Commons + Company invests in the places, businesses, and ideas that bring people together in public.
Commons spaces are essential infrastructure, and yet often an afterthought in a capital system that shapes what gets built and what doesn't.
What do we mean by commons? Places where people come together across ‘loose’ social ties. An abandoned Elks hall that's been the heart of its neighborhood for generations. An empty lot that becomes a neighborhood's first real gathering place. A struggling-with-attendance cultural institution sitting on real estate it hasn't fully activated.
We see this infrastructure as one of the best underrealized investment opportunities in America.
Commons + Company is an investment fund nested in a nonprofit. We support strong commons infrastructure — places, businesses, and ideas. The guiding principle is always how much good would this do for the people who live here?
If that's the work you've been looking for, as a partner, funder, or collaborator, we'd love to be in conversation.
What We Invest In
Places
Real estate that blends civic purpose and commercial viability, creating spaces that anchor communities for the long term.
Businesses
Civic-minded companies that strengthen how communities gather, work, and create together, with models that can travel across geographies.
Ideas
Early explorations that aren't ready for traditional capital but are too important to wait. Our nonprofit structure gives them room to breathe.
Who We Are
Christine Johnson has spent her career at the intersection of public finance, civic infrastructure, and organization building. With early public finance consulting and product roles, she developed fluency in the financial structures and capital mechanisms that underpin complex civic and real estate projects.
For nearly a decade she was embedded in San Francisco's civic machinery — as a Planning Commissioner, as chair of the Successor Agency Commission, and as advisory board president of the San Francisco Community Investment Fund, which deployed over $80 million in New Market Tax Credits to cultural and economic anchors across the city. She has carried that knowledge across an unusually wide range of organizations — from accelerating performance-driven models at Third Sector Capital Partners, to leading the San Francisco office of urban policy organization SPUR, to building a technology company's internal infrastructure from the ground up as founding operator of Atolio.
Christine believes that the civic and social infrastructure that makes communities worth living in represents one of the most underleveraged investment opportunities in America.
Sara Fenske Bahat has spent her career at the intersection of cities, capital, and civic life — specifically in the moments when all three have to move together.
At NYC EDC in the aftermath of 9/11, she helped structure the financial response to one of the most consequential moments in a modern city's life, retaining nearly 15,000 jobs and $2.5 billion in private investment in the five boroughs. From there, Chief of Staff at the New York State Banking Department, then VP and Chief of Staff to the CFO and COO of Citigroup's Global Consumer Group.
She left finance to go deeper into the civic and cultural institutions that make cities worth living in — running the design MBA at California College of the Arts, leading a major interdisciplinary arts institution through financial rebuilding and the repositioning of a cultural district, and directing San Francisco's first mayoral transition in thirty years, restructuring the executive branch of city government from the inside.
She brings to Commons + Company an unusual combination: the financial fluency of the public and private sector, and the operating knowledge of the institutions those structures are supposed to serve — having lived both sides of that gap for decades.