After more than a decade building novel data and AI systems — from the Executive Office at Goldman Sachs to a patent-pending marketing technology that was named a semi-finalist in this year's Harvard President's Innovation Challenge — Ashley Fitzgerald is turning her attention to a different kind of unsolved problem: helping communities rebalance and elevate daily life in the digital age.
This July, the Clarks Summit native and Abington Heights High School graduate will open The Hobbiest: Skills Club, a private skills club for adults in downtown Pittston. The Hobbiest is a response to the gap Fitzgerald noticed when friends from different backgrounds and locations were all complaining about the same things: the difficulty of meeting new people, developing healthier habits and routines, and feeling burnt out from being accessible 24/7.
Her background, she says, trained her to recognize flaws in complex systems and engineer solutions to fix them. Once she saw the pattern, she realized she could focus her skills toward the offline, human experience rather than the online, digital ones she had spent her career solving.
From there, the club took shape — adults-only and centered on expert-led, immersive classes. Operating under the motto "Lessons, for Life," the curriculum spans five core areas — Creative Pursuits, Presence & Entertaining, Essential Life Skills, Hearth & Garden, and Living Well — covering everything from watercolor and calligraphy to home repair, hosting, and intentional daily practices. The lineup wasn't guesswork: Fitzgerald surveyed prospective members and built the curriculum around what people actually said they wanted to learn. Each course runs four sessions, once a week, two hours each.
A radical balance: AI by day, analog by night
There is a deliberate, striking irony: Fitzgerald spends her days building artificial intelligence, yet the club she is opening asks members to leave their screens at the door. The space is intentionally free of electronics and Wi-Fi, and strictly food- and alcohol-free, to ensure deep presence and real human interaction.
By understanding how technology is engineered to capture our attention, Fitzgerald was able to create the opposite: a physical space where people can go to take theirs back. Operationally, she used her AI development and entrepreneurial acumen to build an efficient infrastructure that lets her offer in-person instruction for $12 to $18 an hour. As Fitzgerald puts it, "There's real innovation in our business model and operations infrastructure — it's how The Hobbiest can pay instructors among the highest per-hour rates in the region while keeping prices this low for members. Rather ironically, the poison was leveraged to create the antidote."
Betting on small-town America
For Fitzgerald, launching in the Wyoming Valley is both a strategic business decision and a personal mission — the first step in a broader initiative to build for-profit ventures that enrich everyday life offline while helping revitalize small and mid-sized American communities.
Rooted in the tight-knit sense of belonging she grew up with in Northeast Pennsylvania, she is out to prove a simple thesis: being a good neighbor is good business.
"We're building this in Pittston because the version of success we've been sold — one centered around big-city living and endless consumption — was better in marketing materials than it is in real life. As someone who's been to that mountaintop, I can say that hearing crickets at night is better than hearing horns, and knowing your neighbors is better than hustling past strangers. It is the opportunity of a lifetime to use technology not to replace community, but as the means to rebuild it. People have wanted to move away from this hyper-digital life for a while, but they had nowhere to go. The Hobbiest is that space."
— Ashley Fitzgerald, FounderThe club opens at 131 N. Main Street in downtown Pittston in July 2026. To sign up or fill out instructor applications, visit thehobbiestskillsclub.com.