Earlier this summer, Beloved Community Incubator hosted our second All-Network Convening at Sycamore & Oak, bringing Network members together to celebrate the growth of the Network and build relationships among member cooperatives. BCI workers and representatives from three Network cooperatives – Swamp Rose Co-op, Transverse Cooperative, and Steady Productions – worked together to plan our agenda and co-facilitate the day.
During our last convening in 2023, we gathered eight cooperatives to dream about what a network of co-ops and solidarity economy projects could collectively offer each other and the larger economy in the DC region. Network members imagined a regional economy driven by care and cooperation, rather than extraction and profit – where co-ops had access to capital, free legal and accounting support, and free/sliding scale exchanges of services with each other.
Over the past three years, we’ve tended the seeds from that first gathering and have grown the BCI Network membership to 32 co-ops, and built out the resources and benefits we offer to local cooperatives.
At our 2026 Convening, more than 70 people representing 22 coops gathered to connect, share experiences, and learn about our member benefits, which include everything from loans through DC SELF, legal support hours from BCI and our partner Gilmore Khandhar, technical assistance including accounting support, $1,000 for capacity-building projects and activities, cooperative development sessions, solidarity exchanges of services, and connections to local grantmakers.
Ed Whitfield, a Senior Fellow from Seed Commons, provided an opening plenary that seamlessly connected the day-to-day work of cooperatives and our goal of creating a regional solidarity economy to national and global struggles for economic justice, and the histories of colonialism, imperialism, enslavement that produced the world and political economy we currently exist in. We were thrilled to have Ed’s clear and impactful remarks to ground our work together through the morning and afternoon sessions.
In the afternoon, our Network Member Transverse Cooperative led us through an Offers and Needs Market, where individuals and cooperatives shared requests and offers of support with each other – building a map of our Network’s shared needs and collective resources, and creating space for members to dream about ways to collaborate together.
The direction and vision of the BCI Network has always been guided by the needs and desires of local cooperatives. We spent the final session of the Convening working to figure out the next collective economic project we wanted to take on together, including buying group benefits, purchasing time from a marketing consultant for member cooperatives, and building out back-end HR support for our members.
Beloved Community Incubator started out in 2016 by incubating one cooperative, but over the past ten years, we’ve expanded our vision to sustain and grow a regional network of cooperatives. When co-ops and solidarity economy projects receive consistent support, they’re able to grow sustainably and weather local and national economic and political hardships. As we closed out our second All-Network Convening, we left feeling hopeful about the future of workers and the economic dreams we’ve already made into reality in our region.
