RUNWAY ROOTS Labs
Bold Experiments For Economic Justice
RUNWAY Roots Labs is our space to dream up economic possibilities that center Black liberation, wellness, and collective prosperity. These experiments are strategic initiatives designed to test, build, and scale economic policies and practices rooted in repair.
Seeding Possibilities
CURRENT LABS
-
Black Imagination Lab
The Black Imagination Lab brings together investors, innovators, and problem-solvers to unlock economic power by accelerating reparative capital to urgent, innovative projects.
-
Southern Rooted Freedom Bound
This ongoing research blends art, data, and community engagement to build power and inspire wealth in historically marginalized Southern communities. Through creative convenings, rigorous analysis, and public activation, we turn lived experience into transformative tools for collective imagination and action.
-
Believe-in-You Money Circles
RUNWAY Roots CEO Jessica Norwood’s book Believe-in-You Money is a set of guiding principles offering an anti-racist, equity-centered approach to business capital that’s rooted in abundance, trust, and flexibility. Believe-in-You Money Circles are sacred spaces for inspiring conversations where stories, strategies, and visions for a just economy take root. When you host a Circle, you become part of a growing constellation of change-makers shaping a future where our communities thrive.
Composted & Activated Blueprints
FROM LAB TO LIFE
These are the blueprints we’ve composted—ideas once seeded in the Lab that now live on in different forms. Some have taken root and are actively evolving, being shaped in real time by the communities engaging with them. Others serve as rich soil for future experiments—lessons, insights, and visions that remain ripe for iteration and reimagining. Each one offers something vital to the ecosystem of repair: proof of what’s possible, and what’s still to come.
Universal Basic Income
Our pilot rapid emergency fund first launched in March 2020 to provide a no-strings-attached 6-month Universal Basic Income (UBI) for our entrepreneur family in response to the global pandemic. The pilot allowed us to hypothesize whether this type of supplemental income could be curative for the racial wealth gap. Recipients received an up-front direct cash infusion of $2,000 in addition to monthly stipends of $1,000 through October 2020 and free ongoing business and marketing consultancy services. Out of the 30 Black-owned businesses in our inaugural UBI program consortium, not a single one had to close up shop due to the pandemic shutdowns.
REAL People’s Fund
REAL People’s Fund is a community-powered investment fund and entrepreneurship program co-designed and managed by RUNWAY. REAL People’s Fund provides non-extractive capital, holistic business support, and opportunities to build political power for BIPOC entrepreneurs in the historically disinvested East Bay communities of San Francisco Bay Area. Our experience building this movement fund has taught us what it means to facilitate a community-led, democratically-governed funding program.
Road to Repair Podcast
Financial activists Jessica Norwood, Nikishka Iyengar, and Andrew X co-produced Road to Repair—a visionary business podcast about building a reparative, regenerative economy rooted in justice, equity, and solidarity. If you know capitalism is doing exactly what it was designed to do—uphold white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism—but you're unsure what comes next, this podcast is your invitation to imagine and build the next economy.
Reparative Finance Workshop Series
The Reparative Finance Workshop is a powerful, five-part training series designed to democratize financial knowledge and equip activists with the tools to drive systemic change. In this series, we dive into key finance topics, blending collective wisdom from our movements with crucial concepts from the financial industry to build a stronger, more informed financial narrative for movement building.
The Marketing Glow Up
The RUNWAY Marketing Glow-Up was a real-time response to a growing need for businesses to pivot through the pandemic and get high-impact marketing support to cut through the digital noise following quarantine. We recruited top creative agencies that specialize in branding, PR, web, or digital marketing and matched them with our entrepreneur community for short-term, quality engagements that resulted in mutual brand amplification and meaningful social impact.
The Black Music Entrepreneurship Incubator, HiiiWAV, tasked our Glow-Up partner agency, BBMG, and its seasoned team of summer interns with renaming and creating a brand identity system and story to supercharge a new chapter of participation, growth, and impact.