Building Community
Filling the gaps of Austin’s social sector to increase impact & opportunity for all:
A work in progress, in collaboration, in innovation
Why Building Community
Austin has one of the most vibrant nonprofit and civic ecosystems in the country: hundreds of organizations doing meaningful work across housing, education, environment, equity, arts, and more, with new ones launching all the time. But in an increasingly digital, disconnected world, it's easy to do good work here and still feel unplugged from it.
Building Community is a civic social enterprise and a testing ground: an incubator for how a city connects. Rather than duplicating or overlapping, we design, pilot, and refine the models that help Austin's people, companies, and causes actually find each other, keeping what works and letting go of what doesn't.
We work at the intersection of three things most cities have separately and rarely together:
Civic education. Helping people understand what their city actually needs, who's working on it, and how to contribute, not as a volunteer filling a shift, but as an informed, connected community member who knows the landscape.
Building Belonging infrastructure. Creating the recurring, structured, universally designed spaces where people actually meet each other, not just occupy the same room.
Community engagement innovation. Piloting new formats, partnerships, and models for how individuals, companies, and organizations show up for each other and the city, across causes, neighborhood, and organizations. Most importantly, looking to innovate with curiosity, joy, and the spirit of reciprocity.
Your Austin starts here. More to come.
Building Belonging is Building Community's underlying philosophy, its working laboratory and a flagship program: a place to test what universal design actually looks like in practice, then refine it, adapt it, and pilot it again with a different group. It isn't one fixed curriculum. It's a design approach we keep proving out, population by population, so what works can travel.
Most service, volunteer, social and skill-building programs are built for a narrow slice of who could actually take part. If you have an intellectual or developmental disability, or you're older, or your needs just don't fit the standard mold, you're usually handed a role as someone being helped, not someone with something to lead or teach. Building Belonging starts from a different premise: people with lived experience aren't the population being served, they're some of the best facilitators in the room.
Co-leadership, not participation. People with disabilities and other lived experience serve as co-facilitators and co-teachers, leading sessions and sharing real expertise, alongside corporate volunteers, students, and neighbors, so everyone in the room has the chance to lead and the chance to learn when the time is right.
Universal design, built once and adapted everywhere. Choice, pacing, sensory awareness, and joy are baked into every session from the start, then adjusted for the group in front of us, whether that's IDD teens, older adults, or a corporate team that's never thought about accessibility at all. Maybe it’s virtual or on your own time completely. Not everyone can get across town in rush hour or take half the day to volunteer.
Piloted across populations, not assumed. Every new instance, whether with teens, elders, or another community, gets tested against what actually transfers and what genuinely needs to change, and we document the difference so the design keeps getting sharper instead of just getting repeated.
Everyone belongs here. More to come.
Why Building Belonging
Valuing Curiosity, Belonging, Joy, Generosity, Reciprocity, & Courage
Seeking those who walue the same.