Wheelhouse

The Space

Located on the Annunciation Cathedral campus in the heart of San Francisco, Wheelhouse is a space designed so that families can arrive together each morning and spend their weekdays in a shared rhythm: parents working in quiet offices and call booths while their children play, nap, and learn in dedicated spaces nearby, cared for by on-site nannies, other parents in childcare swaps, or their own parents during breaks in the workday.

Rather than forcing parents to choose between building a meaningful career and building a strong, loving family, Wheelhouse makes both possible in the same place, at the same time, within a community that actively supports both.

The Vision

Wheelhouse is more than a practical solution to the problem of finding reliable childcare for your children. It’s an experiment in recovering something our fragmented modern lives have largely lost: a shared space where work, family, learning, and community life aren’t split apart, but woven together.

Inspired by Charles Taylor’s diagnosis of the modern condition, that we live in a “secular age” marked by a deep hunger for meaning that neither purely religious nor purely secular frameworks have adequately answered, the Open Immanence Society sees Wheelhouse as a seed of something new. It’s a space where parents from different traditions and worldviews can build a common life oriented around what actually matters to them: raising their children well, doing work they believe in, and doing both in the company of others who take those commitments seriously.

Post-Secular

The vision is post-secular in the Taylorean sense. Not a return to enforced religious consensus, but an honest acknowledgment that the questions religion has always grappled with, How should we live? What do we owe each other? What kind of people do we want our children to become?, don’t disappear just because we live in a pluralistic society. They become harder and more urgent.

Wheelhouse creates a daily context where those questions aren’t abstract philosophical puzzles but practical ones, worked out over shared lunches, in the way adults model purposeful work for the children watching them, in evening discussions ranging from AI ethics to interfaith dialogue to the future of education.

San Francisco’s tech community, for all its world-shaping ambition, often lacks exactly this kind of rooted, intergenerational, meaning-rich communal life. We’re building Wheelhouse to fill that gap.

Founding Community

We are currently assembling our founding community of families and philanthropic partners, with the goal of opening in early 2026. Our target is 30 member families and a mix of individual professionals, people working in AI, genomics, education, the nonprofit world, and beyond, who want their daily working life to be embedded in something deeper than productivity.