They’ll inherit the future.
Let them design it.
A nine-year-old in Golden asked how we all share the same street safely. Thirty-four days later, nine college seniors made that question their final year of school. Nobody assigned it. She asked, and the city listened, and the work found the people who wanted it.
Something is opening here. A city stopped managing its young people and started listening to them, and the answers came back better than anyone expected. It works the same way inside a company, a school, a family, an organization, a whole region — anywhere people are willing to design the future alongside the ones who will live in it. If you have been waiting for the place where your hope has somewhere to go — this is it.
I love you — the number every gift here is built on
Find your way in
Four doors, and none of them require money to walk through first. Cities, companies, schools, foundations, families — the model is the same wherever people are ready to build with the generation who inherits the result. Start where you are; the ladder below is for when you know which door is yours.
Take the Creed
Agree to the seven principles our young people wrote, and become a Dream Tanker. The front door to the whole movement.
Become a Dream Tanker →Power a Dream Maker
Fund a young person’s year in the L.A.B., from one seat at $79 to a full classroom of twenty-five at $1,975. Their light goes on the map.
Power a Dream Maker →Fund the Golden pilot
The season that is running right now. Pilot funders are invited into the room when the young people unveil what they built.
Fund the pilot →Bring the L.A.B.
Bring a L.A.B. to your company, school, city, foundation or network. License the methodology. Host a founding site. Align capital. Let’s find the fit.
Plan a conversation →Move real capital?
If you allocate at scale and want to invest in long-term infrastructure for intergenerational problem-solving — in communities, companies, institutions or a whole region — let’s talk directly.
The 143 Ladder
Find your rung. Each one names what it funds, what flows back to you, and what it changes — because the return loop is the part of this field that has never been funded, and it is the part that makes everything else hold.
A young person’s seat at a listening session, and the materials for a pod day.
What flows backYour name in the living record, and the story of what your drop touched. Many Drops are given by a child, or with one — generosity as a family practice, started small on purpose.
A seat in the active inquiry for one full season.
What flows backYou join a design session and the monthly gathering, and your questions shape a real inquiry. You stop watching change and sit inside it.
One pod for one season: a student, an elder, a practitioner — named, faced and paid while the work happens.
What flows backTheir check-backs at one month, three months and a year. You know three names, and their breakthroughs arrive in your inbox with faces attached.
Gifts from $143 to $14,300 can be made online in a minute. A Place and beyond are planned with you — timing, what they fund, and what comes back are all shaped in the conversation.
A whole design season for one place or one organization: listening, facilitation, fellows, culmination — the full arc Golden just proved.
What flows backYou walk the living laboratory, your place is named in its blueprint, and you hear your own mission spoken back to you in the words of the people who live it.
Multi-year flow: the home, the Commons, the coordination — the connective tissue itself.
What flows backA steward’s seat in the ecosystem’s rhythm. You fund the tissue that makes everything else work, and become the reason the field holds together.
A region’s decade: many places, many pods, the whole cycle running at once.
What flows backCo-authorship of a watershed’s story — a decade of places, pods and young lives that trace their beginning to your decision.
Everything on this page, grown to scale.
What flows backThe future, at the centre, with room around it for all of us. Your mission and this ecosystem become one story the world can adopt.
Give now
A Drop, a Seat or a Pod — $143, $1,430 or $14,300, one-time or monthly. Pick a rung above to go straight to that amount, or open the form and choose there. Beyond a Pod, it starts as a conversation.
Every rung sends something back. Not a receipt and a newsletter — a relationship with what you planted. The smallest drop and the whole forest write into the same story, and every level carries the same code.
What your gift actually buys
Nobody’s wisdom is free
The people who hold this work — young people, elders, facilitators, practitioners — are paid while the work happens. No unpaid wisdom anywhere in the system.
The relationships, not just the answer
Transformation does not happen because the right solution is found. It happens when people build enough trust to see the system together, share power, and carry a solution into action. That relational architecture is PEAC’s contribution, and it is the hardest thing in this field to fund.
A model built to travel
Golden went first so the next city doesn’t have to invent it. Every season produces a blueprint another community can run.
A decade of proof
10,000+ young people, 80+ youth-led ventures, and three Colorado state laws shaped by youth voices — before anyone asked us to scale it.
Where it is going right now
Golden, Colorado
A nine-year-old asked how we all share the street. Thirty-four days later, nine Colorado School of Mines seniors made that question their final year of college. Gifts at the Pod and Place rungs are funding this season directly.
The city after Golden
The model is built to travel, and the second city is the one that proves it. A Place funds a full design season somewhere new; a Current funds the coordination that lets several run at once.
Whether that is a Drop given with a child at the kitchen table or a Current that holds the whole ecosystem steady, we will treat it like the real yes it is. Every rung funds the L.A.B. that Dream Tank and the PEAC Institute build together.
The ecosystem behind it
Dream Tank and the PEAC Institute build the L.A.B. together. Dream Tank brings a decade of youth innovation practice, the HEAL · DREAM · BUILD · LAUNCH framework, and local city relationships. PEAC brings the relational, equity-centred systems-change methodology and facilitation backbone — and closes the loop between local and global, carrying community-created solutions to the institutions capable of advancing them. Around them sit the partners who make the work travel and get documented — and, in Boulder, two doorways into the same field.
The Golden Systems Change L.A.B. with Colorado School of Mines is community‑funded by design. We use blended capital — philanthropy and civic investment together — to keep the work locally rooted and its agenda pure. With gratitude to the Johnston Education Fund, an impact innovation ecosystem funder, the City of Golden, Colorado School of Mines, the Golden Civic Foundation, Bob’s Atomic Burgers, and the Colorado Gives Foundation — and to Mayor Laura Weinberg and the community members of Golden, Colorado.
Dream Tank · 2525 Arapahoe Ave, Unit E4 PMB 1111, Boulder, CO 80302-6746 · www.dreamtank.co
