Community of Practice
Our History
The Get Free body of work emerged in the summer of 2025, as 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, and still are, catalyzed by the belief that building resilient relationships is the most important investment of resources for individuals and groups advancing ambitious change agendas. Over the years, informed by this belief, the Get Free (formerly Fierce Allies) suite of tools and practices have called forth and facilitated radical collaboration in hundreds of teams, coalitions, and organizations, often across seemingly insurmountable divides.
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 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.
Our Approach
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 embody our values of equitable distributions of power, agency, and sovereignty.
