A Vision for Land and Liberation

Editors’ Note: This article was originally written for the Summer 2025 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine, “Land Justice: From Private Ownership to Community Stewardship.”

Recent years have seen growing interest in land. This interest is driven by the housing crisis; the rise of giant agribusiness gobbling up small farms; and the debilitating rising rents faced by small businesses. Co-ops, nonprofits, and housing organizations have responded by launching radical real estate workshops. The Land Back movement has also grown in strength and prominence.

Land ownership is a deep way to build power.

All of this is driven by the fact that treating land and its natural and built assets (property) as a commodity—something to be bought and sold in the pursuit of profit—is highly destructive.

When the real estate bubble burst in 2008, it led to a global economic meltdown. Real estate speculation and profiteering continue to drive gentrification and displacement, tearing apart low- and moderate-income communities, fueling a growing housing crisis, and straining paychecks beyond reason—not to mention the environmental toll of reckless, profit-driven development, luxury housing, and urban sprawl.

If land ownership is a deep way to build power, it’s then critical to take that land out of the speculative market—to decommodify it—and to put it into collective stewardship for the benefit of the community.

Land ownership confers control over what happens with to that land and enables us to move away from an extractive relationship to one that is in harmony with Mother Earth. It gives us a seat at the table in the broader landscape of economic development. Otherwise, we are on the outside, organizing a pressure campaign is strengthened by owning land and land assets.

While the vision of collectively stewarding land and dispensing with the legal framework of private property is a goal for many, the reality is that in the United States, outside of Native Nations, our legal system simply does not recognize other forms of stewarding land.

In other parts of the world, traditional and communal land management practices remain common. A study on commons grabbing (the takeover of shared community resources), published in Ecological Economics estimated that “70% of all the land in sub-Saharan Africa, can be categorized as customary common property and community-based tenure regimes.”

Holding land…gives us a place to stand, to organize, to find refuge, to build community…and to build solidarity economy ecosystems.

As much as we may celebrate these forms of culturally embedded land stewardship, it is precisely these types of commons that are getting snatched up by large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs). As the Ecological Economics authors detail, there is “mounting evidence that LSLAs preferentially target the commons, in the process altering long-standing customary resource governance systems.”

In the United States, outside of Native Nations and state-owned public land, private property ownership is the sole way to really control what happens with and on that land. Even a community land trust (CLT) is a form of private property, although it is collectively governed by its stakeholders.

In addition to building power, holding land is also about life and liberation. It gives us a place to stand, to organize, to find refuge, to build community, to connect and learn, to celebrate, to connect with Mother Earth, and to build solidarity economy ecosystems to provide for our material needs.

Land, Liberation, and Community Land Trusts

The founders of the first CLT in the United States knew this. Civil rights activists Shirley Sherrod and Charles Sherrod were among the cofounders of New Communities—a 6,000-acre CLT in Georgia that was founded in 1969 as a safe haven for Black farmers who had been thrown off their land for being active in the civil rights movement. New Communities grew peanuts, corn, soybeans, and vegetable crops, raised pigs, and became known for its cured meats.

According to Shirley, “About 10 families had long-term renewable leases to live in houses on the land, and dozens of others worked there and participated in one of the committees set up to handle the farm, education, health, and industry.”

Following years of drought, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) refused to provide New Communities a loan similar to the relief provided to White farmers, and in 1985 the land was foreclosed upon. Over a decade later, the trust won a $12 million settlement against the US government to compensate Black farmers for discrimination by the USDA. The money was invested in Resora, a 1,600-acre farm, which carried forward the mission of New Communities to address “African American land loss, food-related disparities, environmental and economic justice, and other related efforts like social justice and racial healing.”

A National Movement

New Communities formed the basis for a CLT model that has since spread throughout the United States. The basic CLT model is a nonprofit that removes land from the speculative market and holds it in perpetuity for the benefit of the community.

Although originally designed to hold agricultural land, in the United State the most common focus of the CLT is on providing permanently affordable housing, which a CLT does by leveraging funding from various sources such as grants, donations, and loans to build or acquire housing. The trust retains ownership of the land but assists low- and moderate-income households purchase homes at below-market rates. In exchange, the purchaser must agree to a cap on the resale price when they sell their house, thereby preserving affordability for the next buyer.

Some CLTs also own affordable rental properties; others support collectively owned housing cooperatives. CLTs are also used to support nonresidential development, especially small farms and urban agriculture, and to a lesser extent, commercial buildings, and other social amenities.

In recent years, the CLT movement has grown significantly, with a strong track record of developing affordable housing and promoting racial equity. According to a 2022 census by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, there has been a 30 percent increase of CLTs and similar shared equity programs since 2011. This census also indicates that CLTs provide 43,931 affordable housing units. Survey data on housing form are imprecise, but there is a roughly even split between rentals and single-family homes. Forty five percent of households that purchased homes were people of color and one in three families were headed by single mothers.

The vast majority (85 percent) of responding organizations restrict all or some of their shared equity units to those with incomes at a level at or below 80 percent of area median income. Most CLTs also provide a wide range of post-purchase support including financial support, home maintenance, home repair, home improvement, and homebuyer counseling to help residents and owners steward that housing and build wealth over the long run.

Leveraging Land to Develop a Local Solidarity Economy Ecosystem 

In western Massachusetts, one CLT is being used to strengthen a growing local solidarity economy ecosystem. In the context of the likelihood of various kinds of disruptions—climate change, pandemics, political/social breakdown, and economic precarity—the Lower Valley CLT (LVCLT) seeks to deepen resilience by helping local communities provide for themselves and engage in democratic governance processes to own, control, and benefit from their local economy. A further overarching priority is to integrate regenerative ecological principles in all aspects of development.

The LVCLT was initiated by three organizations: the Wellspring Cooperative, where I am a codirector, a community-based development organization that supports worker co-ops and solidarity economy initiatives in Springfield and Holyoke; Neighbor to Neighbor, a statewide community-based organizing group with chapters also in Springfield and Holyoke; and Equity Trust, based in Amherst, a nonprofit that supports CLT development nationally.

The choice to focus on the lower valley stems from the political geography of the Connecticut River Valley (officially known as the Pioneer Valley) in western Massachusetts. The upper valley, sometimes called the Happy Valley, a term of both affection and self-deprecation, is home to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst—a public university—and Smith, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire Colleges.

The upper valley is a hotbed of solidarity economy practices including worker co-ops, food co-ops, community supported agriculture, CLTs, time banking, mutual aid, and organizations that support this work. Politically, it is very progressive, with a population that is relatively affluent, well educated, and largely White.

South of the Holyoke Range, affectionately known as the tofu curtain, is the lower valley, where people of color make up the majority of the population in the larger urban centers of Springfield and Holyoke. Springfield is the third largest city in the state; Holyoke, while far smaller, has the highest percentage of Puerto Ricans of any US city outside of Puerto Rico. These deindustrialized cities face the usual array of social and economic challenges: both are ranked among the 10 cities in the state with the highest levels of poverty and the highest rates of asthma in the country in 2018, which they are still struggling to remediate.

The LVCLT is committed to working in this region precisely because, as compared to the three CLTs in the upper valley, there are none currently in operation in the lower valley.^[1] In the interest of equity, a core value of the solidarity economy, CLTs must be relevant in struggling communities. Springfield, in particular, appears to be vulnerable to housing speculation, which is likely to lead to gentrification and displacement. In 2024, it was the single hottest housing market in the country, and real estate developers purchased more than 1,200 properties between 2016 and 2021.

Key elements to support this local solidarity economy ecosystem include affordable housing, regenerative agriculture (food system), worker cooperatives, and community production. There is also a commitment to have spaces to build connection, culture, and learning, which are critical to engagement, social cohesion, and knitting together a community’s vision and ecosystem. The first three elements are reasonably well known, but it’s worth discussing community production in more detail.

By community production I mean not a business but a process by which communities produce and provide goods and services to meet their own needs. What community production means can vary. It might be growing food, collectively making meals, a house barn-raiser, or peer support like Alcoholics Anonymous.

These forms of nonmarket production empower the community to reduce dependency on external resources and global supply chains by fostering self-sufficiency and innovation. Community self-provisioning enables people to reduce their dependency on earning a wage, which creates time and opportunity to explore and nurture their talents and passions, thereby living and becoming their best selves.

For this work, our coalition is partnering with the Center for Community Production (CCP) led by Incite Focus, based in Michigan, to provide the tools, technology, expertise, and training to support all of the above.

Of particular interest is building out a Fab Lab for digital fabrication that uses computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), in which machines are guided by instructions from computer-aided design (CAD) files to produce three-dimensional objects.

The global Fab Lab community shares designs from around the world to produce a wide variety of things, from furniture, to bicycle trailers, to houses. At the current rate of innovation, experts believe that we will be able to produce virtually anything locally, including Fab Lab equipment. It is critical to start now to build the infrastructure and develop the skills for the community to benefit from this transformative technology that is developing at a blistering pace.

A Broader Vision 

LVCLT, through Wellspring, is connected to a national network called the People’s Network for Land and Liberation (PNLL). Comprised of six nodes—including Wellspring, Cooperation Jackson, Community Movement Builders, Cooperation Vermont, Lake County Merrymakers, and Native Roots Network—PNLL communities are all working on acquiring and stewarding land to build a local solidarity economy ecosystem.

Each node is autonomous and has different approaches, but they all have a strong shared vision. The communities exchange in strategizing, peer support, sharing expertise, analysis, and training—and  we are building a fund to support this work, which has already raised millions of dollars. Although PNLL is only six nodes, we envision adding to that number, eventually developing a federated model of mutual support and exchange.

We envision a broader movement to build an economy and world beyond capitalism that centers the wellbeing of people and planet, shifting away from an extractive logic and towards a regenerative worldview and culture. This transformative movement is a complex system that includes many strands of organizing.

The core land-based work of PNLL is but one piece of the puzzle, but a critical one. To develop solidarity economy ecosystems, communities must be able to own and steward land to meet their own needs.

Just as the founders of New Communities knew, land and liberation go hand in hand.

Notes:

1. A past effort in Holyoke failed. Their federal Form 990 filing, available from Candid (Guidestar), from FY 2020 reports final assets of zero as of June 30, 2021.