Beloved Economies is an economic innovation firm dedicated to activating the powerful lever of transforming how we work to build an economy that works for all. We support pro-democracy business leaders in how to be brave.
For over a decade, we have led research and collaborative action with enterprises that are boldly breaking out of business as usual, toward shared power and thriving. We understand that real change requires working at both the workplace and economic system levels—making the micro and macro connect.
Our approach:
Revealing that how we work shapes our world
Shift practice one leader at a time:
Every organization has the potential to practice beloved work, one decision at a time. Seemingly small decisions matter to embody and reinforce democracy by practicing shared power within our enterprises. We support leaders to bravely depart from the business-as-usual that isn’t working. Our research-backed content and services offer actionable steps and practices that correlate with life-giving forms of innovation and success for the enterprises that commit to them.
Support system-wide imagination
Ordinary, everyday choices shape our economies: When teams and enterprises intentionally transform how they work, their success can inspire policy change, amplify aims of labor organizing, and reinforce civic engagement. We embolden leaders to be on the frontlines of change in their enterprises and beyond. Our research-backed content and services illuminate this connection and nurture our capacity to imagine and create economies that truly work for all.
Create the enabling conditions
Two powerful forces shaping our economy are narrative and policy. By collaboratively researching and piloting groundbreaking possibilities in economic narratives and policy, we build enabling conditions for far more enterprises to embody beloved work.
Who we are:
Co-founded by researcher-practitioners
Jess Rimington, Co-Founder
Joanna L. Cea, Co-Founder
Our story:
Building on a decade of collaborative research and action
The seed for Beloved Economies was planted through initial research conducted by Joanna Levitt Cea & Jess Rimington starting in 2015 at Stanford University through a shared Visiting Scholar position. Jess and Joanna then expanded the research into a body of work that has engaged over 200 individual contributors and dozens of partner organizations over the course of a decade. Beloved Economies’ work has included:
Creating a co-learning community of 60 enterprises achieving standout forms of success through everyday practices in sharing power—and engaging this community to deeply inform and shape our research;
Leading a research and content campaign that ran from 2020 through 2023 aimed at awakening mainstream audiences to the power we have to build economies that work for all, specifically through transforming how we work;
Seeding a 15-organization collaborative to build narrative power around solutions for an inclusive economy, called the Beloved Economies Collaborative for Narrative Infrastructure;
Providing offerings and bespoke support to leaders and teams transforming how they work; and more.
Rimington and Cea’s 2022 book Beloved Economies: Transforming how we work was named the Porchlight Business Book of the Year in Workplace Management and Culture.
Our name: Honoring the link to the Civil Rights movement and Beloved Community
Dr. Wood coined the term in 1975 at a convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, when he and fellow civil rights leaders were focused on what they termed “the unfinished work” of economic transformation. They recognized a different economy was necessary to realize the promise of a beloved community, articulated so powerfully by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of whom Dr. Wood was a friend and co-worker. “I would say that the beloved economy and the beloved community are twins,” Dr. Wood often said. “They’re two sides of the same coin.”
Learn more about Dr. Wood, and what beloved economies meant to him, in our book, Beloved Economies: Transforming how we work.
We are honored to be able to carry forward this powerful framing in our work.
The name Beloved Economies is a frame gifted to the 2022 book and multi-year research effort that informed it, by Dr. Virgil A. Wood, a pastor, educator, and an advocate for economic justice and transformation for more than seven decades. Dr. Wood was a collaborator on our research and active member of the Beloved Economies co-learning community up until his passing in 2024.