After the Fire: Rebuilding Together
An invitation into our 2026 theme and the practices that will carry us through
As we look toward 2026, our conversations and resources are moving with intention into a shared focus: After the Fire: Rebuilding Together.
Many of us are arriving in the new year carrying loss, fatigue, and hard-earned clarity. Some systems have burned down. Others are still smoldering. Institutions have been tested. Relationships have been strained. What 2025 made unmistakably clear is that rebuilding cannot be rushed, outsourced, or done alone. It must be relational. It must be honest. And it must be collective.
We are living in a season that is burning hot and leaving real impact behind. Leaders and communities are holding grief alongside unanswered questions about what comes next. In this moment, rebuilding is not about returning to what it was” It is about choosing, together, how to build something new.
Last year, we invited our community into a shared retrospective. We looked back together at the moments, decisions, and systems that eroded what many of us had been taught to trust as true and just. That process was not about nostalgia but, clarity. It helped shape a vision for the next five years of our work. At nINA Collective, reflection is not a pause from movement; it is how movement becomes possible. This is an ancestral practice. Our vision is not new. Our ancestors have been here before. They built underground railroads and communities in the middle of jungles, up in the mountains, and everywhere that seemed impossible. They built the sacred as an act of resistance. They carried visionary stories of a just world where everyone belongs, where freedom is possible, and where change is made together.
Rebuilding as a collective practice
After the Fire: Rebuilding Together is our invitation to slow down and rebuild with intention. In the year ahead, our conversations will explore what it means to rebuild with dignity and imagination: how we tend what remains, how we strengthen our capacity for repair, and how we design what comes next without recreating the harms we are leaving behind.
This work requires a different posture. One that holds space for grief and for vision, for strategy and for care. One that recognizes rebuilding as an ongoing practice rooted in listening, shared responsibility, and the willingness to stay in relationship through uncertainty.
“After the fire—rebuilding together—names both what we’ve lived through and what we’re being asked to do next.”
From conversation to infrastructure: mutual aid in our Community of Practice
In alignment with this theme, we are deepening our Community of Practice by adding a Mutual Aid Community—a shared space for members to exchange resources, skills, and support while staying connected to one another.
Mutual aid, as we practice it, is a relational commitment. It recognizes that our collective capacity already exists across our community and that rebuilding requires pathways for care, knowledge, and support to circulate.
As shared in conversation, “The purpose is really to help us do a little bit more connecting with each other.” The Mutual Aid Community is designed to do just that: support members in offering what they have, asking for what they need, and staying rooted in shared responsibility as we navigate this moment together.
“The purpose is really to help us do a little bit more connecting with each other.”
The Mutual Aid Community is designed to do just that: support members in offering what they have, asking for what they need, and staying rooted in shared responsibility as we navigate this moment together.
Practicing what comes next
Throughout 2026, CHOIR Conversations will focus on building trust, strengthening relationships, and imagining new ways of working together that are humane, justice-centered, and sustainable. Each month, we gather to reflect, dialogue, and build applied practices that help us move from surviving toward shaping what comes next.
Rebuilding is slow work. It asks for courage, patience, and care. But it is also where possibility lives.
If you are longing for spaces that help you think, breathe, and rebuild alongside others who understand the weight of this moment, we invite you to join us. Our Community of Practice offers ongoing connection, shared learning, and now, mutual aid woven directly into our collective life.
We would be honored to be in community with you as we step into what comes after the fire—together.