Racial Equity Community Innovators Incubator (RECII)

RECII is the first incubator focused on building an essential infrastructure to seed community-grounded innovations that build long-term and sustainable political, economic, and cultural power for black and brown communities globally. Despite the talent, skill, and unique cultural contributions of black and brown communities, they are under-resourced, under invested in, and face structural impediments and implicit bias in building long term sustainability and power. Our unique model seeks to disrupt this by focusing on:

  • Empowering, leveraging, and scaling the impact of local grassroots leaders;

  • Fostering, a multi-issue, cross-sectoral, and multidisciplinary learning hub that melds models and strategies that center racial equity and build political, economic, and cultural power;

  • Experimenting with and developing future-focused long-term power-building models and strategies that disrupt systemic racism and mitigate the ways that technology and the global digital economy will accelerate and deepen structural racism;

  • Breaking down barriers and creating a vehicle for bringing mission aligned capital to local black communities building power. We build the capacity for local groups to experiment with mission-aligned business models and revenue generation strategies that can create independent revenue generating streams as well as scale and sustain long-term power-building models.

PROBLEM ANALYSIS

  • The Incubator: The need to dismantle systemic racism has both increased urgency and complexity as a result of the pandemic and rapid technological change. As a result, there is a need for seeding and supporting local and community-based projects that center racial equity, are led by communities of color, are future-focused and are able to sustain long-term power.

  • Building Resilient Rural Enterprises: Despite a strong commercial market in South Africa, the rural black small-scale farmers, especially women, face challenges in accessing inputs, infrastructure and training necessary to improve their yields due to constraints in access to finance, technical and business capacity and scant support from government. To promote racial equity in farming and the value chain we need to intensify support to black entrepreneurs and small-scale farmers.

  • Keeping Our Communities Organized Institute (KOCOI): For black, brown, indigenous and working-class communities there are entrenched systems that are fueled by our oppression, and are highly structured and resourced. KOCOI is an institute that builds sustainable infrastructure for black, brown, and indigenous working class communities. The institute will focus on three pillars:

    • 1) policy that supports the development of black, brown and working class communities,

    • 2) sustainable infrastructure, program development, community organizing training and support, and

    • 3) management through best practices, cohort development and professional counseling

Impact

The intended impact of the collaborative pilot project was to provide a bridge between grassroots organizing/innovations and institutional/private capital.

 During the duration of this two year effort, we developed the concept for an incubator “structure” or “coordinating mechanism” that could exist parallel to, but independent of, AFRE. While we achieved what we set out to do with this pilot project, particularly in pooling and directing capital to selected projects, we will not be extending this work beyond pilot-phase.

2019Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity