Nourishing Futures was founded in 2002 as Stepping Stones Project. For 20 years, Stepping Stones served as a leader in rites of passage and initiation for middle school aged youth in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many thousands of young people were supported on their path to adulthood, through mentorship, rites of passage and intergenerational community building. We appreciate this legacy, as well as the beauty and courage to change the form when the time was right. In 2022, Stepping Stones completed its work with youth, and the nonprofit went into a fallow period.

Is there a purpose for the nonprofit now?

Through ceremony and individual and collective listening, a picture emerged for a collective use of the organization.

Over the past decades, many of us now involved have worked on projects together, partnering across organizations and through networks, and have long dreamed of a collective space for our work—a place for mutual support, collaboration, shared infrastructure and spiritual and professional strengthening. We value working in a collaborative environment across time and space with a shared purpose expressed in unique and overlapping ways. We have been doing this for decades, and yet this is our first time creating a shared enterprise whole enough to bring all of our work into, as well as that of others—through fiscal sponsorship, partnerships and continued collaborations across projects and networks. We chose to do this because it supports each of our purposes, with the shared belief that spaces like this are essential to the greater social, cultural and constellated moment of these times. Coming together through Nourishing Futures, we turn toward connection, community and strategic service. We work for cultural renewal, repair and reclamation.

Together, we are stronger and more effective, more accountable and more able to do what we are here to do. Through our shared work, we ask, What are nourishing futures? How can we move toward them? And nourish them into being?