Organizing for the Long Haul: How to Build a Network for Land and Liberation

State of the Movements is a recurring NPQ column dedicated to tracking the pulse of social movements and the solidarity economy in 2025.

We are often forced to fight defensive battles in our movements. When your house is on fire, the immediate and urgent priority is to extinguish the blaze. Such is the case with many struggles against the present administration of President Donald Trump. Virtually everyone I know is finding ways to support—and celebrate the successes of—the vital struggles being led by federal workers, nonprofit workers, and community development financial institutions.

As critical as this resistance work is, we must also confront the reality that the current system is collapsing. This means we must build a new one. The People’s Network for Land & Liberation (PNLL) coalition was formed to do just that.

PNLL is a multiracial, multiethnic consortium of six community-based organizations located across the United States. Its aim is to create a bold yet practical solidarity economy that can transform both politics and the economy from the ground up.

All six PNLL members share a common goal of shifting from power-over, extractive, and unsustainable sociopolitical systems to cooperative, regenerative, and balanced systems. PNLL is also a member of the broader national Resist & Build formation, in which I actively participate.

Central to PNLL’s vision is securing community stewardship over land. As Kali Akuno, cofounder of Cooperation Jackson, explained in NPQ, “A lot of businesses go out of business because they just cannot make the rent. So, we wanted to remove that from the equation as much as possible.”

Forging the Vision

PNLL first emerged amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Today, six organizations comprise the network, all united behind a transformative political program that aims to:

1. Decommodify land using community land trusts for community-owned affordable housing, commercial space for worker-owned cooperatives, food production using a food sovereignty framework, and to preserve the integrity of the life-giving ecosystems of Mother Earth.
2. Support community production employing both digital fabrication technologies and regenerative agriculture-based materials and energy. This means decentralized manufacturing that empowers local communities to create goods collaboratively and sustainably using resilient local supply chains.
3. Incubate an ecosystem of worker-owned cooperatives that go beyond “co-ops for the sake of co-ops” to create profitable and vibrant local supply and value chains.
4. Engage in an internal self-education program that engages folks to foster critical thinking, dialogue, and empowerment.
5. Infuse art and culture in everything. This includes making things beautiful but goes much deeper. Operate according to the adage: “If it isn’t soulful, it isn’t strategic.”

Building the Network

Within these five categories, each member group has a somewhat different focus, although there is a lot of overlap. Here is an overview of who’s who within the network:

• Community Movement Builders has nine national chapters rooted in the Black radical tradition of self-determination and liberation. Their largest chapter is in Atlanta, GA, where they have been leaders in the Stop Cop City movement, a massive militarized police training facility. They also own and operate four community houses, operate a Community Sea Moss cooperative, and are incubating an aquaponics co-op. They recently purchased 14 acres of land near Atlanta as a space for food production, a movement retreat, and training space, which they call the Love Land Liberation project.
• Cooperation Jackson owns 52 separate properties in Jackson, MS. Six are single-family homes with 12 people currently living in them, others are single-family properties that need to be rehabilitated, and some is land being farmed by the Freedom Farms Cooperative. They also operate a 6,000-square-foot community center and a community production center, and own a six-unit strip mall on a city block that is being remodeled to be the site of what will be called the People’s Grocery Store, intended to operate as a worker co-op.
• Cooperation Vermont, based in rural Vermont, purchased the historic 150-year-old Marshfield Village Store and converted it into a worker co-op. The second floor is being used as workers’ housing, and they are currently renovating the third floor for additional cooperative housing. The store served as a relief and resilience hub during the recent floods that decimated the region. Earlier this year they purchased the nearby Rainbow Sweets Bakery building and are converting the ground floor into a commercial kitchen to support local food producers in preparing goods for a commercial market, with the second story to be used for affordable housing.
• Incite Focus is based in Idlewild, MI. Also known as “Black Eden,” Idlewild became famous during the Jim Crow segregation era as a place where people could be “fully human and unapologetically Black.” Today, they are recognized as leaders in the process of local community production using digital fabrication technologies in concert with local supply chains, based on regenerative agriculture. They are also in the process of converting a 60-acre resilience hub, a 10,000-square-foot community center, and a historic hotel and restaurant into a land t They are incubating worker-owned cooperatives to operate them all.
• Native Roots Network is an Indigenous-led community organization that operates in the traditional lands of the Wintu, Yana, and Pit River peoples in what is now known as Shasta County, CA. The group practices “Acornomics,” an Indigenous regenerative framework for land stewardship, cultural revitalization, and community resilience. It has already rematriated two sites: a 4.5-acre parcel which is being developed to become a community resilience center; and a 1,200-acre site for Traditional Ecological Knowledge or TEK land restoration, Native food, and fiber cultivation and community production, with digital fabrication technologies and an aim to develop an ecosystem to support worker-owned cooperative businesses.
• Wellspring Cooperative is working to build a local solidarity economy ecosystem in greater Springfield, MA, by leveraging a community land-trust model. Wellspring already has elements of this ecosystem in place including a shared-use community kitchen, mutual aid and food security projects, and redevelopment of an abandoned fire station as a community center/co-op hub. It is also continuing to build out a network of mutually supportive co-ops, including Wellspring Harvest—a quarter-acre hydroponic greenhouse (the state’s largest), producing roughly 250,000 heads of lettuce, greens, and herbs per year—Wellspring Upholstery, Natural Living Landscapes, a weatherization co-op called Energía, and Catalyst Cooperative Healing, a mental healthcare co-op.

The central goal of the collaboration among these projects is to fundraise and develop a common land-acquisition fund that can enable community groups to decolonize and remove from the market (decommodify) as much land as possible, capitalize the launch and conversion of businesses anchored in the land and in the community, and use both as the foundation to create local and regional supply and value chains. Ultimately, the network seeks to replace capitalism, not reform or coexist with it.

Can Impact Investing Be Transformative?

The next phase of PNLL is to create a movement owned and operated by a catalytic impact investment fund to scale these efforts. But to realize our transformative vision, our movement needs to completely redesign what impact investing is about.

The central goal…is to fundraise and develop a common land-acquisition fund that can enable community groups to remove land from the market.

Today, a lot of well-meaning wealthy people turn to impact investing as a way to align their money with their values. And on the surface, that makes sense—who wouldn’t want to support companies that are doing good in the world?

But impact investing, as typically practiced, doesn’t actually challenge systems. Instead, it often helps wealthy people stay wealthy, while perhaps easing the guilt that comes with knowing the system is rigged in their favor.

Impact investing still operates within the logic of capitalism, which prioritizes private ownership, competition, and endless growth. That means the goal is still to extract more value than is put in, usually from communities or ecosystems that don’t get a say in the process. It’s a gentler capitalism—but it’s still capitalism.

If we’re serious about system change, we have to go deeper.

The solidarity economy offers a different path. It’s about shifting power, not just dollars. It centers cooperation instead of competition, shared ownership instead of private control, and values people and the planet over profits. This isn’t about charity or better business practices. It’s about transformation—building an economy rooted in democracy, sustainability, and justice.

For those with wealth, that means moving beyond just doing “less harm” with investments. It means investors need to ask harder questions, such as whether they are willing to give up some control, to invest in community-owned enterprises where decisions are made democratically, and to support regenerative models that may yield below-market returns but will help generate meaningful community value.

Truth be told, for our movement’s work to succeed, we don’t need more impact investors. We need more people to help us build the solidarity economy. We need accomplices who are ready to redistribute wealth, shift power, and co-create a future where everyone can thrive, not just the lucky few.

Fortunately, some of these accomplices exist. Ava Keating and Charlie Spears are a couple who inherited wealth and have gone “all-in” on this approach. As Keating told NPQ in an interview, “[The] so-called socially responsible investing is a myth. We know that we need something new.”

She added, “As donors, we need to bring our full selves. This means developing class analysis and organizing skills. It means cultivating relationships.…I don’t want a return on investment. I want to help create a humane, equitable world that we all deserve. I want—and need—system change.”

For his part, Spears added, “We are all existentially in the same boat here. Either we break from the capitalist mode of production and create a new society, or there’s no point in having money because the world will be burning around us.”

We need accomplices who are ready to redistribute wealth, shift power, and co-create a future where everyone can thrive, not just the lucky few.

At an institutional level, Boston Impact Initiative (BII) is an example of a nonprofit impact investing fund that is going beyond great projects and is dedicated to building financial, social, and political power. An example is their Fund Manager Education program, which trains community organizers to become fund managers that can implement this vision.

As Shavon Prophet, director of education and strategic partnerships at BII, explained to NPQ, the goal is to engage “in a transformational collaborative process that is challenging assumptions, sparking new ideas, and deepening our shared collective understanding.” Broadly speaking, BII aims to reject extractive systems and advance a solidarity economy rooted in shared power, mutual accountability, and community control.

What’s Next?

We are at a pivotal moment in history. As Antonio Gramsci observed in his Prison Notebooks, after Italy had become the world’s first fascist state a century ago, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

As society confronts the reality of ecological collapse and rising fascism, the urgent need for transformative change has never been clearer. The solidarity economy stands as a beacon of possibility.

By decommodifying land, nurturing worker-owned cooperatives, embracing political education, and embedding art and culture into every facet of our work, it is possible to collectively go beyond merely resisting the old: Communities can actively build the new in a spirit of cooperation, shared ownership, and ecological stewardship.