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: 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: 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
Founding: 2014
Founders/leadership: Rufaro Gwarada; Aparna Shah

The reSet Project cultivates imagination and builds power toward inclusive and participatory governance that centers people and the natural world. Working with tribal, community and state leaders, artists, cultural workers, organizers, communicators, academics, and advocates, they seed cultural shifts and intentionally integrate arts and cultural organizing to ensure that decision making power and influence reside within communities and tribes. Rooted in their unwavering love and collective strength, the reSet Project activates whole people, thriving families, and interconnected communities from a place of expansive vision. Together, they’re rebuilding a world of care, joy, and belonging.

Launching in Summer 2021, reSet and the Resonance Network are working with organizational partners across the country in a collaborative learning community to deepen their understanding and practice of collective governance, guided by the WeGovern agreements. 

Resources:

The reSet Project builds on many years of experience and partnerships, as described in these reports which articulate their grounding ideas:
Cultural Strategy: An Introduction and Primer, 2019
The what, why, and how of Cultural Strategy. Commissioned from Art/Work Practice with the support of Unbound Philanthropy. 
Until We Are All Free: A Case Study in Cultural Strategy, 2019
A summary of Until We Are All Free, our culture-led racial justice initiative with CultureStrike in partnership with Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Commissioned from Art/Work Practice with the support of Unbound Philanthropy.

Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2006
Founders/leadership: Nicole Lee, co-founder, executive director; Xiomara Castro, co-founder; Sikander Iqbal, deputy director

Urban Peace Movement (UPM) transforms both the culture and conditions that lead to urban violence, focusing on building youth leadership for peace on Oakland’s streets. In addition to movement building, UPM’s youth members work on policy and systems change, healing, and culture change. 

One of UPM’s programs is Leaders In Training, a youth organizing and social justice leadership program for high school-aged youths from neighborhoods directly impacted by high rates of violence and mass incarceration. Leaders In Training members have been involved in a number of local policy issues such as raising Oakland’s minimum wage, defeating a proposed youth curfew policy, pushing to end the treatment of youth as adults in the criminal justice system, and helping pass Prop 57. 

Another youth leadership program is the Determination Black Men’s Group, a collaboration between UPM and the United Roots Center. Determination Black Men’s Group involves cultural healing and social justice circle for transitioning-aged African American young men who are formerly incarcerated or who have been near or involved in street life. These circles serve as an opportunity for community members to come together to address harmful behavior in a process that explores harms and needs, obligations, and necessary engagement. Participants create media and messaging campaigns focused on the health and achievement of young men of color in partnership with the California Endowment’s Boys and Men of Color Initiative. 

Most recently, in partnership with other organizations, UPM is taking action to protect the systems-impacted youth of Alameda County who are disproportionately Black and Brown. This is an opportunity to refocus our juvenile justice (or injustice) system away from incarceration and towards creating opportunities for youth to be cared for and thrive. 

Read more about UPM’s Scratch and Fade event in Oakland, CA on the Move Blog.

Read more about UPM’s history in youth organizing on the Move Blog.

Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2019
Founders/leadership: Calvin Williams

Wakanda Dream Lab is a collective fan-driven project that bridges the worlds of Black fandom and #Blacktivism for Black Liberation. It functions according to a value emergence and celebrates the organic self-organizing nature of fandom. The intention is to build on the aesthetics and pop-culture appeal of Wakanda to develop a vision, principles, values, and frameworks for prefigurative organizing with a new base of activists, artists, and fans for Black Liberation. This project is rooted in the belief Black Liberation begets liberation of all peoples.

Wakanda Dream Lab catalyzes and co-creates vision-led, future-facing world-building resources like toolkits, curricula, podcasts, webinars, Twitter town halls, and events rooted in the Black Panther universe and Wakanda. Participants are invited to immerse themselves in world building and visionary solution making through design labs, hackathons, and workshops.

In October 2019, Wakanda Dream Labs published Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Reimagining Gender in Wakanda, an anthology of revolutionary social justice-oriented art, poetry, and fiction from all across the gender spectrum. In August 2021, the Oakland Museum of Art exhibit “Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism” featured work from Wakanda Dream Lab’s Calvin Williams. In a continued exploration of Afrofuturism, Williams collaborated on a film entitled Space to Dream, and it was selected as a 2021 Docs in Action Film Fund recipient.

Read what Calvin Williams, founder of Wakanda Dream Lab, had to say about about the passing of ibrahim abdul-matin on the Move Blog.

Location: Oakland, CA
Founders/leadership: Weyam Ghadbian

Weyam Ghadbian is a Syrian community weaver, healer, meditation instructor, and transformative facilitator. As well as a skilled instruction in trauma-informed mindfulness meditation, a secularized practice that comes out of the Theravada Buddhist lineage. 

In addition to one-on-one coaching, Ghadbian is a Syntara System certified energy healing practitioner. In addition, Ghadbian facilitates transformative workshops to cultivate embodied conflict transformation capacity for social change activists. Through Weyam Healing & Conflict Transformation, Ghadbian offers skill-building training series for organizations and groups utilizing the Turning Towards Each Other Conflict Workbook Curriculum, which takes an embodied, structural power, and equity-informed approach to conflict transformation. 

Recently, Ghadbian released Turning Towards Each Other, a workbook on conflict for people working to change the world together, co-authored with Jovida Ross. The booklet gathers and adapts tools that have been used to help navigate conflict while moving towards transformative change in groups with a deep belief in people’s transformative capacity to access wholeness and create new worlds based in love. Currently, Ghadbian and Ross are working towards building translated versions of the Turning Towards Each Other and developing a podcast to share their approach to conflict transformation with a wider audience. 

Weyam Healing & Conflict Transformation offers workshops and has supported programs in conflict transformation, understanding, communications, and dominant culture patterns.