Gather San Mateo: A Case Study in Building for Belonging
Gather San Mateo is a long-term project I’ve been developing as a case study in community-centered design, social enterprise, and systems change. At its core, it asks a simple but persistent question:
What would it look like if belonging had a physical home?
The idea is a shared community space where families, nonprofits, and local partners come together to support neurodiversity, mental health, and connection—designed from the ground up with inclusion as the starting point, not an afterthought.
The Problem It Responds To
Across the Bay Area, families and organizations doing this work are often fragmented and isolated. Resources exist, but they’re scattered. Support is available, but hard to navigate. Nonprofits compete for space, attention, and funding—often duplicating effort rather than strengthening one another.
Gather San Mateo is an attempt to address this fragmentation by bringing people, programs, and infrastructure into one shared ecosystem, making impact more consistent, visible, and accessible.
The Vision (and What It Tests)
A Community Hub Designed for Real Use
A welcoming, flexible space shaped by universal design principles—where people of all abilities can learn, meet, attend programs, or simply exist without having to explain themselves.
A Café and Bookstore With Purpose
A social-enterprise model that supports financial sustainability, highlights writing and resources on neurodiversity and mental health, and creates meaningful employment opportunities for neurodivergent individuals.
Events, Learning, and Conversation
Talks, workshops, professional development, and storytelling events—built in partnership with educators, nonprofits, and community organizations already doing mission-aligned work.
A Nonprofit and Social-Impact Incubator
Affordable workspace and shared infrastructure for nonprofits and early-stage, mission-driven teams—reducing overhead while increasing collaboration and collective impact.
Why This Matters
The need for a model like Gather is grounded in real, persistent inequities:
Disabled households hold significantly less wealth than the national median.
Students with disabilities graduate at lower rates and face systemic barriers that compound over time.
Disabled adults experience poverty at roughly twice the rate of their non-disabled peers.
Gather San Mateo is designed as a long-term, sustainable response to these challenges—supporting individuals while strengthening the organizations and systems meant to serve them.
Why I’m Sharing This Now
Gather San Mateo is still in development, but the thinking behind it is active. It informs how I approach consulting, advisory work, and organizational strategy—particularly around place-based design, partnership models, governance, and sustainability.
This project is not just a vision for the future; it’s a way of working through complex questions about belonging, infrastructure, and impact in public.
If this way of thinking resonates, I’d welcome the conversation.
riley@therileyproject.org
Let’s build systems where belonging isn’t a luxury—it’s the baseline.
