caring for our resources, and caring for our planet are all the same work.

Rooted in permaculture.

Permaculture is a well-established way of living and growing food that works with nature instead of against it. It rests on three simple ethics: care for the earth, care for people, and share the surplus.

Care starts close to home and moves outward, one circle at a time:

• The land. We care for the soil, the water, and every living thing in it, so the garden can keep giving year after year.

• Our own house. The garden feeds Ma Petite Polonaise, and it feeds our team. Taking good care of the people who do this work is not a perk. It is the principle.

• Our neighbors. Whatever the garden grows beyond what we need, we share with families in the food-desert communities of south-central Arkansas and the Delta, where fresh food can be a long drive away.

Why start close to home? Because strong communities are built from the inside out. First, steady yourself, so you are good for you. Then you have something real to give the people around you, and a little beyond them. When everyone takes care of their own, everyone pitches in, and everyone is in community with someone, far fewer people are left in need. Little by little, circle by circle, that strength spreads across a whole region.

Everyone contributes. Staff, interns, volunteers, and elders all have a real role in keeping the garden and the house running. Meaningful work is part of being in community, and it is part of what we teach.

The garden is also a classroom. Where Ma Petite Polonaise teaches city living, the Potager teaches small-acreage living: growing food, caring for soil, preserving the harvest, and living more self-sufficiently.

• Fresh food for the Ma Petite Polonaise kitchen, season by season.

• Hands-on workshops in growing, harvesting, and preserving.

• Internships and volunteer days for people who want to learn by doing.

• Educational videos so anyone, anywhere, can learn along with us.

Photos and drawings of the garden are coming soon.

Help us build it

If you have read this far, you can already picture it: a place where your neighbors learn to cook, mend, budget, grow, and care for one another, side by side. A place your parents, your friends, and you could walk into and feel at home.

We practice what we teach. The Foundation works hard to earn as much of its own income as it can, through our resale shop, our vending, and our supper club tickets. Being self-reliant is one of the life skills we teach, and it is how we run the Foundation too.

Still, places like this do not appear on their own. They are built by people who believe in them before the doors open. That can be you.

• Give. Your gift helps build the kitchen, the garden, and the programs inside them.

• Volunteer. Lend your hands, your skills, or a lifetime of wisdom. Elders are especially welcome.

• Partner. Businesses, farms, and organizations who share this vision: let's build it together.

• Donate goods. Quality kitchen equipment, furnishings, and household items help us open sooner.

Tap a button below to give, or reach out and tell us how you would like to help.