Community: Our Living Laboratories
Our place-based Catalytic Communities aren't just spaces where we gather — they're living laboratories, where social innovation, through Research, Education, and Incubation, comes alive together in real time: peer-led and expert-led services as lived experience, not just theory to be studied. Again and again, people tell us the same thing:
Something in them widens. A sense of possibility expands. Hope stops feeling abstract.
Inside these spaces, people prototype and step into possible futures they couldn't reach in default systems — testing new ways of relating, working, healing, creating, and governing, alongside others doing the same.
What grows inside our communities:
Research
New indicators, frameworks, and tools for flourishing, shaped and tested with the people actually living them, not developed at a distance.
Education
Workshops, salons, convenings, and peer-led programs helping people find their footing — career wayfinding, reskilling, and meaning-making for a high-uncertainty world.
Incubation
A home for social-impact founders and everyday innovators alike — a venture, an artistic practice, or a healing practice not supported by traditional capital systems can take root here — rooted in care and regeneration as much as growth.
Our community-building efforts span more than a decade, leading up to FSF's founding. But the intentional, place-based Catalytic Community building work began in 2025.
San Francisco
Human Flourishing Floor at Frontier Tower
Our flagship space has since grown into a living network of partner spaces across the city, as the Human Flourishing Community works toward a new, permanent, community-owned home.
Twin Cities, Minnesota
A sister space that spun off in late 2025 and is now flourishing.
Together, these are FSF's two permanent, place-based hubs.
Catalytic Community takes other forms too. We co-produced temporary convenings like Human Tech Week and the Funding the Commons conferences, bringing thousands of people together intensively around shared questions of humane technology and commons-based, public-goods infrastructure-building before dispersing back into their own communities and work. And online, The Verse is a well-run community for well-being-focused game makers, especially youth, proving that "catalytic" doesn't require physical proximity.
From permanent hubs to temporary convenings to online spaces, these are the places where people build the relationships that let them face change together.
That's how we actualize existential hope and human flourishing.
And we are committed to understanding them, designing them, and supporting them to flourish.
Come join us
Whether you're a researcher, founder, artist, or thinker — there's a place for you in this ecosystem.
Events & Offerings