Chinatown Soup is a creative community located on the border of New York's Lower East Side. Operating out of an Orchard Street storefront, the space hosts a gallery, basement studio, and soon-to-be cafe that connects creatives to collaborative opportunities. Entering its second year of operation in 2016, Soup pushes the boundaries of brick and mortar within the city’s hotbed of real estate development and the new art scene to benefit an increasingly intermingled community. Drawing from the Stone Soup folk parable and artist-run collectives of 1970’s New York, such as Chinatown’s Basement Workshop and SoHo’s Food, we’re forming a new vanguard of social entrepreneurs that re-imagine how people can work together to live creatively in the 21st century city. This intervention begins with enabling cultural organizations to provide emerging artists with their first significant exposure, host residencies, offer studio space, and present public programming with strong commitments to local communities. As an experiment in social entrepreneurship, Chinatown Soup questions how a creative space can serve the interests of long-standing residents while driving a broader agenda for innovation in a way that also builds character and quality of place.