Help save Template House!

Our first house acquisition is a home centered around the needs of formerly incarcerated individuals, returning from serving life sentences in california’s prisons.

Save this unique San Francisco community project!

Welcome to Template House :) We are an intentional community space in lower Haight. Template House is a unique and magical intentional community that serves the needs of one of the most underserved populations, those returning from long term incarceration (15+ years). All of our formerly incarcerated residents have served life sentences in California prisons. These are indeterminate sentences, but a rare few are deemed suitable to return to society. Those remarkable individuals return to a completely different world to the one that they left, a world with the internet, mobile phones and self-driving cars. Our home is unique in that it is truly a home, not a program. Our community is also blended, with half our residents being formerly incarcerated and the other half not, which creates magical bonds and the kinds of beautiful kinship that prison strips everyone of.

Template House was purchased in Dec 2019 with the hope of transitioning to some form of community ownership. Our dream has always been to find ways to move the ownership structure to a trust, so that this building, and ideally others in our community, might be removed from the speculative market and remain serving the needs of those who built it in perpetuity. Due to changing life conditions, the current ownership cannot maintain the costs of the building and the building is due to go on the market in the coming months. The current owners are value aligned and are in deep collaboration on this vision.

We have an incredible team working to save this building. We have created a community land trust, we have a promising lender that can finance the two million loan that this project needs, we have an incredible mission aligned lawyer working with us, we have had incredible support from the other california land trusts.

Why donate?

Your contribution allows us to acquire and conserve critical lands for deeply underserved populations. Your donation is going directly to creating a permanent legacy and helping ensure a healthy future for some of our most vulnerale and underserved people.

Supporting this project is a powerful way to contribute to the reintegration and rehabilitation of those who have served their time. Your funds directly help us to break the cycle of recidivism and providing a crucial opportunity for individuals to rebuild their lives. Template House empowers formerly incarcerated individuals by offering stable housing and a sense of belonging, fostering community connections that are essential for successful reintegration. Your donation not only aids in securing housing but also contributes to the broader goal of creating a supportive and inclusive community that values the dignity and potential of every individual, ultimately promoting a safer and more equitable society for all.

About District Commons
District Commons emboldens communities to use their power for liberation. Through education and experimentation, we amplify community needs, power, and potential to create visionary collective possibilities.

Our work includes supporting formerly incarcerated lifers to build their own intentional communities, creating new models of alternative justices, running numerous weekly support circles, advising dozens of new communities, creating free lecture series on topics from the future of work to new approaches to inter-species relations, maintaining free community meeting spaces for radical projects, supporting permaculture, indigenous communities and community retreat spaces in Costa Rica, and scheduling and wrangling large groups of volunteers.

The Future of Template House

Team Members