Voice of Impact Scholarship
Hospitality runs on people. The designers, makers, and operators who shape a space are the reason a guest feels welcome. Yet the industry rarely treats education as something to build on, rather than something to buy once. The NEWH Voice of Impact Scholarship was created to change that. It puts learning at the centre of the industry's future, and it backs that idea with real funding directed at one person who is ready to use it.
NEWH is a global network that connects people across hospitality and adjacent industries through education, scholarships, networking, and leadership. The Voice of Impact Scholarship is one of the clearest expressions of that mission. It funds a single recipient whose work shows how research and design can improve real spaces and real lives. The first recipient is Daphne Chilaka. The first sponsor is TLS by Design Furniture. Their story explains why education matters at every level of this industry.
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This story comes from a special edition of NEWH's podcast, Hospitality Unpacked. Press play to hear Daphne Chilaka and the TLS by Design team in their own words.
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Daphne Chilaka is a fourth-year PhD candidate in interior and environmental design at Texas Tech University. She grew up in Nigeria, where she trained as an architecture student before moving into design research focused on wellness and human connection. Her work centres on three ideas: inclusivity, wellness, and the way a space makes a person feel.
For Chilaka, hospitality is not limited to hotels, restaurants, and travel. It is a practice of intentional care. "I see hospitality as making people feel very valued and comfortable in a space," she said. That conviction is personal. She describes how disorienting it can be to enter an unfamiliar building, and she wants to design environments that help people feel grounded, safe, and welcome instead.
Her design philosophy rests on a simple loop that any operator can understand. Focus on wellness, and guests feel valued. When guests feel valued, they return. "So there's that circle," she explained. "You focus on wellness, the customers feel valued, and the customers come back, and you still get the commercial aspects of the hospitality industry." Wellness, in her view, is not the opposite of good business. It is what makes good business last.
Chilaka holds a certification with the WELL Building Institute and works across several areas of wellness design, including trauma-informed design and multi-sensory environments. Her approach is research-first. The design follows the people, not the other way around.
Her project Qavah shows how that works. Built for a course called Design for Health, Qavah proposed a resort hotel experience in the Atuabo region of Ghana. Because the project served a community she was not part of, she and her teammate studied that community in depth, looking at physical, emotional, and social health needs before drawing a single line. One result was a set of community benches, grounded in research on community-based care. The idea is that informal conversation in a shared space supports well-being, so the design made room for it on purpose.
"For every design, it requires research," she said. "You also need to research the people you are designing for. So your design is not just trends, like vibes. It should have a deeper meaning." She applies the same discipline to emerging technology. She researches AI, the Internet of Things, and virtual reality in hospitality, and she is clear that technology should deepen a guest's emotional connection to a space, not replace it.
This is where Chilaka's research meets the work of her sponsor. Asked what she looks for when designing furniture for comfort, she pointed straight to the sense of touch.
She told a story about the difference between a hospital waiting room and a hotel lobby. One is built to keep people moving. The other is built to make people want to stay.
There's something about being able to sit in a furnishing that just feels like it's giving you a warm hug. I think that's something every furniture company should look into, the tactile stimulation. Daphne Chilaka
For Chilaka, comfort is not a finishing touch. It is a signal to the guest that they are cared for. That insight connects a doctoral research project to the daily reality of every hospitality space in the world. It is also the reason a furniture maker that has spent twenty years engineering comfort on purpose wanted to support her.
The Voice of Impact Scholarship arrived for Chilaka on December 23, just as her funding was about to run out. She had been working toward this support since 2024. What she shares next is the part every emerging professional should hear.
She applied twelve times. This was the twelfth.
I just want to encourage students who think they have been applying for a while without getting it. You'll get it eventually. Just keep at it. Daphne Chilaka
Her advice to anyone who finds the industry overwhelming is just as grounded. Connect with one person. "Just one connection to one person can make a difference in your life." That belief comes from experience. Chilaka credits mentors who stayed open with her, including a professor who keeps her office door half open so students can simply knock and think out loud. "You don't have to be perfect," Chilaka said of what makes a mentor matter. "You just need to be open."
TLS by Design Furniture is a family-owned, woman-owned contract furniture company founded in 2004. It builds furniture for hospitality, restaurants, public space, and multi-family projects, with no minimums and a focus on custom work that designers dream up and the TLS team brings to life.
The company chose to fund a scholarship rather than a general sponsorship for a specific reason. Founder Jeff Day wanted the support to follow a person. "There's nothing wrong with a sponsorship that can go to general funds," he said. "But to really make a difference in an individual's where they can learn and then contribute is another level of importance." For TLS, the Voice of Impact Scholarship represents a belief that intentional education creates long-term value, not only for the recipient but for the whole industry.
TLS does more than fund education. It runs on it, and that is what gives its sponsorship weight.
The company pays by the hour instead of by the piece, and it raises wages as employees gain new skills. Cross-training is built into the culture, and more than half the team can perform most functions on the factory floor. The investment starts early. TLS runs a high school internship program for engineering and production. One team member joined at seventeen and, within five years, learned to mill, frame, spring, and finish frames and run the CNC machine. Another started in the mill room with no computer experience, trained internally on engineering software, and is now a core member of the engineering team more than a decade later.
TLS also practises real transparency. It shares pricing, profitability, and profit sharing openly with its people. As COO JP Day put it, change only works when people understand why it is happening. That openness builds the trust that holds the culture together.
The results are visible. TLS has recorded eleven shipping damages in twenty years, a figure some companies match in a single month. A Marriott installation showed no wear on its seating after more than seven years. The company's work has appeared in Vogue and Architectural Digest. Behind every one of those outcomes is a team that was trained, trusted, and given room to grow.
Put the scholar and the sponsor side by side, and the alignment is hard to miss. Chilaka studies comfort as a measure of care. TLS engineers comfort into every piece it builds.
The Day family is direct about it. Most furniture makers build for durability alone. TLS builds furniture that is durable and intentionally comfortable, using considered spring systems, foam, and design. The team adjusts seat depth and back pitch during the shop drawing phase to improve the experience for the guest who finally sits down. As Elizabeth Day notes, furniture made this way also lasts longer, which makes it more sustainable.
A scholar who wants a chair to feel like a warm hug, and a maker who builds chairs to do exactly that, are working on the same problem from two ends. The scholarship is what brought them into the same conversation. That is education doing its job.
The lesson that runs through both stories is that education is not a cost. It is an investment with a measurable return.
In the end, it's more expensive not to do the training than it is to do the training. Jeff Day, TLS by Design Furniture
TLS held onto its trained people through the pandemic for exactly that reason. NEWH applies the same logic across the whole industry. The goal is to invest in the people coming up through scholarships, education, and mentorship, so they stay, build on what they learn, and make the industry better. When that happens, hospitality stops rebuilding its talent from zero every downturn. The knowledge stays. The people stay. The work gets better.
In Chilaka's case, the return is already clear. The scholarship lets her finish her research and her education. In her words, it lets her continue her work toward "restorative, human-centred hospitality spaces, environments that help foster emotional comfort, cultural belonging, and a genuine sense of welcome for all guests."
The Voice of Impact Scholarship continues because people and companies choose to invest in it. You can be part of the next recipient's story.
Explore NEWH scholarships, support an emerging professional as a sponsor, or join the network behind it all and connect with the people shaping the future of hospitality.
NEWH thanks the Day family of TLS by Design Furniture for sponsoring the inaugural Voice of Impact Scholarship, and congratulates Daphne Chilaka, its first recipient.