GARE is dedicated to building a vibrant social impact network by enhancing peer-to-peer connections through customized engagement opportunities. The Innovation Community strategy serves as a cornerstone for collaboration, bringing together practitioners to develop innovative tools and resources that strengthen the network's impact. These contributions are integral to driving transformative change in government institutions.
The Innovation Community is a space for leading racial equity practitioners to share their stories, showcase effective practices, and ensure the sustainability of their work. It offers a supportive environment for peer learning, creative problem-solving, and cultivating trusting relationships across the network. By nurturing these connections, the Innovation Community enables advanced practitioners to co-create meaningful solutions and deepen the collective impact of their racial equity work.
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The exercise with which I ask every Innovation Community Cadre to engage is grounded in the opening lines of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, an anthology edited by Walida Imerisha and andrienne maree brown, “When we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. In a world in which racism exists, racial equity is innovation and requires imagination.” I ask every cadre to close their eyes and imagine a world without white supremacist patriarchy and imagine what it feels like to not feel the constant threat of violence that hegemonic power requires.
I ask you, reader, to take a moment to do the same. Pause… breathe deeply and imagine. Deeply.
Now, think about what that world might require of you… of all of us.
Because we do not know a world where freedom exists in the broadest sense, we all - racial equity practitioners - think about and engage in fiction and the speculative every day. When practitioners reimagine budget policy, strategize about moving council, or practice relationship-building with the community - they manifest the not-yet of racial equity into being. The imagination space of a future we have not yet seen but we are building is what Innovative Practice and Community seeks to create with each cadre.
The California Innovation Community cadre is composed of 25 experienced equity practitioners across disciplines from every part of the state. The California Innovation Community has been meeting online once a month to imagine new ways of doing the work to which we are assigned and the work to which we are called. In June, we met in person for a cadre retreat in Berkeley! The purpose of the retreat was to connect, build skills in intentional and unintentional collaboration practices, strengthen democratic decision-making, and solidify projects and content that the cadre will produce by the end of the year. Through playful and thoughtful exercises, we explored collaborative processes, engaging in theater and creative play to help us organize and practice the collaboration we need to co-create content for the field. Together we reflected deeply on the needs of the equity field, the work of the California Innovation Community Cadre, where the gaps lie, and what we need to advance our work. These reflections shaped the focus of the content that these brilliant practitioners are now drafting - content that holds universal relevance for our network while being deeply rooted in a sense of place and the unique contextual needs of the cadre.
Currently, we are in the fourth quarter of the California Innovation Community cadre. The cadre has been working hard at developing content to share with our network in 2025. The content includes a model of a resource map, strategies for institutionalizing equity across municipalities, a rubric that determines readiness to engage, and a toolkit that outlines how to cultivate psychological safety on CORE teams.
Even as the contexts and particularities of issues in California differ greatly from those in North Carolina, Florida, and Texas - the sites for the first Innovation Community - the throughline of inquiry is unmistakably shared. What do practitioners need to deepen their practice? What tools will help them run farther, faster, and longer? What will connect us and remind us that we are not alone in the work? These questions continue to guide California’s cadre, as they did the Southern Innovation Community.
Hopefully, what is coming down the pike helps you to stop and reflect… to speculate and imagine. It is from those imaginings that your own work begins.
Cecilia Olusola Tribble is the GARE Director of Innovative Practice.