Location: Brooklyn, NY
Region: United States
Founding: 2021
Founders/leadership: Marina Lopez; Sruti Suryanarayanan; Caroline Woolard; Nati Linares; Ebony Gustave; Robin Bean Crane, co-organizers

Art.coop is a central hub, providing artists with financial resources, innovative ideas, and practical tools to strengthen their communities. Art.coop is reshaping the future of art, placing community governance at its core. It provides a haven for artists seeking alternatives to the traditional system, promoting the formation of networks based on solidarity within the arts sector. The critical role of culture in redistributing power and wealth is widely recognized, with artists building meaningful connections and holding each other accountable. Arts and social justice funders appreciate the importance of integrating equitable practices into cultural work, making Art.Coop a key collaborator in these efforts.

The art world, which reflects broader economic inequalities, often marginalizes artists from poor, working-class, queer, disabled, trans, and BIPOC backgrounds through exploitative practices. Art.Coop advocates for building solidarity networks as a crucial step towards change.

Dedicated to fostering a community of artists committed to redefining the art world, Art.coop is at the forefront of an artist-led movement for change, with a vision of collective liberation. A key achievement was the seven week Study-into-Action program, which engaged 105 cultural innovators and seven facilitators, incorporating feedback from a broad spectrum of contributors. This feedback was vital in shaping Art.coop’s strategic direction.

The Move the Money initiative underscores Art.Coop’s commitment to the solidarity economy, providing resources and events for grantmakers focused on economic justice in the arts. A highlight of this commitment is the launch of a pilot podcast season exploring the Solidarity Economy through the perspectives of artists and cultural workers actively contributing to it in their communities. This podcast offers a platform for sharing insights and inspiring collective action

Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2021
Founders/leadership: Leila McCabe, executive director

The Beloved Communities Network (BCN) is a continuation of the years of work and wisdom that went into building the Transitions Initiative. As we continue on this journey of transitioning to a world of love, interdependence, and resilience, the Beloved Communities Network will build from the foundation that has been laid, while also strengthening, reinforcing, and designing new ways to leap into the world we imagine. 

Beloved Community is not ours in conception. The concept is rooted in the legacy of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Grace Lee Boggs, and others, and is carried forward through many people investing in the idea that we can live in a world of economic and social justice. With the imagination we bring to this work, we envision a holistic approach that includes leading with bold vision and values, embodied practice, radical connection, and strategic navigation.

We know that now is a time of great transition and change. Around the globe 
we see unprecedented climate disruption and upheaval across economic, political, and cultural systems. We are all facing uncertainty and seeking paths to a future we can believe in. In this time we also feel a calling, an invitation, a possibility, beyond what we can presently see.

We have the capacity to answer this call. We have the capacity to bring forth a future that is kicking to be born. We have the capacity to be that future, to be the power and strength of our vision, our purpose, and our relationships. 

Our communities are calling on us to recognize our undeniable interdependence and make a courageous commitment to love. Our mutual future depends on generating new solutions that reflect this recognition and commitment.  

This is the calling of the Beloved Communities Network.

Leila McCabe

Leila (she/her), executive director of the Beloved Communities Network and founder of JoyLabs, is a mama, artist, strategist, movement maker, and builder. She brings over 15 years of experience in community and campus organizing, electoral organizing, movement building, and facilitation. She is dedicated to creating spaces for deep and authentic relationships to emerge across diverse constituencies and coalitions. 

In 2010, Leila was a founding member of the successful minimum wage campaign in San Jose, California that helped kick-start the national minimum wage movement. In the 2012 election cycle, Leila led a team of 20 people to register 14,000 new voters in Santa Clara County going on to be the deputy field director for a progressive mayoral candidate in San Jose, the 10th largest city in the country. She has also worked in many nonprofit organizations and partnered with multiple colleges, churches, community members, and other organizations in developing curriculum and facilitating workshops. 

Leila completed a certificate in leadership and social change at DeAnza College and Bachelor’s in sociology with a concentration in community change from San Jose State University. She is currently studying to complete her certificate as a certified personal trainer from the National Academy of Sports Medicine. 

In 2021, Leila founded JoyLabs, a space where physical movement meets emotional resilience in a beloved community. JoyLabs trains the resistance through embodied resistance training. 

Leila lives in Oakland California with her husband Calvin and son Malik. She serves on the advisory board to In Lak’ech dance academy and, to bring balance and healing to her life, Leila trains capoeira, lifts weights, and dances. 

Read more about BCN’s involvement in the Queer Afro Latin Dance Fest in San Jose, CA on the Move Blog.

Read more about BCN’s graphic guide, Ten Thousand Beloved Communities, on the Move Blog.

Check out part 1 of the fireside chats cohosted by BCN and MSC at the Transformative Movement building event on the Move Blog.

Check out part 2 of the fireside chats cohosted by BCN and MSC at the Transformative Movement building event on the Move Blog.

Location: Alabama; California; Tennessee
Region: National
Founding: 2018
Founders/leadership: Anasa Troutman, project director, founder

BIG We Foundation (BWF) unleashes the social imagination of those who often go unheard, and supports building a world reimagined from their point of view. It cultivates economic and cultural drivers grounded in Black imagination to foster a culture of belonging for everyone. By following the vision and leadership of those who live in or come from historically undermined communities, BWF values are their north star, guiding them on the journey of embodying the culture shift we are working to create in the world. BWF does its part to generate a thriving culture and healthy communities, where we can all experience sustained safety, joy, abundance, and love.  

BIG We Foundation is a nonprofit arts and culture intermediary built to provide infrastructure and opportunity for high potential, under-resourced communities. The organization employs a culture shift model that leverages storytelling, community building, and real world implementation. It expresses a commitment to co-creating the future by investing in people and communities aligned with and working towards a shared vision. BWF priority areas — womxn and girls, wellness equity, and restorative economics — are designed to work together in Black, Indigenous, and other BIPOC communities, forming a fully integrated, narrative-based, and holistic approach to their work. 

Read more about BWF’s Anasa Troutman’s participation in a Transfromative Movement building event on the Move Blog.

Location: Bay Area, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Lawrence Ellis, board president; Tania Abdul, board secretary; Javier LaFianza, board member

Breathe understands that comprehensive, accelerated change requires the pressure of a mass movement with historically marginalized people at the center. Breathe exists to support and increase the numbers of people working for racial equity, justice, and resilience, prioritizing BIPOC and young people. 

In the summer of 2020, a group of people with a wide range of experience began a synergistic process to arrive at Breathe’s unique formula for change. Everyone serving on the team is a lifelong activist, devoted to building a just, equitable, resilient world. Breathe’s current leadership includes: a concert/event producer, a teacher/community builder, an AGILE business coach/multinational venture designer, a tenants’ rights lawyer, a nonprofit executive director, the CFO of a global advertising firm, an actor/coach, and a web designer/immersive experience producer.

Breathe believes that intersectional solitary is the only way forward. An anti-racism organization at its core, Breathe utilizes media, events, interactive technology, the arts, and activist development to amplify, unify, and support impacted communities’ work for racial, environmental, and climate justice. Breathe is a network and platform that draws supporters with compelling media by and about community leaders and artists to educate and motivate audiences to act. Breathe’s web network for learning, action, and community-building provides a sense of solidarity and empowerment, with tools for recruitment and ongoing engagement. These catalytic events and action campaigns build relationships based on shared knowledge, effort, and resources, and offer constituents support networks, leadership and organizer training, and production and accelerator assistance for development and funding.

Read more about Breathe’s podcast, Sandblasted at the Shipyard, on the Move Blog.

Location: Washington, D.C.
Founding: 2023
Founders/leadership: Sam Draisen, Dean Ilyas, co-founders

Democracy at Home enhances the political engagement of young leaders by promoting greater accessibility to the decision making process. 

Democracy, at its most basic level, is direct involvement in decision making. Throughout its history, American democracy has fallen short of this most basic benchmark. Increasing accessibility to politics allows us all to claim power and influence decisions made by those we elect.

Democracy at Home works on projects that put decision making at the fingertips of the youngest segments of the electorate. The organization is committed to promoting intersectionality and anti-racism in all of its endeavors.

Location: Bay Area, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2017
Founders/leadership: Carla Perez, founder 

Healing Clinic Collective (HCC) encourages re-engagement to a sacred way of relating to ourselves as whole people. With a network of over 130 healers and wellness practitioners, HCC’s goal is to connect people in need of holistic healing to natural and traditional healers and wellness practitioners for ongoing care. HCC aims to restore reverence and relationship to ancestral forms of healing and wellness that come from world views rooted in cultural understandings and expressions of love, interconnectedness, and a regenerative relationship to both people and the earth. 

Traditional prayer ceremonies are a foundational part of how HCC seeks and implements guidance for their ongoing work and is part of their organizing process for community-based healing clinics. HCC considers prayer an important part of their work: prayers are conducted in accordance to old world instructions of how to exchange loving energy with the power of the elements, ancestors and other spirit helpers. Prayers may be up to several hours long and can be for anything from the most dire global needs to specific desires for our work on the ground in the Bay Area.

Healing Clinic Collective offers consultations to individuals, organizations, and community-based groups who want to organize a healing clinic for their community with a focus on loving, traditional healing sessions to people from especially traumatized populations in the Bay Area. The organization works to raise awareness, including in working class communities, about the broad world of natural and ancestral healing modalities that are holistic and multi-layered. This may be for a school community, church community, neighborhood residents, or for organizations. 

Location: Oakland, CA; Brooklyn, NY 
Region: National
Founding: 2009 
Founders/leadership: Terry Marshall, founder/creative director; Aisha Shillingford, artistic director; Kira Joy Williams, creative project manager

Intelligent Mischief is a creative studio and design lab whose purpose is to unleash Black imagination to shape a future based on liberation, resilience, regeneration, and interdependence. Their vision is of a global, autonomous, interconnected archipelago of Black liberated zones or beloved communities that practice sacred governance at a scale necessary to transform systems. By boosting innovation and imagination, Intelligent Mischief aims to realign action logic and experiment with new forms of culture and civil society, creating atmospheres of change.

Intelligent Mischief invites creative collaboration with groups and coalitions seeking ways to align their mission, strategy, and policies with a vision of beautiful futures for all Black people. Their work is centered at the intersection of art, design, and popular culture to create spaces — such as publications, multi-platform worldbuilding and story experiences, hackathons and art installations — where Black folks can imagine and co-create beautiful futures. Their Creative Studio has nurtured many projects, including a massive multi-platform immersive story world called NationX.

Read more about the relationship between funders and movement leaders including Intelligent Mischief’s Terry Marshall on the Move Blog.

Read more about Intelligent Mischief’s Aisha Shillingford and Terry Marshall’s participation in a Transformative Movement building event on the Move Blog.

Watch MSC’s 73 Questions-style interview with Aisha Shillingford, Intellient Mischief’s artistic director, on the Move Blog.

Read what Aisha Shillingford, Intellient Mischief’s artistic director, had to say about about the passing of ibrahim abdul-matin on the Move Blog.

Location: Puerto Rico 
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Julie Quiroz

New Moon Collaborations is a home for innovation that centers the spirit, strength, vision, and creativity of Black and Indigenous people and communities of color. New Moon’s purpose is to nurture leaps in culture that transform systems and structures for generations to come, cultivating collaborations to generate strategy grounded in embodied community wisdom and story. 

New Moon recognizes that achieving a future of regeneration, resilience, and love will require a vibrant ecosystem of diverse, interrelated efforts that are:

• Deeply rooted in place,
• Nourished by conscious practice of relationships in beloved community,
• Animated by personally held narrative of past, present, and future that is not defined by white supremacy,
• And grounded in practical, specific, and audacious community wealth development strategy.

New Moon’s work reflects practices and knowledge across all four elements, with a keen focus on shaping and nurturing purpose-driven narrative. New Moon’s work takes many forms including designing and facilitating powerful cross-sector communities of learning and action, producing strategic community-centered video storytelling, conducting qualitative narrative strategy research, and guiding efforts to communicate verbally and visually with clear purpose and vision.

Read more from Julie Quiroz of New Moon Collaborations about MSC’s Transitions Labs on the Move Blog.

Read more from Julie Quiroz of New Moon Collaborations about #BlackLivesMatter on the Move Blog.

Read more from Julie Quiroz of New Moon Collaborations about Love With Power on the Move Blog.

Location: Oakland, CA; Houston, TX
Region: National
Founding: 2008
Founders/leadership: Naina Khanna, co-director

Positive Women’s Network – USA (PWN-USA) is a national membership body of women living with HIV. It was founded in 2008 by 28 women leaders living with HIV, diverse in background and experiences — rural, southern, and urban, of diverse races and ethnicities, and spanning a spectrum of ages ranging from 21 to 72 years old. A foundational part of the MSC ecosystem since 2013, PWN-USA’s mission is to prepare and involve women and people of trans experience living with HIV in all levels of policy and decision-making, strengthening the strategic power of all women living with HIV in the United States. 

Every day, Positive Women’s Network – USA inspires, informs, and mobilizes women living with HIV to advocate for changes that improve their lives and uphold their rights. PWN-USA develops a leadership pipeline and policy agenda that applies a gender lens to the domestic HIV epidemic grounded in social justice and human rights. An organizing machine populated by self-identified women living with HIV — including women of transgender experience — members participate in workgroups, regional chapters, training, and events. PWN-USA supports regional chapters in building leadership at a local, state, and federal advocacy level. 

Community informed, the PWN-USA board of directors consists entirely of women living with HIV, representing the epidemic’s diverse communities. Co-director Naina Khanna supports a vision of a world where women living with HIV can live long, healthy, dignified lives that are free from stigma and discrimination.

A national speaker, trainer, and advocate, Naina Khanna has worked in the HIV field since 2005, following her HIV diagnosis in 2002. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for AIDS United, the National Steering Committee for the US People Living with HIV Caucus, is a member of the Women’s HIV Research Initiative and served on President Obama’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) from 2010-2014. 

Location: Oakland, CA
Region: National
Founding: 2017
Founders/leadership: Alexis Flanagan, co-director; Doris Dupuy, co-director

Resonance is an ever-expanding network of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, women, femme, trans, and two-spirit people and their co-conspirators who are building a world beyond violence — a world rooted in mutual care, where all people live in dignity, and all beings can thrive. 

Resonance’s worldbuilding draws on the lineage of radical feminist, BIPOC movement leaders who have, alongside communities, developed powerful ways to oppose and resolve violence. Today, Resonance practitioners are taking the next step toward transformation, by uprooting the complex and interrelated causes of violence, and supplanting them with ways of being in our families and communities, cultural norms, and systems of governance that reflect our values. 

Resonance participants are healers, leaders, artists, survivors, and storytellers creating visionary spaces to access creativity and radical imagination, and practice what it means to thrive.

Resonance Network participants believe that liberation is a practice, and are building the world we know is possible, by: 

• Activating Radical Imagination: co-creating community-rooted action spaces that interrupt the current dominant worldview, and cultivate mutual care in ourselves, communities, and collective systems.

• Claiming Collective Governance: practicing — in our families, tribes, teams, and communities — a set of principles that affirm our sacred responsibility to care for one another and the earth.

• Building Reach and Resonance: building authentic relationships, a shared vision, and collaborative action with individuals and communities who share a commitment to building a liberatory future.

Resonance Network first took root in 2013 with the first cohort of movement leaders to take part in Move to End Violence, a ten year program of the NoVo Foundation. Their shared vision of a world beyond violence made it clear they would need to work beyond the constraints of mainstream anti-violence approaches, taking the longer, more emergent path toward transforming violence and cultivating thriving individuals and communities. 

Resonance Network’s founding members also recognized that transforming the roots of violence meant centering the people whose communities were most impacted by interpersonal and institutional violence. This intention remains a guiding force today.

From its founding, Resonance made the intentional choice to configure ourselves as a network. Unlike traditional organizations, networks hold the capacity to adapt, evolve, and scale in response to changing contexts and current events. This dynamic form not only mirrors the way change happens in natural networks like mycelium or a coral reef — it also makes broad transformation possible.

Today, MSC works in collaboration with Resonance’s core team and Navigators Circle as the network continues to evolve and grow. Made up of network participants, the Navigators Circle uses network principles of co-design, consent, and collaborative practice to support the Resonance team in choice-making about infrastructure and strategy. Through consent-based decision-making, Resonance practices the governance it hopes to see in the world: centering compassion, deep relationship, and collective thriving.