In a time of growing backlash and burnout, Kindred: an emergent BIPOC affinity space is a monthly, virtual community space for BIPOC leaders in VCET’s partner organizations or who are alumni of the Virginia Progressive Leadership Program to come together to rest, reflect, build relationships, and strengthen their leadership in community.
We’re guided by these principles
Co-creating space
Cultivating a shared, affirming environment informed by the needs and interests of BIPOC participants, shaping what it becomes
Building connections
Deepening relationships rooted in trust and mutual support to counter isolation and strengthen collective resilience across the ecosystem
Exploring possibility
Creating room to imagine, experiment, and step into new ways of leading, organizing, and being beyond survival and towards liberated futures
Kindred is offered on the first Thursday of every month from 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM to people of the global majority for VAPLP alumni and staff at VCET’s partner organizations. To be inclusive for all our partners, staff includes full-time employees, part-time employees, contractors, and volunteers in cases where your organization is majority volunteer-run. At this time, it does not include organization members, bases, and volunteers.
Rooted in collective healing, transformative relationships, abundance, embodied practice, and radical vision, Kindred transforms isolation into solidarity, and care into collective power, so BIPOC leaders can sustain themselves and the movement for the long haul.
Together, we will
Engage in inner work and lineage work that the long-term project of racial justice calls for
Build interdependent relationships and mutual support networks
Practice community care and peer learning to sustain selves and leadership
Meet Your Co-Facilitators
-
Robyn Harper (she/her) is the Founder of The Chiron Project LLC, a consulting practice that equips people to navigate social power and lead anti-oppressive change through coaching, facilitated learning, and strategic advising.
With over a decade of experience spanning research, policy development, public education, and community organizing, Robyn is known for blending intellectual rigor with deep empathy—helping individuals and organizations grapple with complex questions about identity, power, and social impact.
Robyn’s work is grounded in a simple but powerful belief: everyday people—what she often calls “everyday heroes”—have the capacity to shape a more liberated, anti-oppressive world when they are empowered to leverage their individual and collective social power strategically.
-
As a Black woman engaged in social change work—both professionally and in my community—I know what it feels like to be in spaces that are meant to address injustice, but don’t fully make space for those most impacted by it. Too often, I’ve experienced learning spaces that prioritize “catching the privileged up,” rather than tending to the realities, needs, and wisdom of those already navigating harm.
That experience shapes how I facilitate.
I understand that this work comes with constant tension—between care and urgency, between personal impact and professional responsibility, between what is and what could be. I design spaces that don’t rush past those tensions, but invite participants to sit with them, make meaning of them, and move through them in community. This includes naming and unpacking internalized oppression, and how it shapes our relationships, decisions, and sense of what’s possible.
My role is not to provide answers, but to create the conditions for honest conversation, connection, and collective learning. Drawing on lived experiences, multidisciplinary research, and participatory facilitation skills, I hold space for both the weight people carry and the possibility that can emerge when we reflect and grow together.
In Kindred, this becomes a space where BIPOC staff can show up as they are, learn from one another, and reconnect with their sense of purpose and agency—grounded in collective care and a deeper awareness of power and responsibility.
-
Nico Climaco (they/any) is a facilitator and relationship-builder working towards realizing racial and social justice in our organizations and communities. They are invested in nurturing the garden where liberation can grow. Nico’s work lives at the intersections of learning, reflection, and action. A lifelong student, Nico is informed by roles of a guide, weaver, builder, and an Ella Baker-ethic kind of leadership.
As a queer Filipino and Puerto Rican (and openly proud Gemini), Nico has always been curious about the threads of culture and alternative practices to the traditional ways of doing. Politicized by their ancestral lineage and the work of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, Nico is invested in co-creating peer learning spaces and considers community-building as powerbuilding to be the basis of their work.
-
As a facilitator, my approach is rooted in how we build power together — not just through what we know, but through how we relate and practice in community, with all its nuance. I design active, participatory spaces where we make meaning, surface tensions, and test ideas in real time. While I guide the room with intention, I also listen deeply to learn and grow alongside you.
As a queer Filipino and Puerto Rican, I am attentive to how culture, identity, and lived experience are central to how we understand power and possibility. I like to think I bring warmth, humor, and care into the space, balancing rigor with levity so we can engage deeply without losing connection to ourselves or each other.
I believe the way we make sense of the world shapes what we think is possible — and that expanding those possibilities allows us to practice new ways of living and working toward justice and liberation.
Our Why
Years after this country’s most recent racial reckoning, challenges have risen from a backlash to racial justice efforts, often referred to as “Whitelash,” and fueled by the perceived threat to a shift in power dynamics. This has resulted in a rise of authoritarianism and the emboldenment of white supremacy shown through the dismantling of anti-racism efforts institutionally and culturally, the abolishment of race conscious education, and the threats of safety among immigrant and trans communities. For organizations that retained their commitment to racial justice, the difficult work of doing transformative work coupled with inconsistent support and resources resulted in challenging conditions particularly for BIPOC leaders. Often, BIPOC leaders are overly stretched and set up to fail.
“The burden of BIPOC leaders is that they are being asked to simultaneously dismantle the past, survive in the present, and create alternative futures.” (Neha Mahajan and Felicia Griffin, The Call of Leadership Now, April 20, 2023).
It is not enough to merely look beyond repairing the effects of structural racism but we must move progress towards racial justice by equipping leaders with resources, love and connection, and time and space.
VCET’s affinity group, Kindred, meets monthly with leaders of the global majority across Virginia. While many large organizations have affinity groups, small organizations, often BIPOC-led, are left without the capacity or support to have their own affinity spaces. That’s where VCET steps in - to bridge these gaps and offer a safe space for BIPOC leaders to build community and support peer leadership.
Kindred is a capacity-building initiative of VCET that nurtures the conditions to allow our vision of a multiracial democracy to thrive. By fostering community and care, it strengthens the people and relationships that make collective action in Virginia’s progressive movement possible.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us at kindred@engageva.org.