Everyone deserves social and economic protections

Our Intention

The name R2I Lab stays true to our work at the Center for Cultural Innovation as incubating innovations by being grounded in information (commissioned research to deep listening) that informs our strategies to achieve impacts. 

R2I Lab’s main tools are research, advocacy, and investments and incubation in service of the following priorities:

• Expand systems of support to include all types of workers who have been ignored or harmed–unprotected, invisible, marginalized, gig, freelance, solo, and independent workers–no matter their income source or unpaid or paid status. Late-stage capitalism and technological disruptions require new solutions for both protecting and unfettering people’s potentials. We seek solutions that socialize the concept that everyone contributes and, thus, everyone deserves support. We join a growing effort to disconnect work from worth.
• Offer fresh solutions for helping communities, particularly communities of color facing existential threats to their cultural identities, become self-determining so that they can provide the kind of social glue, sense of belonging, and financial opportunities that help people, especially individuated workers, need. We seek to shift laws, regulations, and guidelines that will help communities and their members be empowered and exercise agency. In particular, we attend to how communities can access capital on terms that enable community members to gain or retain shared ownership and governance control of land, properties, intellectual property, loans, natural resources, infrastructures, and utilities.
• Embed the values of mutualistic, solidarity, cooperative, and localist alternative systems in research framing and questions, advocacy stances, impact investment decisions, and incubation of new intermediaries and platforms. As a culturally innovating organization, we seek to change our national consciousness from that of winners-take-all systems as well as unsustainable conditions of have and have nots by using the tools of research framing, advocacy, impact investments, and incubation to advance and normalize a cultural paradigm of deservedness, mutualism, solidarity, and diversity as our strength.

How Do We Do This Work?

We know alternative solutions and approaches are needed for the deeply rooted systems we are hoping to build anew. Because of this, R2I Lab approaches issue areas and priorities by forecasting changes that become possible only by unprecedented disruptions.

We Do This Through…

• Research commissions and contributions that move the needle on core problems and may influence policies…
  • directly affecting arts workers 
  • affecting all excluded workers using artists as a lens and end beneficiary
• Advocacy on issue areas and policy that
  • Serve Arts and Culture Workers
  • Influences Policies, Regulations, and Rules
  • Builds Collectivized Power through strategic coalescing and activation of Gig Worker Groups and other excluded workers
• Impact Investments knowing that…
  • We cannot wait for others to start enterprises that can act as early models and experiments for alternative and just systems. Incubating experimental enterprises and new structures that have the potential to “stick”–such as mechanisms to deliver benefits for freelancers–will create new possibilities to shift power to people and their communities. Building upon CCI’s expertise and experience as a skilled grantmaker and entrepreneur, R2I will make targeted investments that aim to:
    • Incubate experimental enterprises addressing artists’ needs–such as copyright protections and portable benefits for freelancers–will create new possibilities to shift power to people and their communities.
    • Listen, learn, and build capacity for our growing collective of gig workers. 
• Incubations that aim to build alternative systems of support that manifest empowerment and mutualism.