Build a university with artists, builders & scientists. Work on your most ambitious projects. Raise your family in community. Live near 100 friends & peers. Itâs not a dream. Itâs a template. Fractalâs Campus Accelerator Program will help you start a neighborhood campus.
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What is a âneighborhood campus?â
Neighborhood Campus: A community that brings together collaboration and classes with co-living and shared gathering spaces â enabling your best work integrated with deep relationships. Or, a less fancy definition: itâs a bunch of friends doing stuff together in the same place.
The first of these was called Fractal NYC. In 2021, our small group of friends decided to live, learn, and build together in NYC. It started as just a single apartment with weekly dinners where people gave 5-minute talks.
Today, our neighborhood campus includes:
Who is this for?
This program is for you if you want to dramatically increase the tightness of your networkâs social bonds and its potential for generativity. Maybe you have an online community, or maybe youâre part of a meetup group, a co-living house, a professional community, a residency, or a bunch of friends spread all over a city.
Or maybe you simply want to help reweave our rapidly unraveling social fabric. Amidst a crisis of increasing disempowerment and loneliness, a neighborhood campus makes it easy to find co-founders, learn new things, meet romantic partners, and collaborate on the side projects youâve always dreamed of doing.
Vision: the legacy of scenius
From the Founding Fathers to Bell Labs, YCombinator to Renaissance Florence, tight networks of collaborators have produced innovations and institutions that we now take for granted. Brian Eno gives these flowerings of collective genius a name: scenius. Scenius tends to blossom under particular conditions that we believe are replicable. Namely: close proximity and a culture of lively collaboration. Neighborhood campuses are designed to replicate these conditions. Our greatest hope is that this program will lead to sceniuses popping up all over the world.
A day in the life of your neighborhood campus
The program: build your own neighborhood campus
A thriving weekly gathering
A bustling common space
A community university
In our program, crews of 2â4 founders do a 6-week bootcamp, during which they meet twice weekly online to receive step-by-step guidance to launch a neighborhood campusâcomplete with a shared venue, weekly event, and community-run university. The program culminates in a public demo day where each group presents their campus and invites others to join. But our Campus Accelerator Program doesnât end on demo day. We and our larger network will continue to help founders as their communities grow and face new challenges.
You canât do this alone
Creating a neighborhood campus is a huge endeavor. Hence the course is meant to be taken in crews of 2-4 people who specialize in one or more of the following roles:
- Weekly event host
- University founder
- Gathering place coordinator (who may also coordinate co-living)
- Community steward (who catalyzes the entire thing)
What youâll get
đ§âđŤÂ Two weekly classes â all practical know-how, no fluff. See our curriculum below â
đď¸ââď¸Â One-on-one coaching from experienced campus-builders
đ Accountability from instructors, your crew, and your cohort
đ Access to our network to help you find collaborators, co-livers, students, and instructors
Eligibility
You want to do something bigger. Our neighborhood campus started mostly by building in-person social infrastructure for our online community. Maybe you have an online community, or maybe youâre part of a meetup group, a coliving house, a professional community, a residency, or a bunch of friends spread all over a city. This program is for you if you want to dramatically increase the tightness of your networkâs social bonds and its potential for generativity.
Youâve built things: organizations, companies, friend groups, co-living houses.
You have a crew of 2-4 founders ready to collaborate. (Weâll still consider exceptional solo founders if we can match you to cofounders in your city.)
You are open to building in public to act as a lighthouse so that other like-minded people see what youâre up to and want to join.
Youâre okay with imperfect starts. The number one failure mode of this type of project is thinking I want to build to build a campus for my closest friends and perfect collaborators, and then being disappointed that they donât join. Your close friends will joinâŚin a year or three. You have to create the thing first and make it awesome. The perfect scene is like a garden, it will involve tending, pruning, weeding. Sometimes a patch of garden is overgrown or slugs attack your lettuce. Your scene emerges from a series of imperfect iterations.
Details
đ When 6 Weeks June 2nd-July 9th + ongoing coaching đ°ď¸Â Classes Mondays, 6:30-8pm ET Wednesdays, 6:30-8pm or 8-9:30pm ET (We may also host times better for non-US participants) See curriculum
đ Where Remote Meet over Zoom đŞÂ Commitment: Most of your free time for the duration of the program. This includes lots of fun & socializing.
đŞÂ Tuition $600/student Financial aid available
đ Apply Early deadline: May 15 Extended deadline: May 23 Program limited to 5 crews Click the button to the bottom right to apply â
About us
The Campus Accelerator Program is brought to you by the founders of Fractal, a campus in NYC:
Your instructors
Priya Rose founded Fractal and Fractal University in Brooklyn, and The Rabbithole in San Francisco. Sheâs written on how to live near your friends and taught on the same subject.
Previously, she was a software engineer and startup founder. In her free time, she climbs, reads, and spends time with her husband and daughter.
Tyler Alterman is a founder & artist who is interested in the research and advancement of the good life. Currently, he spends his time acting as a steward of the Fractal ecosystem and writing a science fiction novel called Psychofauna. Previously he has built startups (Reserve, The Think Tank), grown social movements (Effective Altruism, Reducetarianism), run cognitive science research in and out of academia (Yale, UChicago, Metamorphic Group), and participated in a lot of weird performance art.
Testimonials
ââ Between a full-time job and a family, my social life was mostly small talk with other parents at school events. I craved a deeply-connected friend group eager to do fun things together. Fractal opened my eyes to whatâs possible and Priya was generous in helping me make it happen here in Boston. Iâve hung out with more people in the last six weeks than the previous six monthsâand weâre just getting started!â - Alex Grin, co-founder Fractal Boston, LBRY, TopScore
ââ When I moved to the city after college, I immediately had something most people my age donât: a real community. A lot of folks end up in that post-grad void where your world shrinks to coworkers and the occasional brunch friend. Itâs isolatingâespecially if youâre trying to do something nontraditional like become a filmmaker. Fractal changed that for me. Being around people who were carving their own paths, who actually wanted to help each other, made it feel possible to take risks. I donât think I wouldâve quit my job to pursue filmmaking without that push. Fractal gave me the inspiration to stay true to what I care about, practical help in the form of job leads and collaborators, and the invaluable moral support of friends and chosen family.â - Jina Zhao, filmmaker
Learn more
Click on the little triangles to expand sections
đ Curriculum
đĄÂ Our inspirations
đââď¸Â FAQ
Apply
Early deadline: May 15 Extended deadline: May 23
Program limited to 5 crews
Click the button to the bottom right to apply â
Contact
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Questions? Concerns? Philosophical diatribes?
đ Email priyalghose@gmail.com