How does a community come together to dream, plan, and build out an economy that supports the well-being of all workers, residents, and our environment? What strategies, ideas, skills, and relationships are needed? How do we move from the pressing needs of today, address the past harms that still impact so many lives, and envision a future that doesn't repeat these challenges? How can solutions be responsive to our city of Richmond, California, while also aligning with global goals for a healthy planet? Our Future Economy focuses on these questions through a series of engagements for the public to co-create knowledge, plans, and capacities.

Too often, "the economy" is something that happens to us, not something that we design. Even urban planners often treat the economy as something they can only set the table for through land-use zoning, worker training, and offering subsidies or tax breaks. And yet, looking at history, every major economic transition has involved essential moves made by government entities: contracting, setting regulations, investing, conducting research, planning, and using other means of shaping the new economy.

We collaborated on this project because we heard community leaders ask: "What can the community and city of Richmond do to plan for a future economy that is free from fossil fuels?" They expressed a desire to create spaces where residents are supported in discussing their needs, dreaming about their future, making plans, and advocating for what kinds of projects they would prioritize.

Our Future Economy is a public event series to explore transforming economies for communities, workers, and climate well-being, rooted in Richmond and North Richmond, CA. This series is part of a larger Othering & Belonging Institute laboratory integrating arts and cultural strategy with participatory research to create space for radical imagination and community building in this time, and to ensure that we are centering the voices, needs, and expertise of those most impacted by economic and environmental harms.

The realities of concentrated wealth and vast material needs, human-made disasters, and persistent racial and gendered hierarchies continue to generate poverty, trauma, health crises, and displacement. The need to reimagine and redesign local, regional, and transnational economies is more pressing than ever.

Richmond and North Richmond are already transforming for a more just and resilient future with polluter-pays tax revenue, a local food system anchored by an urban farm, a new youth commons, city job programs, sustainable energy production, union and community alliances, progressive tax policies, and more. Meeting community needs and advancing a just transition of the local economy requires ideas, relationships, structures, and capacities that our movements and communities are both developing and reclaiming from their lineages.

Since January of 2025, our organizations have been co-creating workshops and other events where residents share their visions of the future and help to build a more just economy in Richmond, North Richmond, and beyond. Public events have been free and open to all, and both events and workshops have been intentionally designed to support the participation of those most harmed and marginalized by the current economy. These events and workshops center Richmond and North Richmond residents, organizers, artists, and cultural workers, and integrate arts and cultural strategies through music, dance, applied theater, speakers, story circles, community dialogue, and time to socialize.

The goals of the collaboration are:

• Amplify the voices of Richmond and North Richmond, lived experiences, ancestral knowledge, cultural practices, community visions, values, and frameworks, exemplary place-based efforts, and related plans and policies that can help facilitate a just transition.
• Work through arts and cultural strategy to facilitate dialogue and practices that apply local knowledge and generate ideas for initiatives that both meet community needs and transform the economy away from dependence on fossil fuels.
• Create space for coalition-building, thought-partnering, and resource-sharing between our Richmond- and North Richmond-based partner organizations.
• Share ideas, examples, goals, and strategies from national and global movements and values-aligned scholar practitioners.

In February of 2025, the Our Future Economy series held its first event at the Richmond Memorial Auditorium, co-hosted by the Othering and Belonging Institute and co-sponsored by local organizations Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Cooperation Richmond, East Bay Center for Performing Arts, Healthy Richmond, Community Housing Development Corporation, Full Spectrum Labs, Richmond Community Foundation, Rising Juntos, RYSE, Safe Return Project, San Francisco Foundation, Sojourner Truth Presbyterian Church, Sustainable Economies Law Center, Urban Habitat, and Urban Tilth.

The MC was Luna Angulo, a visionary local organizer working for climate justice and just transition, and speakers included Reverend Kamal Hassan of Sojourner Truth Presbyterian Church, OBI Community Power and Policy Partnerships Director / Richmond resident Eli Moore, and Principal of Full Spectrum Capital Partners and co-founder/Senior Advisor to Movement Strategy Center Taj James. There were performances by East Bay Center for Performing Arts' Son de la Tierra and the Othering & Belonging Institute's Belonging Resident Company, as well as playback theater to gather participants' input about their experiences of being involved in similar community processes. Community members explored their visions for Richmond's future economy through a Padlet exercise, in which they wrote and shared reflections with one another on what "the good life" would be for them. Participants also shared what they see as existing strengths and assets that Richmond has and should build on.

In April of 2025, the Othering & Belonging Institute hosted a virtual event where we explored approaches to a just transition more broadly, situating the work happening in Richmond and North Richmond in both the national and global contexts of this work. This event lifted up the strategies of invest/divest, arts and cultural strategy, and legal strategy as they are currently being applied to just transition work throughout the Americas. Speakers included Ricardo Nuñez of the Sustainable Economies Law Center alongside OBI collaborators Sarah Crowell, José Richard Aviles, Chelsea Gregory, and Eli Moore. The event started with mindfulness and "movement for movements" designed for the Zoom space, and participants closed out by reflecting on how they might apply the three strategies in their communities.

Following these public events, Richmond and North Richmond organizations collaborated more in-depth on workshops designed for residents to generate visions for a future economy and priority projects that could help make progress toward this future. These deeper collaborations began through workshops with East Bay Center (EBCPA) and Young Women's Freedom Center (YWFC), followed by a town hall-style workshop and community dialogue with members of YWFC, EBCPA, and Safe Return Project (SRP) in December 2025. These workshops and the town hall helped convey to community members why this work is timely given the Chevron polluters pay settlement and other potential support for just transition work, and also generated interest in being part of a participatory process of identifying priorities for how funds could be spent. Urban Tilth also collaborated with OBI in that timeframe to co-design a series of participatory planning workshops called Not for Us Without Us that launched in North Richmond in early 2026, to ensure that North Richmond would be centered as a fenceline community and not left out of these conversations. This phase helped continue to strengthen relationships between organizational partners and community members, reveal the challenges community members face, their visions for a future economy, and the deep expertise they hold. Throughout the process, Our Future Economy has been guided by insights from Richmond and North Richmond community members' lived experience, ancestral knowledge, and cultural practices of care for the earth and their fellow community members.