The next evolution of The Commons
opening our doors to pro-social co-working by day & a community meeting house by night
Last fall, I stepped into the General Manager role at The Commons, a community space dedicated to meaning-making and self-expression in the heart of San Francisco. The last few months have been filled with experiments and lessons in what it takes to operate a physical space, meet the needs of our members, sustain the business financially, and deliver on our mission of supporting people on their journey in becoming more themselves.
In addition to nurturing our member-designed programming, we also piloted a new experience called Town Square where we partnered with values-aligned practitioners, writers, builders, and civic leaders who are pushing the boundaries of intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and civic development. Our events took shape in the form of fireside chats, book launches, and dharma talk series.
In an increasingly polarized world, the opportunity to welcome leaders across domains and open our doors to the public felt like a breath of fresh air. There are fewer and fewer spaces where we experience the cross-section of humanity. Our remaining public spaces — parks, libraries, transit systems, DMVs — fall short of dignifying our shared humanity. As private social clubs crop up across the nation to combat the loneliness crisis, this project seeks to answer a different, more pressing question: what’s the meaning of it all?
As the new year rolled in, our team returned the drawing board to ponder this question, assess the state of The Commons, and determine where we’re headed. We found ourselves wondering: how can we orient our mission toward creating space for people of all walks of life to coexist, setting aside our differences — if only briefly — to honor our shared human existence?
Since its inception, The Commons has served as an experiential lab for our community, poking at what it takes to safely lose ourselves in the company of others on a similar pursuit, to cultivate Aristotelian friendships, to walk the path toward psychological flourishing, to create spaciousness to slow down, to loosen the grip on our traditional identities, and to playfully experiment with multiple dimensions of ourselves. A place to be ourselves and to become ourselves.
In returning to first principles, we acknowledged that we had strayed from our initial vision of serving as a place to sense make in community, devolving more into a private social and coworking club than a community living room.
With renewed energy, we’re excited to usher in a new era of The Commons — one where we’re contemplating:
How do we bridge the experience of playful co-working by day and vibrant community meeting house by night?
What will it take to drive cultural change and usher in new ways of working and playing, offering alternatives to hustle culture and the pervasive bar scene in the form of pursuing work from a place of aliveness and conscious partying with a good book?
What are the structural conditions needed to seed a culture of individual and collective agency within the space?
How do we cultivate a place of serendipity and aliveness where evenings can be spent playing a pick-up board game next to a circle in the depths of debating the impact of AI on inner work and humanity?
How can we sustain this project culturally and financially over the long term and pioneer new business models rooted in healing and self-actualization?
We’re nearly three years in and this is just the beginning. As we continue to experiment with the bounds of what’s possible, we’re guided by the reality that this project is a living, breathing entity, nurtured by the collective wisdom of our community.
The following essay was originally published to .
Where we’ve been 🔮
It’s been nearly three years since The Commons opened its doors in San Francisco. What began as a brainstorm amongst 50 friends for a community living room in the Hayes-Alamo area quickly evolved into a GoFundMe campaign, securing a space at 540/550 Laguna St, and a collective effort by hundreds of friends who built furniture, painted murals, and seeded their hopes for a new kind of community third space.
Together, we co-created a place that harkened back to the feeling of unbounded exploration and curiosity in our formative years: volleying deep questions in a college common room until 2am, mind-melding on beautiful futures that haven’t quite arrived, and communing with diverse, pluralistic, and contradicting perspectives with authentic openness and curiosity. One that could address the growing void in America’s social and "meaning-making" infrastructure left by the decline of churches, clubs, and community spaces.
Thousands of community-created book clubs, juntos, discussion circles, jams, philosophy salons, and workshops later, it's become evident there’s a deeper nexus of phenomena underlying the growth of the space.
The desire to make friends: an effort to mend a fragmented social fabric as urbanites.
The diverse discussions: a need to bring coherence to a dizzying world devoid of overarching order.
From paint nights to writing clubs — a thirst to nurture seedlings of our most authentic selves.
The plethora of co-created programming across the spiritual, intellectual, and emotional — a primordial yearning for wholeness.
The invitation to show up as humans unsure of much — the antidote to all the places in adult life that insist on firm identities.
Not quite a traditional third space, networking social club, secular church, or recreation center — what we are is still emergent and a constantly evolving community experiment (that we’ve loosely defined as a “fourth place”).
Nonetheless, our mission has remained constant: to support people in the process of becoming more fully themselves, rooted in the belief that community is essential to that journey. And to do that in a space infused with playfulness, aliveness, agency, earnestness, abundance, and kindness.
Our next iteration 🔭
Stepping into the new year, we’re excited to share our latest evolution in The Commons’ unfolding toward realizing our mission.
TL;DR: The Commons is evolving from an intimate experimental community into a true “Commons”— a playful co-working space by day that transforms into a vibrant community meeting house by night.
🏛️ We’re moving towards more public programming and inclusive membership
☀️ By day (9am-5pm), we’re creating a new category of playful co-working that is pro-social, serendipitous, and nourishing
🌔 By evening (5-10pm), we’re transforming the space into a Community Meeting House, retaining the heart of our member-created programming while welcoming in more public programming and broader community leaders
🍵 We’ll be experimenting with new forms of “conscious night life” beyond the societal conventions of alcohol and partying
🏛️ We’re moving towards more public programming and inclusive membership
To date, The Commons has functioned more as an intimate community than a porous or open one — an intentional choice. However, going forward we’re hoping to increasingly materialize a true “Commons.”
In their early stages, new communities and institutions are inherently fragile, and we prioritized cultivating our culture at a thoughtful, measured pace. This approach allowed us to experiment with programming formats and find the balance between our vision for the space and the emergent, dynamic needs of the community through each iteration.
Today, we believe the reputation and values The Commons represents have grown robust enough to stand independently. Our experiments with programming have also provided valuable insights into the infrastructure and experiments we’d like to run to fully and continuously realize those values.
As an aspiring pluralistic space for self and communal meaning-making, we also want to increasingly invite diverse life experiences, ages, life stages, political views, and ways of being and becoming. Due to the initial network effect of some of our founding cohorts, we veered towards millennial / gen-z age groups in tech and tech-adjacent industries.
Going forward, we’d like to increasingly move towards a true “town square” and more open institution where San Francisco citizens can commune across dichotomies. In today’s climate of dogmatism and division, what’s needed are less private social clubs (the direction we were going down via inertia) and more spaces that cohere people across differences while uniting under core humanistic values.
Here are the changes we’re implementing:
Broadening membership acceptance: We’ll be accepting more applicants to The Commons given the institutional stability the Commons has created in the last 3 years. With more members, we’ll be ensuring each member still embodies our core values of abundance, agency, kindness, earnestness, and play.
Expanding public and centrally organized programming in the evenings: In our first 3 years of operations, most of our events were hosted by members for members. Going forward, we’re ramping up on organizing centrally run experiences and expanding our in-space team to create our evening Community Meeting House atmosphere. We’ll also be increasing our evening public programming featuring values-aligned practitioners, writers, creators, and builders across domains who are pushing the boundaries of spiritual, emotional, intellectual, creative, and civic development. Members will receive prioritized access and discounted tickets to these events.
The Commons membership experience:
☀️ By day, we’re creating a new category of playful co-working
🌔 By evening, we’re transforming the space into a Community Meeting House
“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.” ― Ian McEwan
With this quote as inspiration, we thought to ourselves: How do we create more of these kinds of days at The Commons?
By day, we will be a vibrant neighborhood hub of creative and playful co-working with new and old friends, where the lines blur between “doing” work, mind-melding with others, and simply “being.” We’re for the days where you may have fewer calls, want more creative stimulation, have IRL coffee chats in one of our cozy nooks, or want to take walking calls around the heart of Hayes Valley. At the same time, if you’re looking to be heads down and focused, you are always welcome to carve out your own flow. We’re not here to force serendipity—just to make sure it has a home for those who want it. If some days you want deep focus, The Commons still fully supports that, with plenty of spaces to settle in and immerse yourself in your craft.
The kind of “work days” that are pro-social, serendipitous, and nourishing: meditating mid work-day in our Moroccan lounge, perusing a book for inspiration in our community library, doodling at our art supply station, or striking up a serendipitous conversation while making tea. This is an intentional departure away from the grind-set, remote, and white-knuckled hustle culture that pervades American work culture. At the same time, we also recognize that not every day is the same. Some days are for head-down execution, and others are for spontaneous creativity. The Commons is designed to hold both—so that whether you’re here to laser-focus on a deadline or open yourself up to unexpected encounters, you have the space to do so with intention.
In essence, we want to bring back and reinvent the “watercooler culture” that made work connective and human. In that vein, we’re ushering in a new era of healing and re-defining our relationship to work — one that is flowy, expansive, and holistic.
By night, we transition into an enlivening community meeting house. “Work” as defined by being an artist and doing our art (in the broadest sense) then evolves into communal sense-making. Where the conversations we have in community become mirrors and edifices for self-reflection and expansion, allowing us to show up more authentically in our creations and worldly endeavors. The Commons, by night, is about expansion in whatever form that takes—whether it's engaging in a lively discussion or quietly sketching ideas sparked by the energy around you.
The evening will be enlivened with numerous members only and public events running all at once; for members, we’ll continue to have philosophy salons, board game nights, recurring social rituals, potlucks, and numerous ways to reflect, commune, and explore as a community.
For more public programming: What would it mean to invert the “retreat model”? Instead of going out of town or to disparate institutions to seek wisdom, The Commons becomes a nexus for “elders” to share ideas. A top of funnel function where intros to spiritual traditions, civic matters, philosophical ideas, forms of art, etc. can be shared with the public in a buffet-like fashion. If the intros warrant deeper inquiry, people can then go directly to that elder or institution afterwards. In other words, a node that aggregates energy and then disperses it. Rather than a place of passive consumption, The Commons can be a generative threshold.
In the Fall, we did a v1 of this by hosting over 30+ salons featuring people like Mayor London Breed, Noah Smith, Joe Hudson, Paul Millerd, Gena Gorlin, and Luna Ray. In 2025, we’re hoping to curate a fantastic lineup of new elders embodying “novel ways of being and doing,” offering fresh perspectives on how we live, work, and connect.
Here are the changes we’re implementing:
Enhancing our co-working spaces: We’re adding a new tea station, an art-making area, and space affordances designed to spark serendipitous conversations along with other playful upgrades.
Experimenting with playful work affordances: We’ll be experimenting with novel forms of social infrastructure to encourage serendipity and connection during co-working days (i.e. informal lunch squads, “watercooler” prompts, activity breaks, playful stand-ups, etc)
Balancing member-led and organizational programming: While we’ll continue to support members with resources and space for their events, we’re ramping up on organizing centrally run experiences and expanding our in-space team to support more public events to create our Community Meeting House atmosphere.
🍵 We’ll be experimenting with new forms of “conscious night life” beyond the societal conventions of alcohol and partying
There’s been a subtle but steady shift in the public consciousness towards desiring new forms of evening activities that go beyond the typical excursion to a restaurant, bar, movie night, or club to meet others or convene with loved ones. With a recent warning put out by the US Surgeon General that even small amounts of alcohol can cause cancer, the current alcohol-driven culture of nightlife is rife to go through a huge upending.
What kinds of evening social and physical infrastructure will be created in the wake of this? How can we use different means to meet the same needs for self-connection and connection with others?
We believe now is the time to experiment with novel forms of evening activities: from late night decaf tea houses, evening bathhouses, no-alc dance parties, reading parties, game board parlors to cozy cafes that close at 2am. The Commons is hoping to be at the forefront of this experimentation, opening our space for evening programming that is connective, conscious, and wholesome (with the aims of opening a late night tea house sometime in the future 😉🤫).
Here are the changes we’re implementing:
More non-alc evening activity experimentation: Expect more experimental evening programming like silent reading nights, analog write-a-thons, powerpoint parties, and rabbit-hole-a-thons.
Keeping our doors open until 10pm: Most coffee shops close at 5pm and non-alch spaces that are open late are far and wide in between. We plan on keeping our doors open after public / member events end until 10pm so you can continue the discussions into the night.
We’re excited to usher in this new evolution of The Commons’ journey and hope you’ll join us for the ride.
We’ll be opening our member applications to join our space in Febuary: apply by Wednesday, Febuary 5th, 2025
Check out our public programming calendar (new events are still in process of being announced & will drop in Feb) + subscribe to our Substack to get updates
Follow us on Twitter for more updates and good vibes
Warmly,
The Commons Team
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Watching with interest! I'm based in London, UK, and if you come across anyone doing something similar over here I would be very interested to speak to them :)