GET FREE
Community
of Practice
Community of Practice:
Our History
Seeded in the summer of 2025, the GET FREE body of work is the natural evolution of Miakoda’s previous work as the founder and director of Fierce Allies.
Fierce Allies was founded in 2009 as a network of diverse practitioners advancing equity and justice through relationship-based practices for change. We were catalyzed by the belief that building resilient relationships is the most important investment for individuals and groups advancing ambitious change agendas. Over the years, in response to and in partnership with our clients, we developed the Fierce Allies suite of tools and practices, that call forth and facilitate radical collaboration, often across seemingly insurmountable divides.
The term “community of practice” is used by a wide variety of groups and with a broad assortment of meanings. Most of them are more akin to communities of practitioners, or networks of peers banded together by some shared principles, values, goals and/or practices, who sometimes collaborate with one another on projects, share skills and best practices, engage in parallel learning, and/or some combination of the above.
- Miakoda
Community of Practice:
Our Approach
What distinguishes these CoPs from most of the other groups using this term is our implementation, from the beginning, of specific tools and practices that map the power dynamics at play within the group, while also inviting and effectively leveraging tensions between CoP members. Transparently acknowledging power dynamics and openly working through conflicts is an explicit expectation of our work together, and makes the liberatory and radical collaboration nature of our work possible.
Miakoda has never been comfortable with the use of the term “clients” to describe the people we work with. That word feels deeply inadequate in its ability to capture our intensely mutual exchange of learning. Instead, Miakoda refers to these individuals as practice partners and their collective bodies as Communities of Practice (CoPs).
What Becomes Possible
The trust built within these Communities of Practice makes the following outcomes possible:
Healing the divides within groups in order to truly show up for one another in authenticity and vulnerability.
Holding ourselves and each other accountable to the ongoing interrogation of how our best work still remains steeped in the harmful behaviors of “business-as-usual.”
Manifesting actual shifts in our personal and collective beliefs, behaviors, and operating practices, so we can walk our talk of equitable distributions of power, agency, and sovereignty.
Come back soon
to see a list of current
practice partners
See the Fierce Allies Community of Practice pages for
testimonials from Leaders and Organizations
immersed in previous iterations of this work.