Members of the Washington Belonging Table gather on the lawn outside the Oakland Museum of California during the 2024 Othering & Belonging Conference

During a sunny spring afternoon outside the Oakland Museum of California, a small group of organizers, healthcare leaders, state officials, philanthropies, and community practitioners from across Washington state gathered on the lawn with a sense of recognition that had been building for months.

Some had already been meeting virtually, exploring what it might look like to connect belonging work across Washington. Others were encountering one another for the first time during the 2024 Othering & Belonging Conference in Oakland, where workshops and panel discussions kept revealing a shared geography and a shared purpose. Someone would say, “I’m from Washington,” and another voice across the room would answer, “I am too.”

By the time the group came together outside the museum, the gathering was both organized and organic — the continuation of earlier conversations, and the beginning of new ones. What surfaced was not surprise alone, but a clearer sense of possibility: Why are we all meeting here, in California, instead of in Washington? People exchanged numbers, shared stories, and imagined what it could look like to build the work of belonging together.

“Relationships take time to build, but when you’re able to recognize the work that others are doing and how it can enhance your efforts, a mutual power can be created,” said Liz Baxter, CEO of North Sound Accountable Community of Health, a regional nonprofit founded in 2016 that helps over one million people across Washington to meet their health and social needs.

“And at that conference what we constantly heard from each other is that people are hungry for connection.”

That hunger is part of what made the work of belonging feel urgent for the group. From those early virtual conversations, the intentional gathering in Oakland, and the relationships that continued afterward, the Washington Belonging Table began to take shape  — an emerging statewide network of organizations, agencies, and practitioners working to expand belonging, strengthen civic connection, and reimagine how institutions relate to the communities they serve.

Supported by OBI Places of Belonging Director Ashley Gallegos, the group began meeting monthly two years ago — mostly over Zoom at first, and in person annually to build stronger bonds and to focus on the group’s strategy and potential projects to develop. They resisted the urge to formalize too quickly and for more than a year, the table remained intentionally small to co-create a structure that was both inviting and open to new perspectives, said Gallegos.

“We’ve been doing the foundational work first — building the relationships, trust, and shared understanding that make lasting change possible,” she said. “Before you can create something bigger together, you have to prepare the ground for people to truly see themselves in the work and in each other.”

And to Baxter, that intentionality mattered.

“Movements built only around funding cycles or institutional urgency rarely last,” she said. “Relationships do.”

Members of North Sound ACH and partner organizations participate in a movement exercise at the 15th annual partner convening of the Collaborative Action Network.

A December 2024 retreat in Seattle helped solidify the effort. Participants reviewed statewide survey data that started to map existing belonging work within the state, and they began to create a charter and vision for the table. The conversations stretched across healthcare systems, local government, philanthropy, economic development, community organizing, and statewide agencies.

What has emerged since is not a single initiative, but what participants increasingly describe as a “network of networks”: a state-wide strategy for belonging without othering.

Each person at the table brings entire ecosystems with them — regional collaboratives, state departments, grassroots coalitions, civic institutions, and practitioner communities. The goal is not simply to grow membership, but to connect and, where they can, strengthen the work already happening across Washington into something more visible, aligned, and sustainable.

Baxter often describes it another way: stars forming a constellation.

“We are one or two degrees of separation away from thousands of organizations across the state.”

Convening with a purpose

Helping hold and coordinate much of that emerging work recently is Civic Commons, a Seattle-based group working to strengthen civic participation through cross-sector collaboration.

But the table began taking shape long before a formal convener emerged. For over a year, OBI helped connect leaders across sectors, facilitate conversations, and convene early gatherings — including a retreat hosted with Civic Commons in Seattle — where participants began recognizing the shared threads across their work and developing a collective vision. In recent months, Civic Commons has taken on a larger coordinating role, helping steward the network as it continues to grow.

For Nia Liggins, Civic Commons' Belonging Program Lead, and Frank Nam, a longtime civic strategist and consultant who previously supported the initiative, the work sits at the intersection of movement building and relationship building.

Nam first encountered OBI’s work years earlier at one of OBI’s final in-person conferences before the pandemic. As an immigrant from South Korea who grew up in New York City, he said the institute’s frameworks immediately resonated with his own experiences navigating belonging across cultures and institutions.

Nam helped facilitate many of the table’s early conversations and statewide strategy work, organizing that first gathering on the lawn in Oakland. He describes the effort as less about building a single organization and more about creating durable civic infrastructure that can connect communities, agencies, and movements over time.

“Relationships have to come before transactions,” Nam said. “When trust is there, stakeholders are more willing to listen, invest, and be patient.”

To invest in those types of relationships further, last year, Liggins joined OBI’s Belonging Practice Community — a cohort experience that helped deepen her understanding of belonging, bridging, and targeted universalism while connecting her with practitioners across the country. Today, as the Belonging Program Lead at Civic Commons, she helps steward many of the conversations shaping the future of the table and the broader statewide ecosystem around it, building on the foundation and early convening work led by Nam and Civic Commons’ Chief Architect Michael Brown.

“One of the things that feels most important right now,” Liggins said, “is that this is a relationship-rooted movement.”

Liggins said one of the table’s goals is helping cultivate a stronger statewide practitioner network while expanding the language and practice of belonging into more communities and decision-making spaces. A challenge the table continues to explore is how belonging can be understood, measured, and strengthened across a statewide “network of networks.”

That question extends well beyond Washington.

Earlier this year, more than 50 practitioners, researchers, and community leaders gathered in Washington for Unlocking Belonging: A Summit on Measurement, Insights, and Action, co-hosted by Liggins alongside Washington Main Street and the American Immigration Council, to explore how institutions and communities are assessing and advancing belonging in practice.

“Belonging requires people to actually shape the systems impacting their lives,” she said. “And belonging cannot exist without co-creation.”

Faduma Fido, Lab Leader at the People's Economy Lab, poses with a banner painted by Martin Aranaydo at the 2024 Othering & Belonging Conference.

For Faduma Fido, the work of belonging is ultimately about structural power — who holds it, who gets excluded from it, and who gets invited into shaping the decisions that govern everyday life. She often points to Seattle's Othello neighborhood, where construction of the Link Light Rail cut through a corridor of immigrant- and community-owned businesses. While rail lines in other parts of the city were built underground to protect economic activity, Othello businesses bore the brunt of the disruption.

Years later, Fido worked on a mixed-use economic opportunity project responding to the fallout of a transportation infrastructure development that had devastated a neighborhood and forced roughly 2,500 businesses to close. The experience reinforced a lesson that continues to guide her work today: when communities are excluded from decisions that shape their futures, the consequences can last for generations.

“That community wasn’t at the table when the decisions were made,” she said. “They didn’t have a voice in something that would fundamentally reshape their lives and livelihoods.”

That experience laid the foundation as she developed the Collaborative Governance program at People’s Economy Lab, a Seattle-based group that seeks to advance equitable economic models.

“A neighborhood loses businesses because it wasn’t at the table when a transportation project was being planned,” Fido said. “A community’s needs get misdiagnosed because the people living those needs weren’t part of framing the problem. That is a belonging failure.”

For Fido, belonging is not just about inclusion. It is about whether institutions are accountable to the communities they claim to serve — and whether communities have genuine ownership over the systems shaping their futures.

Young residents of southeast Seattle discuss transportation policy, its impacts in their daily lives, and potential solutions at a pilot assembly organized by the People's Economy lab.

That perspective sharpened for Fido after attending the Oakland conference alongside many of the future table members: “Structural power, I came to understand, only transforms when it becomes shared,” she said, “and belonging is what makes that possible.”

One of the Washington Belonging Table’s earliest phases involved building shared language and grounding participants in a common understanding of what belonging actually means in practice. Fido said the language elevated what she had already been building — the first government funded community assembly pilots by the City of Seattle and by the state legislature.

“The language bank of belonging — and vocabulary like othering and bridging — gave people a way to find each other across disagreement,” Fido said. “It gives movements a way to stay together even when the work is hard.”

Rethinking how government shows up

For Andrew Chin at the Washington State Office of Equity, the table represents something larger than collaboration. It represents a different relationship between institutions and the people they serve.

After more than two decades working in Washington’s child support system, Chin began noticing how many government systems — even those designed to help people — were structured in ways that failed to account for the realities of people’s lives.

“We started realizing our processes just weren’t built for everybody,” Chin said.

At the Office of Equity, Chin works to help agencies rethink how systems are designed in the first place — who they work for, who gets left out, and what barriers prevent communities from fully participating.

One example involves state contracting systems. Chin said many small community-rooted businesses struggle to compete for state contracts because of legal complexity, paperwork, and capacity barriers larger firms are better equipped to navigate.

“We’re trying to identify where government isn’t working for people,” Chin said. “And then asking how we redesign those systems so they actually work for everyone.”

For Chin, belonging is not just interpersonal. It is infrastructural.

It shows up in whether people can access services, whether communities feel heard by institutions, and whether someone experiences government as distant and punitive or responsive and human.

“A lot of times people think government doesn’t care, or nobody’s listening,” Chin said. “So part of our work is just showing up.”

In one rural Eastern Washington meeting, Chin recalled residents initially approaching the Office of Equity with skepticism. But conversations around contracting barriers and economic access began shifting perspectives.

“I had someone tell me afterward, ‘I didn’t think this was the kind of work your office was doing,’” Chin said.

Those moments reinforced something important for him: people may distrust institutions, but they still want to feel seen.

“There are so many messages right now that say you’re either on our team or you’re not,” Chin said. “Belonging asks whether we can still create a place where people feel safe, feel seen, and feel like there’s room for them.”

For Alex Gibilisco, those questions were deeply personal long before they became professional.

Gibilisco immigrated from Guatemala to the United States as a child after his family seeked to stay together. Today, he works with the City of Spokane on equity and community initiatives that attempt to close the distance between government and the people it serves.

“The intentionality was always: How can people treat each other better and see each other as human beings?” he said.

In Spokane, city leaders noticed that many immigrant, refugee, Indigenous, and grassroots organizations were being left out of funding opportunities because they lacked the staffing capacity or bureaucratic familiarity needed to navigate city systems.

Rather than blaming organizations for not participating, the city began asking different questions: Were the systems themselves accessible? Were communities actually being invited in? And what would it look like to redesign those processes around trust instead of compliance?

Members of the Washington Belonging Table gather for the most recent in-person convening in June 2026.

“We had to rethink how government shows up,” Gibilisco said. “And these are discussions we are continuing to ask in a statewide context with the table.”

That work led to changes in how Spokane engages residents — including bringing cultural events and community celebrations into civic spaces before city council meetings.

But those efforts also surfaced deeper barriers.

“One event showed us how inaccessible city buildings still were for residents with disabilities,” Gibilisco said. “That’s part of belonging too. You learn where people are still excluded when you actually invite them in.”

Gibilisco said the Washington Belonging Table has given him and many others a space to connect around common goals, discourse and issues affecting communities across the state. The table has also helped them develop a shared language and connection to one another.

“There’s a lot of great people doing this work,” he said. “The table became a way to brainstorm together, create a mutual understanding of a vision, and see how we can move it forward.”

Belonging as an antidote to fragmentation

For many involved in the table, the most important outcome so far is not a specific program or policy, but the relationships themselves.

After years of work in public health and civic engagement reinforced a belief that people were often far more connected than political narratives suggested, Baxter said the table reflects the perseverance of regional communities that reflect that reality. 

“It is amazing to realize that across the state people are more in agreement than disagreement regardless of politics, geography and economics,” she said. “It gives me faith in the power of gathering and civic dialogue.”

That philosophy now shapes much of the work at North Sound ACH, the regional health collaborative originally funded through Washington State’s Medicaid Transformation Project, and which Baxter has led since 2016.

Up to 80 percent of what determines a person's health happens outside the clinic, said Baxter, and it’s shaped by whether people have stable housing, reliable transportation, access to healthy food, economic opportunity, and strong social connections.

“The systems responsible for those conditions are often fragmented and disconnected from one another, she said. “Our role is to help bridge those divides—to bring together healthcare, education, housing, government, philanthropy, and community organizations around a shared commitment to well-being. Because healthier communities are built when people have both the resources they need and a meaningful voice in shaping the future they want to see.”

Today, North Sound ACH convenes more than 270 organizations across the region, creating a network built on belonging, shared responsibility, and collective well-being. At its core is a commitment to tribal sovereignty, including dedicated representation from each of the region's eight Tribal nations.

That work has become even more urgent as attacks on equity programs intensify and immigrant communities face growing fear and uncertainty.

Fido sees the current moment as a test — not only of policy, but of solidarity itself.

“Federal budgets are being cut. Equity programs are being dismantled,” she said. “Communities that were already navigating systemic exclusion are now facing accelerating threats to their safety, livelihoods, and belonging. If not now, then when?”

For Baxter, the stakes are equally clear.

“When forces are trying to make us afraid of our neighbors, distrust decision makers, and believe that we are alone,” she said, “the work around belonging is an antidote of sorts.”

The work is still in its early stages. The table is only now beginning to expand membership more intentionally across regions and sectors.

But participants say that slowness matters.

“How do you build something where everyone belongs,” Chin said, “without growing so quickly that you lose the ability to actually hold relationships?”

For now, the Washington Belonging Table remains what it has been since that first gathering in Oakland: a space where people who thought they were working alone are beginning to realize they aren’t.

And in a moment defined by fragmentation, fear, and distrust, for Gallegos, the Washington Belonging Table reflects something larger than a single statewide initiative. It is part of a growing recognition that belonging must move from theory into practice — embedded not only in community spaces, but in the institutions and relationships that shape everyday life.

“What gives me hope,” Gallegos said, “is seeing people realize they were never doing this work alone. Across Washington, there were already communities, agencies, organizers, and practitioners building toward belonging in different ways. The table is creating space for those efforts to find each other.”

Ashley Gallegos presents the "Places of Belonging" program at the 2024 O&B Conference in Oakland, California. Gallegos will lead a Belonging Practice Community cohort this year for practitioners and belonging builders.

She said the work is ultimately about creating the conditions for people to participate fully in shaping the futures of their communities. Belonging is not just about being invited into a space, Gallegos said, it’s about people having the power, trust, relationships, and shared responsibility to help shape what those spaces become together.

“I really hope people take from this work that it is doable,” Baxter said. “That belonging can actually be built.”

“The most transformative work happens in the spaces that don’t easily show up on a spreadsheet — where people feel they have a real voice in shaping their communities,” Baxter added. “When people experience belonging and shared ownership, that stays with them. It becomes foundational.”