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.”