We’re excited to share that we recently completed our second annual strategy retreat with the REAL People’s Fund (RPF), deepening our ongoing partnership with this vital community-powered initiative in the East Bay, CA.
This February, our team returned to Oakland to facilitate RPF’s 2025 strategy retreat, building on the foundation established during our initial collaboration last year. The two-day session brought together RPF’s democratically-governed leadership to address critical organizational questions during a period of transition and growth.
As RPF continues to advance its mission of providing non-extractive capital and holistic support to BIPOC entrepreneurs in East Bay communities, our facilitation focused on three key areas:
- Reimagining RPF’s community governance and operational structure to align with current capacity and future goals
- Evaluating options for continued alignment of all RPF’s commitments to values and mission
- Building on insights from RPF’s power-building strategy to chart new directions
A significant focus of this year’s retreat was establishing non-negotiables for community ownership as a core principle of RPF’s work. Through structured discussions and collaborative sessions, RPF leaders articulated clear standards for ensuring that financial decisions remain rooted in community priorities and values. This work reflects RPF’s commitment to not just distributing resources differently, but to fundamentally transforming how decisions about those resources are made. It’s an approach that recognizes that true economic justice requires new models of governance and power-sharing.