A Pre-Launch 501(c)(3)
A Quaint Think Tank
Reimagining Human Connection.
To make human connection more familiar — across therapy, film, education, technology, art, and every other medium already doing this work, whether or not it’s been named that yet.
On the Name: A Quaint Think Tank
There is deliberate double meaning in the name, and it’s worth explaining plainly rather than letting people guess.
Read the full sectionMission
To make human connection more familiar.
This mission is built in two layers, modeled loosely after organizations that operated in their early stages. This is a short and abstract header that can stay constant even as the language around it evolves. It sits above a fuller statement of what that means today. The vision is the layer that doesn’t move; the fuller mission below is expected to be rewritten as the organization matures, without the underlying vision and the overarching mission changing.
To get the world acquainted with the full breadth of human connection, no matter the medium, discipline, or form it takes, and to build community, research, and infrastructure that lets it be explored without judgement or a single system lens.
Human connection is not a soft or secondary concern, and it is not the property of any one field. It shows up in mental health outcomes, health care systems, education, technology design, art, and public policy. It is disproportionately absent, under-resourced, or actively stigmatized for the people who need it most. This entity intends to change that, not only through research and policy work, but through the projects, programming, and people described in the sections below.
Vision
Reimagining Human Connection.
We are working toward a future where the industries and institutions that touch human connection — mental health care, education, technology, therapy, art, and community life — are all shaped by people who understand connection in all its forms. We measure progress in policy changed and research published, but also in whether people who have historically been told their way of needing or desiring to connect is wrong are beginning to find infrastructure, community, and legitimacy.
Values
- Human Centered First
- Every topic we take on starts from lived experience, curiosity, and response to a human connection need. Abstract or to the point, these topics are explored creatively and from within the confines of any chosen discipline, practice, or professional facet. The research and the programming follow people.
- Every Medium Is a Valid Door Into Human Connection
- Film, art, therapy, policy, technology, education, social work, and more are equally legitimate ways into this work.
- Justice
- Our work is rooted in social justice: equity, access, and accountability to the communities most affected. The practice and praxis of social justice matters more than the label.
- There Is No One Way to Connect
- In a world where connection is constantly being reshaped by technology, culture, and circumstance, we refuse a single template for how healthy or legitimate connection takes form.
- Quaint
- There is a through line of making sure that we are approaching this with a legitimacy that is comfortable and appealing to the rest of the world, the communities we are serving, and our hearts.
- Governance for the Stakeholders
- Boards and decision-making structures built around this work include the communities most affected by its absence, or most equipped to steward discourse and reimagination. Those most equipped take many shapes.
- Ethical Innovation and Accountability Structures
- Whether the innovation is technological, artistic, clinical, or something beyond and in combination, we engage this work as something to help shape responsibly for what human connection is. The ethical is not binary, but sits in a grey space of being able to speak to the nuances of human connection.
The Landscape, and Why This Work Is Needed Now
Human connection is being reshaped from every direction at once — clinically, artistically, technologically — and almost none of those directions talk to each other.
Read the full sectionWhat We Work On
The scope is intentionally broad because human connection itself is not a narrow topic. Current domains include, and are not limited to, the eight below.
This list reflects the range of one founder’s own resume and relationships to social work, counseling, sextech, film, and education, but it is not the ceiling of the topic. Growing this map past any one person’s background is the point, and part of the entity’s job is to keep discovering where human connection needs witnesses and stewards.
Human Services & Care Systems
Mental health, health care, therapy, group therapy, social work, counseling, and whatever else can be creatively put into this category.
Stigmatized & Marginalized Forms of Connection
Sex, sexuality, relationship structures, and intimacy defined as closeness.
Community & Affinity
Affinity groups and other peer and collective structures through which people build.
Technology & Digital Intimacy
Dating apps, social media, femtech, sextech, AI, digital intimacies, parasocial relationships, and the broader evolution of connection through emerging technology.
Meaning, Loss & Belief
Spirituality, grief, and trauma are all parts of human connection tied to meaning making and loss.
Education & Literacy
Schools and curricula, digital literacy, health literacy, critical thinking.
Arts & Storytelling
Film, visual art, animation, documentary, and other creative or narrative mediums that explore or depict human connection.
Ethics
The applied ethics of connection, technology, research, and care, running within all of the above and all of what can be thought.
Redefining What a Think Tank Is
A conventional think tank studies a population from a distance. This one is built to hold plurality as infrastructure instead.
Read the full sectionHow We Work
A nonprofit structure built to grow, launch, or sunset individual projects — plus the logic model connecting research and lived expertise to real programs and policy.
Read the full sectionMembership and Participation
A Quaint Team Members: Those With Intention to Participate
Team members join at a small, sliding-scale fee set by ability to pay — the maximum is $150 (this money goes to our team accountant) and the minimum is your own definition of value. Funding is incredibly important in the launching of an organization, and all member donations go toward the growth of the organization, culminating each year in the Annual Showcase. In exchange, every member commits to a project within the year — something addressing a topic inside the domain map above, in whatever medium fits them. This could be a research paper, a piece of art, a podcast, a curriculum, a support group, a short film, a policy brief, a therapy resource, or something more.
The Annual Showcase, or Proverbial Magnum Opus
Once a year, members bring their projects back to the group to showcase. There is no competition in this, but it is meant to be the moment the whole point of the organization becomes visible at once: many small, particular, wide-ranging pieces of work on human connection, built by people who approached it from completely different directions. This is also where the organization can demonstrate impact to funders and the public, rather than only describing it.
Partnerships and External Visibility
The showcase makes the work visible internally. Beyond it, member and organizational projects across the domain map are meant to be displayed outward — through partnerships, cross-promotion, and advertising with any entity whose mission touches human connection, whether that’s a therapy practice, a sextech company, an arts organization, a school, or another nonprofit. The goal is for a piece of work built inside this think tank to be seen well past the room it was made in, and for aligned organizations to have standing reason to point their audiences back at it. Human connection is a siloed topic that existing corporations and entities take on piece by piece. We are building a landing zone for as high as one’s imagination can fly, and for those cruising at altitudes having already carved out their own understanding of human connection. It’s our intent to shine light on those who have already been doing the work at every scale.
Board Members: Governance and Stewards
Board members take on governance responsibilities. This is consistent with nonprofit practice, and board members are expected to make an annual contribution as a condition of service. This isn’t a fundraising gimmick — it’s a standard signal that people governing an organization have also invested in it.
Why This Isn’t a Mass Invitation Yet
This memorandum is being shared with a small circle on purpose. A functioning board, a funding base, and the community platform all need to exist first. Early members and board members are, more accurately, founding collaborators. They are people building the infrastructure itself, not just joining something already built.
Inquire
Two distinct commitments, two distinct forms. Ground your answers in why this, specifically — a rough or half-formed answer is a completely normal place to start.
Stay in the Loop
Low-commitment, no gate on anything: updates and sneak peeks at member projects ahead of the Annual Showcase.
If this describes work you want to be a part of as a founding member, board member, funder, or collaborator – it would be our joy to connect.
Questions before applying, press inquiries, or anything else on your mind — visit the Contact page. The Inquire forms above reach Ethan directly — there’s no general inbox standing up yet.