Seanan Fong

As a minister turned designer, Seanan combines a grounded empathy and a builder’s imagination to reweave our missing moral infrastructure. He leads the San Francisco Contemplarium as its Founding Director, and writes a personal ideas newsletter at Moral Infrastructure.

Seanan received his B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University and his M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School. Having grown up as a nonreligious Chinese American, he co-authored Family Sacrifices: The Ethics and Worldviews of Chinese Americans (Oxford University Press, 2019), a sociological study of Chinese Americans reviewed in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion as “a must-read for scholars interested in reevaluating what is, and what is not, religious.”

Bringing his perspective as a queer, secular-humanist Chinese American to Unitarian Universalism, Seanan was ordained at the First Parish in Cambridge, where he also served his parish internship. He conducted his clinical chaplaincy internship at Stanford Hospital, serving the emotional and spiritual needs of a wide variety of patients and their families across the theological spectrum. He is an Affiliated Community Minister at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco.

As a conflict resolution practitioner, Seanan has served as the independent ombuds at a major technology company, pioneering the role in the tech space. He has also served as a facilitator, mediator, conflict coach, and conflict skills trainer for a range of groups and communities navigating conflict. His work with the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program assessing a townwide political tension was covered in the Boston Globe.

In his career as a designer, Seanan spearheaded UX design for clinicians at a healthcare technology company serving primary care physicians. There, he helped raise a $40M Series C and win the industry’s best-in-class award by shipping human-centric design that clinicians loved, while meeting strict criteria for government certification. His work as a leader in healthcare design has forged his understanding of the structural and personal complexities that go into promoting well-being in our communities.

Seanan lives in San Francisco, near his three nieces and two nephews, and far from a long-distance best friend in Iowa. He enjoys speculative fiction, constructed languages, drawing folkloric sketches, and singing for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.