Noah Mitnick, 19, is like a lot of Santa Cruzian teenagers. He surfs religiously. He lifts heavy at the gym. After graduating from Soquel High School last spring, he traveled to Europe and Iceland with some buddies. This fall, he enrolled in “Jazz Appreciation,” MUS 11A, at Cabrillo while he was figuring things out and to keep those pesky parents off his back. (“I was like if you’re not in school, then you have a full-time job,” his mother Sarah Mitnick told him).
More unusually, he is a budding entrepreneur with a new local shopping app called Melo, and he is the founder of a philanthropic foundation that raised $10,000 in one night.
His lived experience departs significantly from some Santa Cruzian teenagers’ lives because when Noah was 12 years old his younger sister Ziva died of Acute Myeloid Leukemia after a long stay in the hospital. Seven years after the Mitnick family’s great tragedy, Noah is living like no one is watching and transforming “grief to growth.”
Words used to describe Noah in conversations with local business owners, friends and family alike are “addictive” and “infectious energy.” Noah admits he has a lot on his plate as he enters adulthood.
“Melo, keep it local,” he says is the company’s and his improvised tagline. “But I am not very mellow,” he added. He tries for at least 10 hours of sleep a night.
With the support of his family and generous friends, the Ziva Mitnick Foundation has raised over $30,000 for families with children in hospice or end-of-life care. In junior year of high school, Noah organized a low-key roller-rink fundraiser at the Seabright Roller Rink with a suggested donation. With his family and the help of his uncle, who is an attorney, he started the foundation, “in honor of a very special sister, daughter, friend, Unicorn lover, and so much more. Ziva had a heart full of magic and wonder, and by using her spirits we can continuously pass on this magical sense of hope to many families struggling to find comfort.”
Noah works closely with Child Life Specialist Michelle Hug at Kaiser Permanente who relays what the children want, sometimes Star Wars stuff or NeeDohs, a popular fidget toy, or Legos. Noah then picks it all up at one of Santa Cruz County’s numerous toy stores where he stuffs wicker-baskets and handbags with the funnest playthings known to children and adds some of his personal favorites. Recent hauls have included stops at Jett and Rose on Freedom Boulevard and Childish Toy Shop downtown Santa Cruz.
In 2019, Hug remembers how Noah noticed the positive effect changing the sterile environment in the hospital had for his little sister. Noah remembers that his family made the visits bearable and even fun—a home away from home. They dressed up as characters, Anna and Elsa, from Ziva’s favorite movie, Frozen, and hung disco lights and threw glitter and played music.
As a child life specialist, Hug’s work is grounded in child development, coping theory, family systems theory, but a big part of what she does is providing opportunities for therapeutic play.
Noah’s strength as a benefactor is his desire to find out what each child wants and then get it for them, a more unusual trait than you would expect in her experience as a child life specialist, Hug said. Parents are tremendously thankful for the thoughtfulness of the gifts.
“What’s really cool about Noah and special in the world of giving is that Noah is focused on the child or the patient who is here and what they need,” Hug said. “Like he’s always saying, ‘Michelle what do they need? What do you need to do your job better?’”
A big NeeDoh in her hand can make all the difference in making a pre-school age kid trust her, Hug said, and facilitate the next conversation about the diagnosis and the course of treatment. Teenagers are trickier to get their attention and that’s where an engrossing Lego set never fails.
“There’s something called post-traumatic growth,” Hug said. “And I think you could probably say he is an example of it.”
THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY
After his frequent stops at Santa Cruz County’s toy stores over the last couple years, Noah realized there was an underserved market niche hurting local business—impulse purchases done online that could be done locally but which stores failed to capture because people didn’t know they could buy it locally. Once he was permitted to access their inventories for the foundation work, Noah got to work.
People want to shop local, but they also want the accessibility and reliability of Amazon or Shopify. The animating idea behind the app is that it centralizes Santa Cruz’s beloved shops into a one-stop destination without a Big Tech algorithm siphoning profits and user data, per Noah. Card-carrying pro-local business customers in Santa Cruz who might be tempted to skip a purchase from a trusted face behind a counter every once in a while might have second thoughts if they could see exactly what merchandise local shops and boutiques have on offer, Noah said.
Shop local was pioneered by the “Think Local” campaign almost 20 years ago: the more money kept circulating between Santa Cruz business owners, their employees, residents and customers, the more sustainable the local economy. What you spend at your local taqueria or on signage from a local artist will come back your way sometime down the road, the thinking goes, according to the consumerist Golden Rule.
As a Santa Cruzian born and raised and a big fan of its ethos, Noah takes the idea of the local community really seriously.
“Not trying to brag, but I think Santa Cruz has the most loving and tight-knit community,” Noah said in an interview. “And we got each other’s back for sure. That’s why I think Melo is going to pop.”
Santa Cruz’s love was apparent to him when the community embraced his family after Ziva’s death. Some 499 supporters donated $61,000 to help cover Ziva’s experimental bone-marrow transplant procedures at UC San Francisco and to cushion their financial hardship in 2019.
But that was the least of the generosity. Check-in phone calls, small thoughtful gestures and moments of affection never let up. Everyone who gave their afternoons cooking meals for the Mitnicks to ease their domestic responsibilities during those six months will stay with him and his family forever, Noah said. Random people wished him sincere condolences and went in for the hug, he said.
“People that I hadn’t seen in years, who I maybe saw once down the street, came up to our doorstep the next day and wanted to support my family,” Noah said. “And it was a total communal effort to get us past just the mental blockade of my sister’s death, and I just know that our community had us.”
This summer Melo launched in Beta testing. There are 12 stores participating so far and more than 20,000 products on tap. The business proposition is a $25 flat fee for each business that signs up.
Noah says Melo can be a viable alternative to Shopify and Amazon by being a reliable partner with local retail businesses he already has a relationship with.
But how does he plan to convince those accustomed to shopping at their favorite workers-pee-in-bottles-multinational-technology-platforms that offer same-day delivery to use Melo?
“People want to boycott fast shopping at Amazon, especially here,” Noah said. “They don’t like the founders that are leading these big corporations, so if we can position ourselves as the anti-Amazon or anti-fast shopping, we become the outlet for those people that need somewhere to go.”
The struggle to convince people to change their shopping habits is difficult. Amazon makes up about one third of e-commerce sales nationwide. And the share of shopping done online compared to in-person continues to grow year after year, according to the US Department of Commerce.
Sonia McMoran, owner of boutique Home/Work in Santa Cruz, signed up for Melo’s Beta testing because she agrees there is plenty of demand for a service that allows people to buy items online without a monopolistic middleman or a delivery component, though that may come later, Noah says. McMoran notices more hyper-conscientious shoppers who want to reserve what they want the night before in bed and go pick it up themselves the next day. So far she has worked with Noah to make sure the app works with her current inventory and point-of-sale systems.
“I think we’re just trying to nail down everything from the business side of things,” McMoran said. “If Noah can do that, if he can create a system that works seamlessly for businesses and on the user experience, so it is really easy to use. I think in a place like Santa Cruz that is especially passionate about supporting local businesses, I think it could really take off.”
In the coming weeks before an official launch, Noah wants to sign up more businesses and iron out any kinks in the program. By the end of the year, he aims to have signed up 100 businesses, inventoried 100,000 products, and why not, he adds, become the official app of the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce and be sponsored by the Santa Cruz Warriors.
“Why wouldn’t I try and go out and build stuff, and try, and fail, over and over again?” Noah said. “Because at the end of the day, I would rather lay down on my deathbed and feel like I gave it my all rather than regret that I didn’t try.”
EMOTIONAL CIRCULARITY
Many people who helped carry them through those tough times took a great interest in Noah’s development, according to Sarah Mitnick, and watched over him. Ziva’s friend’s mother, Hannah Stubblefield, happened to be co-owner of Wonderland Toys and Classroom Supplies in Aptos. Gift shop Jett & Rose owner, Amy Rand, lost her son Jett to brain cancer shortly after Ziva died. Rose was her grandmother. She donated a $500 raffle prize at an October 11 Sand Rock Farm Gold Dance Party, which Mitnick organized. So there was a natural evolution from giving toys to partnering with local businesses.
“I think it feels very full circle for Noah to choose to try to help the local businesses and community that also supports him,” Sarah said. “It feels like a very symbiotic relationship where if I’m gonna have these wonderful people supporting me, I want to support them too, and put that goodness back out into the community.”
Old water polo, yoga and elementary school friends came to boogie down on October 11. In the barn, at this historic Aptos bed and breakfast and wedding venue, they danced like those who were missing were watching, and maybe they were there on the sidelines of the Conga line, or blowing bubbles in the crowd and busting out moves in the fulcrum of the dance floor.
“I picture our kids here tonight. They would love this. If you can shake your grief and channel it into something that is meaningful to you, and meaningful to the person that you lost. That’s all that really matters,” Rand said at the party.
The vision: A princess named Ziva Mitnick walks into the most spectacular party of the year wearing a beautiful golden dress in a more humane and better world. There are fun games to play and everyone is wearing a costume. The hospital room is joyous at that moment. Her siblings Noah and Tamar beam at her.
That’s what the Ziva Mitnick Foundation tries to do through every gift basket, hospital makeover, and benefit gala. Make the impossible reality. And it works sometimes.
