History of CARA
The California Anti-Racism Alliance, LLC’s (CARA) origins can be traced back to 2018 when its eventual founder, Reiney Lin–an organizer and trainer with REI–moved from Greensboro, NC (the home of REI) back to her hometown in Los Angeles, CA. With the vast majority of REI networks based on the East coast at the time, she quickly found an opportunity to bring REI’s race analysis to the state when John Ma, a Los Angeles resident, reached out to REI after hearing Scene on Radio’s “Seeing White” podcast about going to a Phase I workshop in southern California. The two, along with their mutual connections, reached out to local community organizations and hosted the first REI workshop in March 2019.
CARA’s first workshop in March 2019 with Deena Hayes-Greene, Bayard Love, and Reiney Lin.
Reiney continued working with REI alumni from this initial workshop to host five more workshops throughout the rest of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 in Los Angeles and had planned the first workshop in San Francisco, CA in March 2020, which ultimately had to be canceled with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. With much of the world halted at an unprecedented level, the pandemic slowed the building momentum of the REI alumni network in California, and in-person workshops were no longer an option until virtual adaptations began operation later in the year.
As the workshops started to go virtual in the latter half of 2020, workshops became less tied to a local area as attendees were calling in from all over the state as well as out of the state and out of the country. During this time, Reiney connected with Janice Rooths, an alumna of REI based in Riverside, CA, who had reached out to bring the analysis to the local organizing entity she founded, Antiracist Riverside. With the expanding scope to other cities and regions of the state, Reiney began to reorganize the state’s REI network into the California Anti-Racism Alliance (CARA), named after the Guilford Anti-Racism Alliance (GARA), a similar organizing back in Greensboro, NC.
Reiney & Janice meet in-person for the first time in Riverside, CA in May 2022 along with Catherine Netter, an REI trainer living there at the time.
Reiney and Janice continued to organize REI Phase I workshops, especially since CARA was the only open community-based workshop operating on Pacific Time in the then-virtual world. It took until May 2024 for Reiney to lead her first Phase I workshop for REI (hosted by the San Francisco Health Plan) back in-person since the COVID-19 pandemic, but it proved to be a major catalyst into the next evolution of CARA for a few reasons.
First, being back in person in California was a reminder of the workshop’s true purpose of delivering a shared race analysis to drive local organizing and movement building that starkly contrasted the increasingly loose borders of virtual workshops.
Second, Reiney connected in-person for the first time with Tim Jellison, a program leader with the Groundwater Institute based in San Francisco. While Tim was quite familiar with the video-recorded version of Reiney, who is featured in GWI’s 1.5-day Immersive Experience, this was another critical connection as the resulting desire to bring more REI workshops to California and to establish a “home” for organizing REI alumni.
The first in-person REI Phase I workshop in the state of California (hosted by the San Francisco Health Plan) since the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2024.
Following this meeting, Tim joined Reiney and Janice to rebuild CARA to bring the in-person Phase I workshops back to the state and to develop the organization into a more established entity built for sustainability and building relational power in multiracial coalition in local organizing contexts within California. During this period, Mario Estevez, an REI trainer based in Oakland, CA, and Tanynya Hekymara, an REI alumna from one of first California-based workshops in 2019 based in Inglewood, CA joined the CARA Core Team.