Support a Project

The Center for Existential Resilience explores how people, communities, cultures, and systems can live, act, create, and care in the presence of deep uncertainty.

At the heart of this work is a simple recognition: risk is not an exception to life. Risk is part of what it means to exist. To be alive is to be exposed, finite, interdependent, vulnerable, and subject to change.

Existential resilience is not the fantasy of becoming unbreakable. It is the practice of living truthfully, courageously, and creatively in a breakable world.

Support gives this work the time, attention, and practical capacity to become public: through interviews, essays, books, recordings, public resources, and future gatherings for people navigating uncertainty, transition, and change.

The Center is currently seeking founding supporters and project support for the following work.

Projects Seeking Support

The Resilience Interviews

Full first-phase support: $20,000
Smaller support levels begin at $1,000

Every field has learned something about how things break, endure, recover, adapt, and transform.

The Resilience Interviews is a cross-disciplinary interview project exploring how resilience is understood and practiced across 20+ fields — including engineering, ecology, medicine, psychotherapy, contemplative practice, art, mathematics, construction, gardening, music, law, education, and beyond.

Each conversation asks:

What is risk in your field?

What is resilience?

What breaks?

What repairs?

What did your field have to learn the hard way?

What does your field know how to see that others might miss?

What principle from your domain might help people in other fields live, build, and respond more wisely under uncertainty?

The project is not about reducing every field to a slogan. It is about listening carefully enough that wisdom can travel without losing its depth.

A gardener, an engineer, a therapist, a mathematician, and a musician may not use the same language. But each knows something about pressure, pattern, timing, rupture, repair, and form.

Support for The Resilience Interviews funds research, expert outreach, recorded interviews, transcription, editing, publication, and the creation of a public archive of field-specific resilience principles.

Support levels:

$1,000 — Support one interview
$5,000 — Support a field cluster
$10,000 — Support editing, publication, and audiovisual production
$20,000 — Support the full first phase

First phase: 20+ interviews with accompanying essays and distilled resilience principles.

Resilience Principles, Part I

Publication support: $10,000

Resilience is not the opposite of fragility. It is the art of living with fragility.

Resilience Principles, Part I will distill the core ideas of existential resilience into a short, accessible publication for readers, communities, educators, practitioners, and leaders.

This first publication will explore foundational principles such as:

Fragile asks for care.

Robust asks for strength.

Resilient asks for repair.

Antifragile asks for challenge.

Existential resilience asks for wisdom.

The publication will clarify the language of the Center and offer a practical, poetic introduction to living inside the real structure of existence: uncertainty, interdependence, impermanence, vulnerability, and possibility.

Support for this project funds writing, editing, design, publication, and distribution.

Founding Support

Founding support helps establish the Center’s early body of work and make it available to a wider public.

This support funds writing, research, interviews, editing, publication, design, distribution, and the development of future gatherings and public resources.

Founding supporters help create the conditions for this work to take form with greater focus, steadiness, and reach.

In Development: Convenings and Resource Exchange

Ideas matter. So do the conditions that allow them to become real.

The Center is developing small convenings where people can bring what they have to offer — ideas, funding, expertise, accountability, space, encouragement, practical help, creative collaboration, or focused attention — and receive support for meaningful projects that are ready to come into form.

Some projects need money.
Some need time.
Some need structure.
Some need a witness.
Some need a collaborator.
Some need someone to believe in them long enough for them to become real.

These gatherings are designed to support the conditions that allow meaningful work to emerge, strengthen, and become available to the world.

Why Support This Work

Support gives this work the time, attention, and practical capacity to become public.

It funds the research, writing, interviews, editing, publication, and gatherings needed to bring existential resilience into clearer language and wider conversation.

This work begins from the recognition that resilience is not simply recovery after disruption. It is participation in the conditions that allow life, meaning, and care to continue under uncertainty.

To support a project, inquire about a specific contribution, or explore becoming a founding supporter, please reach out.