Rio Grande Valley Families Gather to Honor Fathers and Father Figures

SAN BENITO, TX, UNITED STATES — Sunny Glen Children’s Home wrapped up its Third Annual Fatherhood Festival on Saturday, June 27th, welcoming approximately 150 community members from across the Rio Grande Valley for a morning of games, food, and connection dedicated to celebrating the vital role fathers play in the family, whether biological, adoptive, or a father figure.

Held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Poenisch Counseling Center on Sunny Glen’s San Benito campus, the free event paired family fun with practical support, offering outdoor games, a family picnic, and giveaways alongside community resource booths designed to connect local families with services they can use year-round.

The festival was made possible through Sunny Glen’s partnership with the Heart Galleries of Texas, with Desiree’s Spa and Massage sponsoring the grand prize for the event’s giveaway raffle. A range of community partners joined the celebration, including CUTE Pediatrics, Mission Pawsible, the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, The Perfect Body Studio, RGV Dads, and U.S. Fish & Wildlife with the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge. Each brought resources and connection points for the families in attendance.

The event took place at the Poenisch Counseling Center, a trauma-informed facility built through the generosity of the Poenisch family. The center features counseling offices and a play therapy room open to both Sunny Glen residents and the broader community, and serves as a hub for the home’s parenting and transition programs. It also partners with Heart Gallery, a program of Foster Angels of South Texas, to support post-adoptive and post-permanency families throughout the region.

The Fatherhood Festival reflects Sunny Glen’s long-standing commitment to family, extending that mission into the wider South Texas community by celebrating fathers and father figures and connecting families with the resources they need to thrive.

About Sunny Glen Children’s Home

Sunny Glen Children’s Home was established in 1936 in a single house near La Feria, Texas, where six children were cared for. Since its inception it has provided a Christian home for over 25,000 children. The home offers long-term residential care, counseling services, and supervised development programs while pursuing family reunification when possible. To learn more or get involved, visit sunnyglen.org. 

Media Contact

Organization: Sunny Glen Children’s Home

Contact Person: Amanda Lucio

Website: https://www.sunnyglen.org/

Email:
media@sunnyglen.org

Address:PO Box 1373

City: San Benito

State: Texas

Country:United States

Release id:46716

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London, England, July 2nd, 2026, FinanceWire

The next-generation EPOS, payments and Bitcoin platform taps the Channel 4 “First Dates” mixologist and pub owner to deliver consultative, 24/7 AI-powered sales to merchants – across 30+ languages, positioning Musqet to win in the hospitality, food and beverage sectors.

Musqet, the next-generation payments, Bitcoin and EPOS platform, today announced a partnership with Merlin Griffiths, the Channel 4 “First Dates” mixologist and owner of The Dog & Gun pub in Walton, Leicestershire, to build an AI-powered sales avatar capable of holding real-time, consultative conversations with hospitality and food and beverage merchants. The avatar uses Griffiths’ likeness and voice to guide prospective customers through the EPOS selection process the way a knowledgeable peer would: by understanding how their business actually operates before recommending anything.

The hospitality and F&B EPOS market has run on the same playbook for years. Providers sell the platform, then spend the relationship upselling modules that have nothing to do with how a given venue actually runs. Merchants end up paying monthly for features they never asked for and never use. Musqet is built on a different premise: that an EPOS stack should reflect the merchant’s operation, not a vendor’s revenue targets. The AI avatar puts that principle into practice at the top of the funnel, asking the right questions before making any recommendation – and only surfacing the modules a merchant’s business actually needs.

“Hospitality operators are busy people running tight margins – they don’t have time for a sales process built around a vendor’s commission targets. What we’ve built with Merlin changes that. The avatar asks the right questions first, and only recommends outcomes that solve real problems for the merchant.,” said David Parkinson, Founder and CEO of Musqet.

Familiar to millions through his decade on Channel 4’s “First Dates,” he has also spent years on the other side of hospitality, operating The Dog & Gun pub in Walton, Leicestershire and living the operational realities merchants deal with daily. That combination of public familiarity and credibility in the industry is central to the avatar’s design. Merchants are more likely to be direct about their real needs when the conversation feels like it’s coming from someone who has run a venue himself. Musqet joined Griffiths and the production team in the recording studio to capture his speech mechanics and facial movements for a high-fidelity prototype. Griffiths is also an advocate for Bitcoin as a new asset and monetary vehicle and Musqet CEO, David Parkinson spotted him on ITV’s Saturday Kitchen with a Bitcoin t-shirt, reached out to chat and a mutual alignment of interests led to Merlin becoming immortalised as an AI avatar!

“Anyone who’s actually run a venue knows what it’s like to sit through an EPOS pitch and come out the other side with a monthly bill full of things you never asked for. I’ve been there. The reason I got involved with Musqet is because this is genuinely different – it starts with your operation, not with a product catalogue. If this saves one publican from a contract they regret, it’s worth it,” said Merlin Griffiths.

The avatar operates 24/7 across 30+ languages, removing the scheduling, inconsistency, and cost-scaling constraints that come with a human-only inbound sales function. 

The announcement follows a strong stretch of announcements for Musqet with even more to come. The company recently showcased at Money20/20 Amsterdam alongside Vodafone IoT, and launched its agentic commerce protocol on Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol – milestones that underscore the commercial momentum behind the avatar’s development.

To learn more about Musqet and its AI-powered sales avatar, visit musqet.com.

About Musqet

Musqet empowers merchants and e-commerce platforms to securely accept payments in store or online and receive Bitcoin from anywhere in the world in a way that is instant, borderless, and unstoppable. As a next-generation payments and EPOS company providing a full stack of payment services, including Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, and specialising in Bitcoin adoption as a medium of exchange, Musqet delivers a robust, scalable solution for merchants and e-commerce platforms worldwide.

Contact

Founder
Phil
21M Communications
phil@21mcommunications.com