Celebrating a Decade of Building an Economy for All

Beloved Community Incubator (BCI) invites you to celebrate our tenth anniversary with us on Friday, October 16, 2026!  We’re hosting this community event to honor the past decade of volunteers, funders, community partners, and BCI Network members who built this organization alongside us – and share our vision for our next decade of building an economy for all.

From a moment to a movement: BCI began in 2016 as a listening campaign. We asked community members how the changing political climate impacted their lives, and their responses were clear: work was their number one stressor. Neighbors who worked in extractive industries wanted something better than wage theft and toxic employers that levied their power over immigrant workers.

From that listening campaign grew a movement to build our regional solidarity economy – an economy where workers have control over their workplaces and have democratic and economic power within their communities.

Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of “beloved community,” we have spent the last ten years expanding our network of cooperatives – providing legal and technical assistance to more than thirty local businesses and collectives. We also manage the DC Solidarity Economy Loan Fund (DC SELF) through our partnership with Seed Commons, issuing more than $3 million in non-extractive loans to local cooperatives and solidarity economy projects since 2022.

Sustaining momentum: Please join us for an evening of cocktails, celebrations, and collective visioning. We can’t wait to share what’s in store for our next ten years.