Sunday, February 16, 2020

Legacy CLT: A Prospectus





Legacy
Community Land Trust (CLT)

“a little bit of everything”

“Once invested, forever kept in service.”
 
“We are prejudice in favor of those people who are or have been treated as lessors. That is the community of people that we want as major and equal participants in our community.” -Sister Poulin

ReLeasing Land-Based Capacities for Whole Communities.

Land held in trust, serving the need for:

Affordable Secure Shelter, Healthy Air Food & Water, Connection to Community

Special Land Based Projects to provide access to stable shelter and land access for Very Low to Modest Income that Legacy Community Land Trust would be 

Temporary Shelter 

  • Conestoga Huts
  • Tiny Houses and Villages
  • Co-Housing
  • Homes
  • Separate or Combined Elder and Child Care

Charitable Organization Facilities & Offices

  • Food Cooperatives
  • Regenerative Farm/Gardens
  • Community Gardens
  • Incubators for new farmers
  • Incubators for new farmers
  • Jesus Center Farm
  • Carbon Sequestration Offsets and CSA Produce Subscriptions 
  • Physical and Mental Health & Rehab 
  • Combined Farm, and Elder and Child Care
  • Field to Fork Healthy Food Delivery Systems
  • Resource Stewardship based Makers Clubs
  • Public uses of Preserves
  • Publicly and Privately Financed long term - low or no interest loans.
  • Social Service Support
  • Education, work and recreation opportunities for the disabled
  • Permanent residence for efficient and effective delivery of Social Services and Charities.
  • Food production, preparation and delivery for Institutions such as
    • Hospitals
    • Schools
    • Corporations
    • Businesses
    • Restaurants
  • Green/Natural Burial

Why a Community Land Trust?

The Community Land Trusts (CLT) evolved through a uniquely American path.

1879 “Progress and Poverty” by Henry George

Home schooled author Henry George troubled by the coexistence of great wealth and great poverty side by side called attention to the poverty created by speculative hoarding of land access around cities and presented alternatives to private land holding in his bestselling book “Progress and Poverty” (1879).

1928 “This Ugly Civilization” by Ralph Borsodi

In his first book, prolific and popular author and ardent follower of George, Ralph Borsodi was the first to call these “lease holdings” Land Trusts”. Borsodi went farther, than George, saying that land should never be privately owned, but held as a trust for all. His writings heavily influenced both Helen and Scott Nearing, and Robert Rodale, both credited with the “back to the land movements of the 60’s 70’s” and beyond, and the “Regenerative Agriculture” approach growing at CSU, Chico and Butte College today.

1969 New Communities Inc.

is generally credited with being the first attempt at a Community Land Trust. A 5,700-acre (23 km2) land trust and farm collective owned and operated by approximately a dozen black farm farmers from 1969 to 1985 and at one time, the largest-acreage African American-owned properties in the United States. The backers of that land trust took inspiration from the Jewish National Fund, which at the time was buying up land and setting up settlements in Israel, and the Bhoodan Movement in India, which tried to persuade wealthy landowners to give some of their land to the poor.

Note: “In the aftermath of the Pigford v. Glickman class-action discrimination lawsuit, in 2009 New Communities received the largest of thousands of compensation awards from the USDA[7] for past discrimination practices.

1978 Covenant CLT

Sister Lucy Poulin a Carmelite nun, and fellow CLT activist and promoter Chuck Matthei who together started Covenant CLT, regarded the CLT as a vehicle for helping and empowering low-income people who had been excluded from the economic and political mainstream. To express it in terms of Lucy’s Catholic theology, there was a “preferential option for the poor.” The CLT was not simply building houses; it was building a community of the dispossessed.

“We’re talking about people who have never been accepted or had value in the community. And we’re prejudiced in favor of these people—that’s the community of people that we want as our community.” -Sister Poulin

1981 Community Land Cooperative of Cincinnati (CLCC)

This inner- city CLT was started by the West End Alliance of Churches and Ministries in 1980. One of its leaders was Maurice McCrackin, a Presbyterian minister whose church lay in the heart of the West End, Cincinnati’s oldest and most impoverished African American community. The CLCC was unlike all previous CLTs in applying the model for the first time to an urban environment.

Much greater in-depth information is available here: http://cltnetwork.org/publications-library/

Today

The essence of this historical review above is to illustrate that Community Land Trusts evolved through time from a need to meet unaddressed social problems.

Today, the goal of a CLT is understood to provide a safety net and bridge for those people most in need, spanning the gap between urban and rural problems and solutions. Going beyond the work of an organization like Homeless Shelters, the primary purpose and focus of CLTs is that they provide for the mainstreaming and permanent preservation of low income housing and opportunities by placing land in public trust for perpetuity. “Once invested, forever kept in service.” 

Each iteration of a CLT is furthered development of this form. Legacy CLT is no exception. CLTs were birthed from the needs arising from social and economic poverty. Legacy CLT provides access to long term local sustainable land-based and agrarian solutions for both urban and rural problems. 

Inventory of Local Networks and Resources

In 2012 the Agricultural Census ranked Butte County as 28th in the nation and 19th in California for production of crops including greenhouse and nursery.


*Link*
CSU Chico University Farm was ranked #1 for sustainability by College Values Online, while The Butte College make the list at #30. *Link* and The Jesus Center leads an Organic Farm Project

The extensive award winning work and research carried out by the University based Center for Healthy Communities serves 19 counties in Northern California and its programs are largely garden and agriculturally based.

Both CSU Chico and Butte College emphasize Sustainability in all their education programs, providing both education opportunities and student resources as interns and volunteers for a wide range of projects from developing Makers Clubs to agricultural innovation. Sustainability Offices in both college and university infrastructure are focused on collaborative project coordination between departments.

The Chico Saturday Certified Farmers Market was ranked #5 in the world by EssentialTravel.co.uk. There are approximately 10 seasonal markets run by 5 different community organizations in Butte County alone plus two year-round markets in Chico, all enabled to accept EBT (foodstamps). (Oroville Hospital runs one Cert. Farmers Market. Enloe ran one for several years.)

The Opportunity

Besides the ongoing strain that states of homelessness place on a society, the interest in outdoor or wilderness child care and elder care, green burial and the comingling of the young, the old, in natural agrarian environments, the growing demand for paths to carbon sequestration in soils, the rich depth of natural resources, experience, educational opportunities, technology all conspire to an astounding social growth potential of an agrarian response through a Community Land Trust in California’s Sacramento River Watershed.

A community that combines these land, education, interest, and public service resources through affordable access to shelter and land delivers opportunity to those of limited resources to learn and grow their lives and business in strangely organic, interesting and creative ways and will expose Legacy CLT to a national and worldwide role for positive, long term, non violent, community based, change.

Current Programs & Achievements

Current active startup and organizational networking partners are:

The Disability Action Center

The Children’s Education Fund

Legacy CLT is actively seeking greatly expanded:

networking partners

organizational partners

pledges of land, money, or volunteer services through

Our Website


Estate Planners


Kickstarter


North Valley Community Foundationwww.hOurworld.org

Apprenticeships

Internships

Our own public information outreach program








at a pivotal time,
Legacy Community Land Trust is:


joined in land-based work, celebration and cultural tradition:





to understand that human beings belong on the planet and therefore obligated to act like it


to study & teach the intricate complicated and interwoven patterns of the environment


to imbue our forest, farm & garden soils with mineralized and organic carbon


to create our work within the margins of our understanding of nature


to reduce carbon emissions through deployment of renewables


to see the old, the weak, the sick, & the troubled, succeed


to be stewards of healthy air, soil, water & living systems


to emancipate & celebrate local food self sufficiency


to make real, affordable permanent shelter


to live, create, die & rot without waste


to attune with & return to nature


to eradicate homelessness,


to demonstrate peace


to feel love





“a little bit of everything.”



Friday, February 7, 2020

The Energy Efficient BioChar Bakery Pit Oven


17 Minute Video above is the of test burn. Watch as smoke (mostly steam) pictured above quickly clears up)
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(Discussion, Comments, Shares, and your own trials of this pit method are much invited and welcomed.) A 1 minute video not included in the above video is below taken about 1 hour after lighting


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8 Minute Video below is the initial layout and explanation. And below that is the design sketch and discussion.



This is "The Experiment Burn" of a set up of an prototypic method to see if biochar can be made efficiently in a method that combines rocket stove concepts with a sort of wood-fired-oven that bakes yard waste in an integrated and efficient manner, perhaps similar to the methods used by the terra preta cultures along the Amazon.
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Below is how I set up the underground oven.


This method of making biochar is the most successful I have ever had in over a decade of making, thinking about, watching videos on, attending presentations and demonstrations on, all while making biochar at home in my wood stove and in my backyard. Pit Baking Biochar opens up a host of creative new ideas and concepts for adoption of systems, uses and adaptations for agricultural communities and 3rd world people's because the materials for making it are as local and cheap as a hole in the ground - (which, within a multitude of functions and designs) is basically what it is.

And, while it maximizes heat efficiencies in the the making of char, it delivers the remainder "waste" heat in a manner easily available and adaptable for domestic or farm or even urban and manufacturing uses. I believe when properly constructed, it is safer to work around than an open or above ground fire, or a barbeque (I dare add and emphasis the word "MUCH"). Because I believe this system is scalable, I believe also that pit baking biochar opens up a rainbow of options for both the backyard tinkerer and the civil engineer.


The folks in the Amazon were sequestering carbon into the soils for thousands of years. Biochar was an integral part of their daily cultural practice. As such, it is conservatively estimated that they transformed approximately 3% of the Amazon Rain Forests into rich soils supporting perennial food forests.
Old technology provides modern lessons to archaeology students
https://news.wisc.edu/old-technology-provides-modern-lessons-to-students-in-archaeology/

Mastering the Basics of Bonfire-firing Ceramics
https://drojkent.wordpress.com/2019/09/08/mastering-the-basics-of-bonfire-firing-ceramics/

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

18650 Salvage, Testing, Sorting, & Making Packs: An Old Man learns some things.


A couple of friends gave me their dead Lithium-Ion batteries from their DeWalt cordless tools.  This video shows the process from Salvage, Testing, Sorting, & Making Packs from such salvaged items as cordless tool battery packs and laptop and other tools and devices that use the 18650 cells.

Surprises: The ugly rusted cells tested the best! You can get a buzz handling 18650's with sweaty hands.

Suggestions:

  1. Be very careful. For example, do not hook up a cell in a pack backward (like I did).
  2. Keep the work table free of metal objects.
  3. Wrap metal tools with insulating materials such as shrinkwrap.


All the tools I used in the video can be had for less that a hundred dollars.

These, I think, are really great. Solderless caps for putting together battery packs of any size. A great way to experiment and learn how to set up different batteries in series or parallel, or both. If you are a novice, like me, or have kids who are interested in learning about batteries (for their eSkateBoards) I suggest starting them out with just enough of these caps to make and test the 3 batteries I showed in the video. That said, here are all the links:

VRUZEND battery kit V1.6 (
https://vruzend.com/product/vruzend_basic_kit/

----------------------------------------------------------
Product links below are monetized affiliate links through VigLink - now SOVRN//Commerce. I get a small fee if you purchase them using these links. You might find them a little bit cheaper if you look elsewhere.

Check out VigLink: viglink.com/?vgref=408410

Good Deals for Tools used in this video include


DEWALT 20V MAX XR 20V Battery, 5.0-Ah, 2-Pack (DCB205-2) from Home Depot
https://bit.ly/2RZw9cb

PITTSBURGH Precision Pliers Set, 6 Pc. from Harbor Freight
https://bit.ly/2Gy3S77

TECKMAN 10 in 1 Torx Screwdriver Set with T3 T4 T5 T6 T8 T10 Security Torx Bit & ESD Tweezers,Magnetic Screwdrivers Precision Repair Kit for Xbox,PS4,Macbook,Computer,Doorbell & Folding knife from Amazon
https://bit.ly/31a6BgG

7 Function Digital Multimeter from Harbor Freight (inexpensive (around 7 bucks): I have a couple and they work just fine.
https://bit.ly/2OqcJwb

Other Tools I have found useful and featured in my other Videos:
18650 Li-ion Lithium Lead-acid Battery Capacity Meter Discharge Tester Analyzer.
https://bit.ly/2RqDIcP
The solderless plastic end caps for 18650 are VRUZEND battery kit V1.6 for up to 52 18650 cells:
https://bit.ly/2GrS9Xv
Other products I use and enjoy are:
Juiced eBikes:
https://bit.ly/2tQFU3U
Ryobi 18-Volt ONE+ Cordless Reciprocating Saw:
https://bit.ly/2tai0k3
Diablo Nail-Embedded Wood and Metal Cutting Bi-Metal Reciprocating Saw Blade Set (6-Piece):
https://bit.ly/2QStbXw