Portfolio of Activities
A Journey: Research to Impact Lab
Building Futures for Everyone Since 2022
Our Current Portfolio of Activities Since Launch
We need a new cultural paradigm for everything from our political economy to how we care for people.
Launched January 2022, R2I Lab is still developing as a relatively new program of the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) to bring about alternative systems and solutions for the new reality of work.
Our Activities
R2I Lab conducts research, builds relationships and policy coalitions across silos, advocates for common causes, and invests in seeding or starting up new enterprises for an alternative ecosystem.
We invite you to take a deeper dive into our work thus far and to sign up for our newsletter to stay in touch with what’s next.
Incubation
Can Trust and Community Innovations be our Path to a New System?
Where trust and community support through a gig worker savings club creates the possibility for financial freedoms
The Beginning
In 2023 we ran cross-industry focus groups of individuals who identify as gig workers to understand what kind of portable benefits could be helpful in their lives. Participating gig workers ranged from industries including construction, art, events, and academia. While the types of work individuals pursued were varied, the shared worries became even clearer in our work: our current system of employer-sponsored benefits leaves many falling through the cracks for universal needs and guarantees that should be afforded to all people, regardless of their abilities and type of work they do. This problem can be further backed by many of the findings and recommendations found in our Arts Workers in CA Report conducted by Urban Institute in January 2021 with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This seminal report became the foundation of our work at Research to Impact Lab.
In our current system, artists and other gig workers often do not get access to employer-sponsored benefits, including access to retirement or savings plans. While the "what" was diverse in what our focus groups would see as benefits to their lives (more readily accessible public transit, housing and healthcare affordability, as well as ability to take time off) the throughline undergirding the diverse worries plaguing the minds of our gig worker groups was almost too simple: financial precarity.
This made us more curious, especially with the increasing support for guaranteed income programs, what if we could pave the road for solutions built specifically for gig workers that could help solve for the financial precarity currently baked into the lives of those working outside of a standard W-2 category? Inspired by the many forms that historically extracted from communities have been forced to innovate to create their own forms of support and protections, we are excited to embark on a journey of experimentation to build new solutions with Val Elefante, a freelance research, project manager, and co-design facilitator specializing in community-led, responsible development of emerging technologies including AI and the decentralized web.
What are Possible Solutions?
A tech-enabled rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) for artists and gig workers that leverages the power of community, in conjunction with decentralized tech infrastructure, to provide an alternative system that can help fill this gap, meet peoples' needs, and expand access to basic human rights.
Why are we doing this?
R2I Lab and our historical work at the Center for Cultural Innovation as supporters of and champions for individuals in the arts, artists, culture bearers, and creative entrepreneurs, through grantmaking, research, and capacity building programs has made us intimately aware of the issues most impacting artists and other gig workers’ ability to live full and dignified lives.
Our gig worker savings club (tentatively called “Cookie Jar Collective”) project comes from our many years of research and incubation specifically centering artists, culture bearers, and creative entrepreneurs from marginalized communities.
Why a rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA)? R2I Lab is interested in how many immigrant communities have relied on different forms of ROSCAs (Such as: Su su, Tanda, or polla) to support one another’s dreams of attaining more financial security. At the root of all rotating savings clubs is the inherent and unwavering trust necessary for its success. All participants are reliant on their community for each other’s success. Are there ways we can bring these values of community trust and accountability for EVERYONE’s success to new technologies?
Through this experiment we hope to leverage decentralized technology in response to the failures of current financial and social welfare systems, which have excluded these communities and therefore restricted their economic access and opportunities.
Through this experiment we hope to:
- Leverage the power of community, in conjunction with decentralized tech infrastructure, to provide an alternative system that can help fill this gap, meet peoples' needs, and expand access to basic human rights.
- Show examples of blockchain technology uses for the greater public good
- Legitimize gig work and other excluded forms of work by building solutions specifically for people living these types of lives
- Experiment in ways we can build and govern with the values of community trust and accountability at the center
What's Next?
- Test our ideas at DWEB Camp through a co-design session with values aligned technologists, innovators, and creatives in the Redwoods
- Invite our community to keep iterating through co-design sessions focused on different pillars of building this solution: Governance, User Experience, & Technical Backend
- Build, pressure test, and keep building
- Deliver this solution to the world to continue piloting
Join Us!
At DWeb Camp this August 7 - 11 in Navarro CA, and join our E-Newsletter to keep an eye on how you can be involved. Interested in learning more? Contact Jennelyn Bailon at jennelyn@cciarts.org
Val Elefante & Jennelyn Bailon
Val Elefante is leading our Gig Worker Savings Club project with support from R2I Lab's Jennelyn Bailon.
Val Elefante (she/they) is a freelance researcher, project manager, and co-design facilitator specializing in community-led, responsible development of emerging technologies including AI and the decentralized web. With a background in feminist political theory and economics, Val has worked on a variety of projects building more equitable and participatory governance into technology. For TechSoup, Val helped design and build a curriculum about decentralized technology for nonprofits, collecting cutting edge social impact use cases of the tech. For Metagov, Val led user research and a pilot program for an open source tool called Collective Voice, adding interoperable collective decision-making features to Open Collective. Finally, Val is also a founding team member of Lips / Reliabl where she led the co-design of a social media alternative especially for women, non-binary, & LGBTQIA+ creators with innovative, participatory data labeling and content moderation systems.
Jennelyn Bailon is a Senior Program Associate at the Center for Cultural Innovation where she advances their Research to Impact Lab and Training and Workshops. In addition to her work at CCI, she is a program manager and independent curator passionate about work that is driven by empathy, community, and empowerment working in the Education departments at institutions across the U.S. such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Supporting Confident Creativity
Stanford and CCI Partner to Help Creatives with their Copyright Claims
For the vast majority of artists, some interaction with technology is not only unavoidable - it is necessary to rapidly create, produce and disseminate work as well as to ensure compensation. From blockchain to NFTs to Etsy, creatives use technology to connect directly with those who support their artwork. However, such technologies have also made it incredibly easy for that artwork to be pirated or misattributed. To protect their livelihoods, artists must learn how to protect their work from copyright infringement, as well as other lesser-known copyright claims that can impact an artist’s livelihood such as noninfringement and misrepresentation. The Copyright Claims Board (CCB) was created to make this process easier and less expensive for the average creator.
The Copyright Claims Board (CCB) was established in 2020 by Congress to answer an urgent need - the large volume of copyright claims and the limited amount of resources (time, expertise, money) available to creators to make those claims in federal court. The CCB consists of an entirely online process led by a three-member tribunal with extensive expertise in copyright law. The goal is a more efficient, less expensive alternative to federal court for copyright claims of less than $30,000.
And yet, like any bureaucratic process, this one can be challenging for those without an understanding of intellectual property law. CCI felt that it was critical to create a resource specifically for creatives so that they might learn how to navigate the CCB to protect their intellectual property rights. Through a partnership with the incredible students and staff of Stanford University’s Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinics, we have created a live online resource for creatives to confidently navigate the CCB called Navigating the Copyright Claims Board: A Practical Guide for Creators!
What makes Navigating the Copyright Claims Board: A Practical Guide for Creators so special? Our Juelsgaard Clinic students found that since opening, the CCB has only seen a success rate of 1.5% of claims reaching a final decision (that is only 12 claims out of 721 filed).
This jaw-dropping number sparked our interest - how is it possible that a public resource set up to encourage independent creatives to take control of their IP should see such a dismal success rate? Our hope is that with this more accessible and interactive guide, artists and creative workers will feel more confident in their copyright claims.
To celebrate the release of this resource, please join us for the following activities:
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- Confidently Informed: Navigating the Copyright Claims Board for Creatives on Thursday, June 6: a virtual workshop with the authors of the resource, Caitlin Cary Burke, Juelsgaard Clinic Member, Stanford J.D/PhD Candidate, 2025; and Kiran Wattamwar, Juelsgaard Clinic Member, Stanford J.D Candidate, 2025. Participants will get a tour of the guide and the chance to ask its authors any questions they might have about copyright protections. Register here!
- Confidently Registered: a Copyright Registration Party! on Thursday, June 20. CCI will host a virtual registration party! Register your copyright online with the Copyright Office. CCI staff will be on hand to assist you through the process. Register here!
- Share Your Story! Are you an artist or creative worker who has dealt with an issue related to copyright? If so, then share your story with us below! We’ll add it to a story bank to help us understand how we can support creatives with their copyright issues.
- Ongoing Activities. CCI will host resources and gatherings related to the needs of artists and in response to the research. Interested in partnering on this initiative? Contact Jennelyn Bailon at jennelyn@cciarts.org
CCI would like to thank the team from Stanford for making this resource possible:
Caitlin Cary Burke, Juelsgaard Clinic Member, Stanford J.D/PhD Candidate, 2025
Kiran Wattamwar, Juelsgaard Clinic Member, Stanford J.D Candidate, 2025
Phil Malone, Director of Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic, Mills Legal Clinic, Stanford Law School
Nina Srejovic, Clinical Supervising Attorney and Lecturer, Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic
Navigating the Copyright Claims Board: A Practical Guide for Creators would not have been possible without the support of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation
A Change in Name
A Change in Name
We are in the process of landing on the new name (hopefully, third time’s the charm).
In March 2023, we changed this program’s name from Rustle Lab to Sol Center for Liberated Work. As our work grew, Rustle Lab didn’t do enough to reflect our aspirations. In selecting the Sol Center name, we hoped to embed our aspirations for this work directly into the identity of the program itself. For us, Sol represented the energy of the sun to fuel new life and ecosystems. As a Spanish word, we felt it honored the immigrant and marginalized communities we hope to work alongside, as well as our California home. And it formed the root of other words that reflect the program’s priorities – solutions, solidarity, and solo workers.
Meanwhile, Liberated Work encapsulated our world-building ambitions. For us, liberated work was about self-determination by creating new systems that no longer equate “work” with “worth”; where the jobs we do to earn money do not dictate access to benefits, security, time to rest, or possibilities for the future. Liberated work is not just about how we pay our bills, but also the work we do to care for our families, participate in our communities, and freely express artistically and culturally.
When we rolled out the new name, however, we heard that it wasn’t landing in the ways we hoped. For some, Sol was too easily understood as Soul, and the deep cultural resonance that term holds for Black communities. In addition, Liberated Work was less understood as our stance on labor issues and, instead, perceived as borrowing too heavily from the language of Black Liberation movements. For others, the Spanish word Sol felt appropriating in the absence of LatinX leadership within our program.
As an arts and culture organization, we know that language and representation matter, so we have taken critical responses seriously. We are grateful for those who shared their honest reactions, all of which were shared and received as acts of solidarity and support. Hence, we are changing the program’s name and, in this process, being more deliberate and thoughtful about our intentions and how we show up.
We are in the process of landing on the new name (hopefully, third time’s the charm). If you would like to offer suggestions (we see you, creatives!), please take a look around our site, read what we’re up to, and email us ideas at solcenter@cciarts.org. No prizes awarded except the glow of knowing you are helping an endeavor that is meant to help you!
Imagining Social Protections for All
Imagining Social Protections for All
Bringing together worker advocates and movement leaders to imagine new systems of protection
Althea Erickson
Althea Erickson is the Director of the Sol Center for Liberated Work, a program of the Center for Cultural Innovation. Previously, Althea was the Vice President of Global Government Affairs and Impact at Etsy, and Advocacy & Policy Director at Freelancers Union.
Sometimes when we’re living inside a system, it’s hard to imagine what an alternative could look like.
In our desire to make progress–to improve the way things work–we focus on a tweak here, a shift in implementation there. And to some extent, that can be a good and pragmatic strategy. But it has its downsides.
When we seek to fix the systems we live in, we may unintentionally reinforce and entrench ones that simply don’t work, and worse, undermine our hope of achieving more. For example, the U.S. social safety net excludes huge swaths of workers–domestic workers, farm workers, self-employed workers, sex workers, and undocumented workers, just to name a few. Some of these groups were explicitly excluded to appease Southern segregationists, while others were merely overlooked due to the nature of the economy at the time. To date, much of the effort to close those gaps has been to focused on expanding existing systems to new populations, for example including domestic workers in labor laws or excluded workers in unemployment insurance. But what if the 21st century work force simply doesn’t fit into 20th century systems?
What if we started fresh, and reimagined a set of social and economic protections that met the needs of today’s workforce, unencumbered by the past? And what if we started that conversation with the workers who have been erased from the conversation, yet are most excluded from today’s safety net? What types of protections might we imagine together? And wouldn’t that system be more likely to actually work for all?
Those questions underpinned Reimagining Social Protections for Independent and Other Traditionally Excluded Workers, a convening we co-hosted with the Urban Institute in December 2022. The convening brought together worker advocates representing nontraditional workers from across a wide swath of sectors–domestic workers, migrant workers, temp workers, street vendors, migrant workers, sex workers, and more. Together, we set aside the constraints of today’s systems, and gave ourselves permission to imagine an alternative vision of economic security for today’s workforce, to dream beyond barriers of all kinds.
The ideas that garnered widespread support were pretty inspiring, and start to paint the picture, and the true possibility, of an alternative system of protections that isn’t contingent on your specific job or identity as a worker, but is guaranteed to you, as a human. In particular, attendees imagined:
- Widespread adoption of guaranteed income and other cash transfer programs that offer a floor of protections for all workers regardless of employment status
- Improvement of key social insurance programs, including healthcare, unemployment insurance, and retirement to make them affordable, portable, and universally available to everyone, regardless of their employment status
- The establishment of a national worker bill of rights that would apply to all workers, regardless of sector, occupation, or employment status
- Robust enforcement of labor laws and worker protections across all sectors
- Exploration of new models for building and wielding collective power, like sectoral bargaining
Driving the discussion were some core ideas - and really cultural and narrative shifts – that we, as a society, need to grapple with.
- We need to decouple work from worth.
- All people deserve dignity.
- We are full humans deserving support, not just in the narrow confines of our identities as workers.
- Our labor is more than the labor we do to earn income. It is the labor we do to support our families, to strengthen our communities, and to express ourselves that makes life worth living.
- A just society recognizes the value of people as humans, and builds systems to support broader human flourishing.
As inspiring as the visioning was, at times participants raised the challenges that stand in the way of moving from the systems we have to the systems we want, especially given the current political forces shaping policy today. And yet, there was palpable energy in the room around building greater connectivity and connection across these groups, to build greater collective power between and among nontraditional workers across sectors.
Yes, the challenges are great, but if we can align ourselves around a shared vision, we can start to build bridges to get from here to there.
You can read the full summary of the convening here. We, of course, welcome your voice in this ongoing conversation.
What do gig workers really want?
What do gig workers really want?
We're thrilled to support new participatory research to find out.
Althea Erickson
Althea Erickson is the Director of the Sol Center for Liberated Work, a program of the Center for Cultural Innovation. Previously, Althea was the Vice President of Global Government Affairs and Impact at Etsy, and Advocacy & Policy Director at Freelancers Union.
For several years now, the conversation about gig work and the future of work has been hampered by the lack of good data.
Current measurements of the gig workforce are notoriously inconclusive and contradictory. Existing studies rely on conflicting definitions and overlapping terms (e.g., separating out or collapsing freelancers, contract workers, independent workers, itinerant workers, gig workers, etc.) that result in findings so disparate, they undermine the data’s usefulness and credibility.
Existing research also fails to capture the full diversity of gig workers across sectors. So often, the conversation focuses on app-based workers, but fails to consider informal workers, farm workers, street vendors, arts workers, and any number of other categories of non-traditional work who ALSO lack the benefits and protections tied to full time employment.
Moreover, existing research fails to uncover what workers say they need and what solutions they want. Ultimately, such data is necessary, not only to anchor any new effort to deliver benefits and protections outside of employment, but to build the political power that gig workers need to win them.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce Sol Center’s first grant, to support the Gig Worker Learning Project, a participatory research project by The Workers Lab and the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative, seeking to understand gig workers’ needs and the solutions that will impact them most. The first phase of the project, which took place over 2022, included early stakeholder outreach and a landscape scan of existing gig workers research. The second phase will rely on participatory research methodology to develop a foundational understanding of gig workers’ most pressing challenges and identify solutions that workers feel would impact them personally.
Participatory research methods differ from traditional ones by positioning research subjects as collaborators and owners of the research process and data. In this, the Gig Worker Learning Project doesn’t just start with excluded and marginalized workers; it puts them in the driver's seat of research design, data collection, dissemination, and data ownership. The team will also build a cross-sector community of leaders, researchers, and worker organizations committed to gig and contract worker-centered knowledge, who can amplify findings and collectively frame their work from the perspective of gig workers.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the project will build infrastructure for power building across worker groups through a Participatory Research Toolkit that equips gig worker organizations with tools to collect ongoing data on workers’ lives. This data will bolster each organization’s ability to advocate on behalf of its members with policymakers, supporting their efforts to build political power. It will also form the basis of a larger national dataset about gig work, owned by gig worker groups.
In this, the project will build the infrastructure to enable cross-sectoral collaboration around a shared agenda for gig work, one rooted not in the perspectives of powerful interest groups, but in the perspectives of workers themselves. To the extent that the project will help create more open space in the debate, it will also equip worker organizations to fill it.
We couldn’t be more excited to support this project. Learn more about the work here!
