Maria, the visionary behind Maria's Place, is devoted to curating captivating experiences for older adults and caregivers. With a focus on therapeutic-based activities, she strives to enhance seniors' overall quality of life.

Maria actively works to ensure that all caregivers have equal access to these enriching experiences by offering free membership to the Maria’s Place website. Her genuine passion for the well-being of older adults shines through in her commitment to creating and designing enjoyable senior activities.

Nichole Bontrager is here to serve and lead a life full of purpose. She strives to make a difference in the world and has a passion for the older generation. She is deep-rooted in business and leadership and believes that combining business, purpose, and impact makes for a better world. Nichole brings team members together who are passionate and are leaders in their fields. Together, they create a powerful force for good.

Ulf is a co-founder of Maria's Place along with Nichole, Maria and Ryan. Ulf is a key advisor to the management team. He has been a successful business owner for decades and has a passion for leadership and advising teams on strategy. Ulf cares about having a positive impact on the world, and has found fulfillment while working with the team to enhance the lives of older adults.

Ryan is Head of IT for Maria’s Place, and carries 25 years of web development and product management expertise. He is our digital solutions explorer and a digital transformation (DX) expert.

In the earlier years, after the physical game development phase, Ryan built multiple versions of MariasPlace.com. He led agile development teams through custom web application development, DevOps and DX initatives. As the years passed, Ryan continued SDLC practices to build and retire custom web application features while navigating software product integrations for sales & marketing technologies.

During Coronavirus, Ryan led a product development lifecycle to build safe senior-oriented technology to challenge the mental health epidemic of isolation and lonliness among seniors and the elderly. In early 2021, he built a MVP iOS app with secure audio chat rooms (like Clubhouse), and an ADA Accessibility-oriented UX design. An NIH grant application was built and filed for field testing specialized secure chatroom devices for seniors in residential care environments.

2021 brought the increase of cybersecurity threats into the MariasPlace environment, and Ryan worked with multiple teams to develop secure DevOps policies and procedures, build incident response plans, ensure secure PII data management, and harden front-facing applications. Cybersecurity, DevOps automation, and application security are still focused fields of study for Ryan.

Through personal experience with his Japanese Grandma, Ryan has a deep affinity for home caregivers, in-home care providers and lifelong learning. He is always thinking up new ways to share connection, education and resources with caregivers around the world.