Coming Together: The 2026 Beloved Community Cohort Retreat
After months of gathering, learning, and building relationships virtually, participants in the 2026 Beloved Community Cohort had an opportunity to do something especially meaningful this July: come together in person.
From July 20–23, cohort participants, mentors, advisors, and facilitators gathered at Westerbeke Ranch in Northern California for four days of reflection, relationship-building, learning, and embodied practice.
The retreat marked an important moment in the Cohort’s 10-month journey. After beginning the program together in February, participants had spent months gathering virtually through cohort sessions, embodiment practices, intensives, and mentorship. Being together in person offered a different kind of space: an opportunity to slow down, deepen relationships, and reconnect with the visions that brought each person to the Cohort.
A 10-Month Journey Toward Beloved Community
The Beloved Community Cohort is a 10-month program created in collaboration between Beloved Communities Network and Movement Strategy Center. The 2026 Cohort brings together 20 participants from a range of backgrounds and practices who share a commitment to cultivating stronger, more just, connected, and regenerative communities.
Guided in part by the 10,000 Beloved Communities Graphic Novel & Guide, the program brings together cultural strategy, healing, embodiment, mentorship, and applied practice.
Throughout the journey, participants explore questions that are both deeply personal and collective: How do we cultivate belonging? How do we navigate conflict in ways that strengthen rather than fracture relationships? How can healing and embodied practice shape the way we lead? And how do we begin putting the principles of Beloved Community into practice in the places where we live and work?
The retreat created an opportunity to explore these questions not only through conversation, but through the experience of being in community together.
Making Space for Connection
Over four days at Westerbeke Ranch, participants shared meals, stories, movement, ceremony, laughter, grief, rest, and honest conversation.
After months of seeing one another primarily through screens, simply being in the same place mattered. Learning moved beyond facilitated sessions and into shared meals, walks, moments of rest, and conversations that continued throughout the day.
Participants had opportunities to deepen relationships, learn from one another, and explore new approaches to collaboration, conflict transformation, healing, and embodied leadership. The gathering also created room for something that can be difficult to find amid the urgency of everyday work: time to slow down, listen deeply, and be present with one another.
These relationships are not separate from the work of building Beloved Community. They are part of the practice itself.
Beloved Community asks us to pay attention not only to what we are trying to change or create, but to how we relate to one another while doing it.
Turning Learning Into Practice
An important part of the Cohort journey is helping participants translate what they are learning into something tangible within their own communities.
Each participant is developing an applied project or practice commitment that provides an opportunity to integrate ideas from the Cohort into their ongoing work. These projects can grow from something entirely new or strengthen work that is already underway.
During the retreat, participants had space to think more deeply about these projects, learn alongside mentors and peers, and consider how their work can cultivate belonging, healing, trust, creativity, and collective thriving.
The goal is not simply to leave the Cohort with new ideas. It is to experiment with what Beloved Community can look like when those ideas become lived practice.
Practicing Beloved Community Together
Perhaps the most meaningful part of the retreat was also the simplest: being together.
For four days, the Cohort had an opportunity to practice many of the things the program has been exploring since February.
Listening, moving, reflecting, creating, sharing, resting, and navigating differences. Making room for joy and grief. Building relationships across experiences and perspectives.
Beloved Community isn’t only a vision for some distant future. It is something we can begin practicing now, through the ways we show up for one another and the relationships and communities we build together.
As the 2026 Beloved Community Cohort enters the final months of its 10-month journey, participants will continue developing their applied projects, meeting with mentors, engaging in embodiment practice, and carrying what they experienced together at Westerbeke back into their communities.
In February, this community began largely through faces on screens. By July, those relationships had taken on another dimension through shared meals, movement, reflection, laughter, grief, and care.
We are deeply grateful to every participant, mentor, advisor, facilitator, and supporter who helped make these four days possible, and we look forward to seeing what continues to grow from the relationships, ideas, and commitments strengthened during our time together.
For more information about the event, partnership and collaboration opportunities, or ways to support this work, contact:
Beloved Communities Network
Leila McCabe, Director, Beloved Communities Network
leila@belovedcommunitiesnetwork.org
(408)893-4775
https://www.belovedcommunitiesnetwork.org