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.
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. Education without Research is guidance without grounding. Incubation without Community is innovation without accountability to the people it's meant to serve. 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 — the living laboratory
Everything learned returns to the field — the cycle begins again.
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