Lauren Rahlson has spent much of her life moving from place to place. But, when she came to Marin with her husband, Lukas, five years ago, something felt different. “We are not people who put down roots lightly, just because of our backgrounds. We’ve just moved around a lot. We always said, if we found the perfect place, we would put down roots. And we knew that it was Marin,” said Rahlson, who has since bought a house in San Rafael. “We have our son now, and we plan to be here forever.” Being in Marin during the pandemic was a “lifeline” for her. Every day, after spending her days on Zoom as an educator, she would go for a walk through the Marin Headlands or the hills of Sausalito, where she lived at the time. “Moving to Zoom classes was really hard, and I missed my students so much. When you get into education, you’re not signing up to be at the computer all day,” she said. “So my husband and I made it a tradition that every golden hour after work we would go for a walk. And that’s really when I fell in love with Marin.” Rahlson pays homage to that time in her life and her continued love of Marin with Golden Hour Marin, her locally inspired, sustainably made clothing company that features Marin-focused designs for tourists and locals alike. “My passion is coming from wanting to create community, wanting to create pride in where you live. And I think fashion is a great way to do that,” said Rahlson of her collection of sweatshirts, T-shirts and hats. While Rahlson has taken a step back from education to take care of her 1-year-old son, Brody, she continues to advocate for the education community in her work. Every month, Rahlson will fund a DonorsChoose project by a Bay Area teacher; the website, created by a high school teacher, Charles Best, in 2000, allows public school teachers from across the country to request funds for much-needed materials and other items for their classes. As a former teacher, she knows how important outlets like this are. “When I was a teacher, I wanted to create the most special classroom possible, and that meant that I needed to spend a lot of my own money because I wanted students to walk into my classroom and feel like it was something special and that they really mattered. Creating an environment like that can really impact a student’s learning experience. From my own experience, I spent a lot of my own personal money to create that experience,” she said. “And teachers already are not paid a fair wage, in my opinion. So you just end up feeling really burnt out as a result because you’re giving and giving, and now it’s coming out of your pocket. I saw, while working as a high school principal, that we have a huge crisis right now of teacher burnout and teacher shortages. You have people who love what they do, but they don’t do it anymore because they’re burned out, and the gratitude and support maybe isn’t there anymore, and they’re leaving the profession.” Her first selection went to a classroom at Bahia Vista Elementary School in San Rafael, near where she and her family now live. All 30 students in the classroom will get a copy of Christopher Paul Curtis’ book “Bud, Not Buddy” for their novel study. “Every student deserves an excellent education. I really don’t want resources to be a barrier for teachers dreaming up whatever idea they want to dream and making it a reality. So many times I would think of ideas that I wanted for my classroom, and I was just told, ‘No, we don’t have the funds for that,’” said Rahlson, who most recently was a high school principial in Richmond. ‘The power of education’ Rahlson, who studied criminal psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, started to reflect on the power of education while speaking with men who were incarcerated for life. “The conversations just kept coming back to the power of education and how that could have really shifted their life’s journey. One person who I had gotten really close with in the prison system spoke about how if he could ever get out of prison, his goal would be to become a teacher because he felt like if he had had a teacher in his life that had that impact on him and shared the stories that he wishes he could have shared, life would have turned out differently,” she said. “So that fall, I decided to apply for Teach for America. I wanted to have the experience of working with younger students and share that message that this man had shared with me. I actually got permission when I became a teacher to have him Skype into my class, and he was able to share his message outside of the prison walls, which he never thought that he would be able to do.” While she initially planned to do her two-year Teach for America commitment and then become a forensic psychologist, she fell in love with teaching and her students and stayed at the Dallas school she was assigned to for Teach for America for several years before coming to California to get her master’s degree in policy, organization and leadership studies at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and transition into leadership roles in education. The idea for what would become Golden Hour Marin was on her mind for a long time inspired by a local apparel company she loved in Dallas but she just didn’t have the time or energy for it. But when she took some time away from education, the idea came bubbling back to the surface. “I always thought to myself, when I find the place that I really feel like I want to create community and build my community, I would love to create something like that,” she said. “I’ve always been really creative, and I’ve always been someone who wants to create community. That’s what I did as a principal. That’s what I did as a teacher in my own classroom. So I really wanted to create that community.”.
https://www.marinij.com/2025/11/24/marin-residents-clothing-company-gives-back-to-local-teachers/
Marin resident’s clothing company gives back to local teachers
