Build a university with artists, builders & scientists.
Work on your most ambitious projects.
Raise your family in community.
Live near 100 friends & peers.The Campus Accelerator Program helps you start a âfractalâ â a neighborhood & campus combined.
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What is a âfractal?â
A âfractalâ â aka a âneighborhood campusâ â is a social template (like a âchurch,â âcollege,â or âkibbutzâ).
The focus of a fractal is on integrating all the aspects of a healthy adult life: work, hobbies, family life, partying, and friendship. This isnât anything new. In our grandparentsâ time it was called civic society. It was extremely common to be a part of voluntary organizations with overlapping membership: trade unions, service clubs, churches, neighborhood associations, and so on. A fractal is just a structure for revitalizing this sort of active community living.
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 fractal includes:
And now fractals are springing up all over the world both thanks to this program and also people simply being inspired by the model!
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Click here to read more about what is â and isnât đ« a fractal
A fractal has three pillars: campus, village, & âšv i b e sâš:
đïžÂ Campus
There is a scene of intellectual, creative, and practical activity. Friends build and explore fields together through classes, startups, research groups, clubs, & nonprofits.
People live within a five-minute walk, raise kids together, share common spaces, host weekly potlucks, bring soup when someone is sick, & dance at each otherâs weddings.
If the vibes are off, itâs not a fractal! Also: the primary binding force between members of a fractal is vibes aka natural chemistry â NOT identity. A fractal is friendship infrastructure, helping beautiful relationships form and sustain themselves.
Like a friend group, fractals are based on relationships, not on ideas or political alignments.
No âshoulds!â This is for fun & realizing the good life! In this way, a fractal is fundamentally unlike a commune or most intentional communities, which are often full of explicit rules and obligatory roles.
A fractal is ideologically pluralist. It is not an enclave for only one subculture (such as: effective altruists, Game B people, leftists, cottagecore conservatives, meditators, authentic relaters, etc). You can, eg, use your community of neo-post-Marxists as a jumping off point for a fractal, but there is no such thing as a neo-post-Marxist fractal.
In sociology speak, fractals are not âidentity-basedâ communities â they are âaffinity-based.â
đ«Â Centralized
Like a neighborhood, there are no formal roles, rules, or boards in the community overall.
Formal structure can (and probably should) exist for organizations within the fractal, but the fractal itself is just a name for an informal collection of friends, family, and colleagues, as well as the projects that they collaborate on.
Rather than hierarchy or anarchy, this is heterarchy: where there many be a bunch of hierarchical suborganizations, but the community as a whole stays informal. Another way we sometimes put this is that fractals are full of âmini-dictatorshipsâ: anyone can create a concert series, coliving house, 3rd space, etc, own it, and decide its rules. However, there is no formal structure governing all these mini-dictators â theyâre bonded through friendship.
đ«Â Separatist
Like a civic society, a fractal is not a commune that breaks away from civilization. A fractal is a scene that integrates and contributes into an existing municipality. Relatedly, fractals are multicultural. They should be able to integrate everyone from your mom to your college best friend without too much friction.
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 fractal 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
The Bloomsbury Group, a scene of writers, artists, and intellectualsâincluding Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynesâwho gathered in the Bloomsbury district of London.
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. Fractals 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 fractal
The program: build your own neighborhood campus
A thriving weekly gathering
A coliving house with a 3rd space
A community university
In our program, crews of 2â4 founders do a 6-week bootcamp. The crews meet weekly online to receive step-by-step guidance to launch a neighborhood campusâcomplete with a weekly event, a coliving house, and community-run university by the end of the program. The program culminates in a public demo day where each crew presents these three components of their fractal and invites others to join.
You canât do this alone
Creating a fractal 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
Neighborhood coordinator (who also coordinates the coliving house)
Switchboard operator (a superconnector & catalyst for the whole thing)
đïžââïžÂ 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
Potluck dinner at one of Fractalâs co-living houses
Community co-working
Eligibility
đ
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.
đ ïž
Youâve built things: organizations, companies, friend groups, co-living houses.
đ„
You have a crew of 2-4 founders ready to collaborate.
(Weâll still consider exceptional solo founders)
đŁ
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.
đ€·ââïž
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 joinâŠin 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.
đ€
You are available to build a neighborhood campus now. This is a fast-paced course with a lot of hands-on work including choosing and announcing a location (âplanting a flagâ), hosting a weekly event, and launching the first semester of a community university.
đł
You are rooted. You plan to stay in your current location for several years, and maybe even the rest of your life. You are prepared to keep travel to a minimum for at least the next year. You will be in town for at least 4 of the 5 weeks of the course.
Details
đ When
6 Weeks
September 1st-October 13th
No class on September 22nd
đ°ïžÂ Classes
North America cohort:
Mondays, 6:30-8:30 pm ET
Europe cohort:
Mondays, 6-8 pm UTC
đ Where
Remote
Meet over Zoom
đȘÂ Commitment:
âą Most of your free time for the duration of the program. This includes lots of fun & socializing.
âą You will stay rooted in your city for the program duration, hosting a weekly event
đȘÂ Tuition
$600/studentFinancial aid available!
đ Apply
Deadline: August 15th
Click the button to the bottom right to do so â
About us
The Campus Accelerator Program is brought to you by the founders of Fractal, a campus in NYC:
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
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đ Curriculum
Fundamentals
A weekly lecture on the fundamentals of building a campus that your whole crew will take.
Gatherings: How to host a weekly event that weaves social fabric
Hands-on Work: Your crew will host a weekly gathering throughout the course, and for the next year.
University: How to found a community university and get your friends to teach
Hands-on Work: Your crew will solicit teachers and locations and launch the first semester of a community university.
Co-living: How to start and run a co-living house
Hands-on Work: Your crew will choose and announce a neighborhood to âplant a flagâ in, and gather all your friends to.
Third spaces: How to create a common space for your community
Culture: How to cultivate a vibe and create a positive-sum, playful, ambitious culture
Stewardship: enforcing norms, conflict management, risk management, federation, governance, inclusivity vs exclusivity, dealing with sociopaths, common community failures
Futures: How to serve as soil so more and more projects emerge from your scene
A talk from Priyaâs Live Near Your Friends class
Yet another potluck (so many potlucks!!!)
Hands On Work
This is a fast-paced course with a lot of hands-on work including choosing and announcing a location for coliving (âplanting a flagâ), hosting a weekly event, and launching the first semester of a community university.
We recommend having each person in your crew âtake pointâ on one of these components.
Tylerâs talk on the Role of the Fool in Community Integrity
Community University: You will launch the first semester on September 1st! âWhatâs a community university?â Itâs where your extended friend network teaches each other classes. Weâll spend the fall recruiting teachers and marketing to students. Example: FractalU
Baby coworking club, where we each took shifts babysitting while working alongside each other
Neighborhood Lab: A key component of a neighborhood campus is that a density of friends live âon campusâ - i.e. within a 5 minute walk of each other. Even better is if your friends live in the same âdorm,â i.e. the same apartment building. The density will lead to spontaneous interactions, deeper friendships, and a more vibrant scene. You will choose a building or neighborhood and âplant the flag.â
Note: only one member of your crew must live or move there. We do not recommend coordinating one neighborhood among the entire crew.
Wealth Squad, where we met weekly to brainstorm how to make money together
Weekly Event: You will create a weekly event, and improve it week after week. This event will serve as the backbone of your social scene.
Kaila brought us out to watch the marathon
Switchboard operator: You will spend your time meeting with people one on one, connecting people to collaborators and friends, and scheming to unblock people in your scene and help them go faster.
Here is a thread of the alum of our first cohort. If you see that a fractal already exists in your city, youâre welcome to try to combine efforts, however we encourage multiple per city. A fractal is just a way of organizing an existing network and so any city will have multiple networks.
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đââïžÂ FAQ
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Can I apply solo?
Yes! The program is meant to be taken in crews of 2-4 founders, but we will consider exceptional solo applicants.
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How should I seek a crew?
We recommend that your crew is made up of pre-existing friends or longtime collaborators. The class moves very fast, and itâs hard to keep up if your crew is still getting to know each other and building trust together. If you do not have local friends who are interested in building a campus with you, consider applying solo, or seeking those friends first and then applying to a future cohort.
Will we be expected to closely follow the Fractal template or is it more open ended than that?
Right now we are planning to focus on the 3 main components that worked for us (university, weekly event, and coliving house). We are open to accepting crews who want to follow a different model but we will not be tailoring the curriculum for individual crews. If youâre looking to take a general community building class, this is not it!
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I think I could build this on my own. Why should I enter the program?
If youâre a strong enough applicant to get into this program, youâre definitely capable of doing it on your own. However, it took us 4 years to build Fractal. By contrast, Fractalâs Campus Accelerator has helped crews in Geneva, Boston, and elsewhere launch the critical elements in just 6 weeks. As an analogy to YCombinator, people build startups on their own all the time, but a bootcamp helps you focus, rally your founding team, join a powerful network, and receive tacit knowledge from experienced founders of the 1000 little things you donât anticipate in advance.
That said, if youâre devoted to building it on your own, weâd love to hear how it goes! Email us at priyalghose@gmail.com. And here are some resources in case theyâre helpful:
A community university is a collective of friends who teach classes for each other and the public from their living rooms. Teachers do not need any credentials â instead the goal is for anyone to be able to step into the role of âteacherâ; just as now we occasionally step into the role of âparty host.â
Classes range from STEM to art to entirely original courses never taught anywhere before. Hereâs a small sample of classes FractalU NYC has taught:
What should I name my campus? Can I use the name âFractalâ?
Naming is one of the most fun parts in our opinion đ. Last cohort campuses had names like Portal Porto, V2 Vancouver, Weave Toronto, and Tetra Seattle.
We ask that you not name your neighborhood Fractal unless we agree separately to do so.
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Iâm an introvert. Does it make sense for me to build one of these?
Believe it or not, Tyler and Priya (the creators of this bootcamp) are also introverts. Weâd estimate that the majority of people who participate in Fractal NYC are introverts. Introverts need community too! So we do a lot of introvert-friendly activities: boardgame nights, coworking, etc.
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How much does it cost beyond tuition to build a campus?
Believe it or not, $0 beyond living expenses.
People in our community have often found that theyâre saving on rent by doing co-living.
Meanwhile, FractalU (our community university) had no startup costs â we just started hosting classes in living rooms. Our teachers earn money by charging tuition, and nowadays the admin team collects a small admin fee from students.
It was only 3 years into building Fractal that we started fundraising for things like the Fractal Tech Hub.
As we move into this next phase in 2025, Fractal people have started founding companies together, a couple of which are starting to be wealth-creating.
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How do I apply for financial aid?
Itâs part of the application below.
Apply
The deadline to apply is August 15th.
Click the button to the bottom right to do so â
Co-working at one of our creative residency programs
