The mission of The UCLA Family Commons is to inspire families and communities to discover their unique potential for well-being. We offer a welcoming environment filled with classes, events, coaching and excitement about creating healthy, engaged lives.
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We envision a world where all possess the tools they need to move through the world with confidence and innovation—for life. Healthier families make stronger communities, and healthier communities make stronger families. When children and parents take charge of their own well-being, they build both.
The Place: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The Time: Late 1980s
The People: Diane Flannery, Ph.D. and Mary Jane Rotheram-Borus, Ph.D.
Dr. Diane Flannery and Dr. Mary Jane Rotheram-Borus met while touring the favelas of Brazil to study how families can raise healthy, resilient children, no matter what their circumstances. It was the late 1980s, and Diane had recently become Executive Director of Larkin Street Youth Services in San Francisco. Mary Jane was Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University in New York. Little did they know that over 20 years later they would be opening the doors of The UCLA Family Commons in Santa Monica together.
The two hit it off immediately and saw many connections between their work, even though Mary Jane was a research psychologist, while Diane’s agency was providing direct services to youth. Mary Jane could see that once the research was completed, the programs she was developing didn’t always reach the children and families whose lives they were intended to improve. Diane could see that lots of families would raise healthier children if they only had easier access to reliable, science-based information about how to solve common problems. Both Mary Jane and Diane realized that the well-being of families was inextricably linked to the communities in which they lived.
They stayed in touch, always looking for projects they could work on together. Aside from an abiding commitment to improving the lives of children and families, Diane and Mary Jane also connected around a love of travel, and they worked together in Africa and other places around the world. In the early 1990s, Mary Jane moved to the west coast to join the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. Diane, still in San Francisco, was exercising her entrepreneurial spirit by starting Juma Ventures – a partnership with Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream to provide young people with jobs, job training, and career development. Mary Jane raised a daughter who is now herself a professor of psychology, and Diane became the mother of a daughter who is now 11 years old.
Six years ago, the time was right for these two women to combine their skills and experience to build something larger than either could accomplish on their own – The UCLA Family Commons. Diane moved to Los Angeles to join Mary Jane in creating a new kind of wellness center offering accessible, science-based tools to build healthy families. Their goal was to merge science with engaging, experiential learning, bringing the university’s vast wealth of expertise into the community in a way that would be fun for the whole family.
The project received a huge boost in 2007, when it was chosen as a winner in a global competition to identify Disruptive Innovations in Health and Health Care. Sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Changemakers, the competition aimed to identify ideas with the potential to empower consumers and transform how health care is delivered. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation then invited The UCLA Family Commons to apply for a grant from its Pioneer Portfolio, subsequently awarding $2 million in seed funding to launch the Santa Monica family wellness center.
The UCLA Family Commons is a project of the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Directed by Peter Whybrow, M.D., the Semel Institute enjoys an international reputation for research, education and treatment focused on a wide range of mental and behavioral health issues.
We welcome you to The UCLA Family Commons in Santa Monica – a place for children and parents, families and communities, scientists and artists and entrepreneurs. We look forward to traveling the path of lifelong wellness together.