Our Work
Flourishing Systems Foundation advances human flourishing through four core areas.
Our four areas of action don't operate side by side — they move in a holistic and circular fashion, rooted in Community, reinforcing each other.
Community — the living laboratory
Everything learned returns to the field — the cycle begins again.
Communities are our living laboratory: real people, in real relationships, living through real change. From that lived experience, Research emerges — indicators, frameworks, and tools shaped by what people are actually experiencing, not developed at a distance.
Education carries that learning back out, helping others navigate the same uncertainty in the same spirit of shared discovery and collective sense-making. Incubation gives new projects and ventures a safe place to be birthed and tested against that same real-world complexity. And what's learned through each of these flows back into Community, deepening it, so the cycle begins again, richer than before.
Nothing here is a separate department. Research without Community is theory untested. Held together through a deep relational web, they become something more than the sum of their parts — a living system that keeps teaching itself how to help people flourish.
Community: Where It All Begins
Our Catalytic Communities are living laboratories, not just gathering places — where people prototype and step into possible futures they couldn't reach anywhere else. Again and again, people tell us the same thing: something in them widens when they step into a Flourishing Systems Foundation (FSF) community.
Case study · San Francisco
Gifting Games
Our Human Flourishing Community received a $5,000 grant through Simocracy.org - a Protocol Labs experiment on AI-assisted commons-based community governance and resource allocation process. Through this process, our community members didn't choose to fund a program — they chose to fund a relationship-building project itself. Guided by our neighbors at Faithful Fools in the Tenderloin, members set aside professional identities and simply walked alongside residents who'd made one thing clear: they didn't want outside help; they wanted people willing to understand a shared human condition. What grew from that were budding projects in food recovery, free AI literacy and art workshops, and lasting partnerships — all community-originated, none of them prescribed by an institution.
Research: Tools for What Actually Sustains Vitality
Our research is shaped by lived experience, not developed at a distance — turning what communities teach us into indicators, frameworks, and tools others can use.
Case study · Piloting in 2026
Return on Flourishing Indicators (RFI)
Most organizations measure what's easy to count, not what's worth building toward. Goodhart's Law is real: a metric chased hard enough quietly reshapes the thing it was meant to track. GDP is the clearest example — a measure built to track production, never designed to capture wellbeing, that nonetheless became the default definition of a healthy economy and steered policy toward growth for its own sake.
RFI is our answer to that same trap at the organizational level: a framework for measuring what actually sustains vitality, built around five indicators — Relational Richness, Generative Potential, Adaptive Feedback, Rhythmic Resilience, and Multiscale Coherence — that ask not just "did we grow?" but "did we grow toward something life-giving?"
In 2026, we're piloting the RFI Scorecard with aligned organizations looking to replace growth-for-growth's-sake metrics with ones that point toward life-centric outcomes instead — testing whether flourishing can be assessed with real rigor, using both structured scoring and stakeholder reflection, not just internal self-report.
- Relational Richness
- Generative Potential
- Adaptive Feedback
- Rhythmic Resilience
- Multiscale Coherence
Education: Wayfinding for an Uncertain World
Through workshops and peer-led programs, we help people find their footing in a world reshaping faster than most institutions can keep up with — career wayfinding for graduating youth or those who have opted out of college, reskilling for mid-career switchers, inner healing and personal development, and dedicated space for women, elders, Indigenous people, and BIPOC minorities to find belonging.
Case study · Saint Paul, Minnesota
Diverse Futures
Grown by FSF co-founder Lauren Hebert from the same founding research, Northern Commons' Diverse Futures speaker series gathers a city around Afrofuturist storytelling and facilitated dialogue on what futures grounded in care could look like. It's education carried into an entirely different register — proof this practice isn't bound to one city or one format. It mirrored the Matriarchal Futures Games workshop that the Human Flourishing Community in San Francisco ran in May - both centering imagining and prototyping a care-based future economy.
Incubation: Ventures Rooted in Care and Regeneration
We believe the most important ventures aren't always the ones that scale fastest, but the ones with the greatest integrity with life.
Case study · San Francisco
Flourishing Cultivator
A free, six-week incubator and public education course for experienced social-impact founders building humane technology that traditional venture capital often overlooks. In the pilot cohort in July 2025, we supported 27 founders/teams in elder care, brain and mental health, relational AI, regenerative finance, and community organizing — pairing practical support with real inner-alignment work, alongside outer-systems-change education and sense-making.
What We're Currently Exploring
- Regenerative economic systems
- Conscious technology development
- AI aligned with human flourishing
- Digital public goods
- New models of governance
- Community-centered innovation