International Center for Community Land Trusts

Land, Justice and Community in Great Britain
2026-05-21 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Paris)
This event was part of the 2026 Global Community Land Trust (CLT) Virtual Summit. Explore the full program and register for more events here.

Recording

Resources

Transcript (English)

Slides (Scotland)

Slides (England)

South of Scotland Community Housing and the Community Land Trust Network of England and Wales co-hosted a session exploring the role of community land movements in addressing inequality and advancing community-led development across Great Britain.

While the UK is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, land and property ownership remain highly concentrated, contributing to inequalities in housing, economic opportunity, and access to land. This session examined how community land initiatives are responding by bringing land and buildings into local democratic control and developing them for community benefit.

Drawing on experiences from Scotland, England, and Wales, speakers provided an overview of the movement’s history, diversity, and current challenges, alongside grassroots perspectives from practitioners working in different contexts. The discussion highlighted how community ownership is being used to address housing need, support local economies, and strengthen long-term community resilience.

Speakers

Mike Staples, South of Scotland Community Housing, Chief Executive (Scotland)

Tom Chance, Community Land Trust Network of England and Wales (UK)

Chris Dalglish, South of Scotland Community Housing, Partnership and Learning Manager (Scotland)

Angela Williams, Langholm Initiative, Development Manager: Tarras Valley Nature Reserve (Scotland)

Megan MacInnes, Applecross Community Company, Local Development Manager (Scotland)

Casey Edwards Cwmpas, Community Led Housing Project Manager (Wales)

Gareth Ioan, YTC 4Llan, Director (Wales)

Sanab Hersi, Green Soul and Cardiff CLT, Director (Wales)

Nkechi Okeke, Brent CLT, Regeneration Manager (England)

Christine Eden, Marshfield CLT, Chair (England)

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Decolonizing Community Land Trusts in Canada
2026-05-26 13:00 - 14:30 (America/Halifax)
This event was part of the 2026 Global Community Land Trust (CLT) Virtual Summit. Explore the full program and register for more events here.

Recording

Resources

Transcript (English)

Temiskaming District CLT Demonstration Project

The Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts hosted a panel exploring how CLTs can support processes of decolonization through community stewardship of land.

Bringing together land trust initiatives from across so-called Canada, this session highlighted how organizations are engaging with rematriation, Land Back, cultural resurgence, and housing justice within settler-colonial contexts. Speakers shared experiences from both established and emerging initiatives, including efforts to secure permanently affordable housing, support Indigenous-led governance, and reclaim land for cultural and ecological purposes.

Grounded in diverse regional experiences—from urban neighborhoods in Vancouver to Indigenous-led initiatives in Northern Ontario and Kingston—the discussion examined both the possibilities and tensions of using CLT models within existing legal and political systems. The session also reflected on key questions around governance, language, and the role of women and Two-Spirit leadership in shaping land stewardship practices.

Organizations

Cultural Land Trust (British Columbia)

The Cultural Land Trust is an emerging initiative in British Columbia focusing on securing space for artists and cultural organizations. Supported by 221A during its development phase, emerging research explores strategies land trusts can employ to foster reciprocal relationships with host nations.

Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust (British Columbia)

The Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust is working to secure permanently deeply affordable housing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. Founded in 2020 by local organizations—and guided by Indigenous leadership, Elders, and tenant voices—the organization frames community ownership as part of a broader effort to decolonize housing systems.

Temiskaming District Community Land Trust (Ontario)

The Temiskaming District Community Land Trust is forming to address housing insecurity faced by Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people in Northern Ontario. Grounded in land reclamation and matrilineal governance, the emerging land trust will be governed by and for Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people, enabling them to design, build, and steward their own housing.

All Our Relations Land Trust (Ontario)

All Our Relations Land Trust, founded in 2022, enables the urban Indigenous community to take direct action for biodiversity restoration and cultural resurgence in Katarokwi (Kingston, Ontario). Its flagship project, the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Garden, creates space for community cultivation, ceremony, and ecological restoration. In 2024, the land was gifted by the United Church of Canada, highlighting a meaningful example of reconciliation through land return.

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OFS/BRS : Une réponse à la crise du logement ?
2026-06-03 14:00 - 15:30 (Europe/Helsinki)
This event was part of the 2026 Global Community Land Trust (CLT) Virtual Summit. Explore the full program and register for more events here.

FRANÇAIS

Foncier Solidaire France a organisé une table ronde consacrée au dispositif OFS/BRS, adaptation française du modèle des community land trusts (CLT), et à son rôle dans la réponse à la crise du logement.

Développé pour répondre aux difficultés croissantes d’accès au logement, le modèle OFS/BRS repose sur la dissociation du foncier et du bâti afin de faciliter l’accession à la propriété pour les ménages à revenus modestes tout en limitant la spéculation. Cette session a examiné comment ce dispositif a permis de produire rapidement une offre de logements abordables, et comment il évolue aujourd’hui pour répondre aux enjeux de rénovation du parc existant.

À partir d’exemples concrets en France, les intervenants ont partagé leurs expériences et analyseront le rôle des OFS dans la mise en œuvre de solutions à la fois sociales et environnementales, notamment en matière de rénovation de logements et d’amélioration des conditions d’habitat. La discussion a permit également de situer ces dynamiques dans un cadre plus large de politiques publiques du logement et de transition écologique.

Enregistrement / Recording (Français)

ENGLISH

On June 3, Foncier Solidaire France will host a roundtable exploring how the OFS/BRS model—France’s adaptation of the community land trust approach—is being used to address the housing crisis.

Developed in response to growing housing affordability challenges, the OFS/BRS model separates land ownership from housing to enable access to affordable homeownership while limiting speculation. This session will examine how the model has scaled in recent years to deliver housing for low- and moderate-income households, and how it is now evolving to address the renovation of existing housing stock.

Speakers will share experiences from across France, highlighting how OFS/BRS is being used to respond to both social and environmental challenges—including improving housing conditions and supporting climate-related renovation efforts. The discussion will connect these local experiences to broader questions around housing policy, affordability, and sustainable development.

Resources

Transcription (Français)

Transcript (English)

Slide Deck (Français / English)

Speakers

Juliette Grenier, Fédération des Coop’HLM, chargée de mission Accession et Copropriétés

Nathalie Demeslay, Rennes Métropoles, Responsable du Service Habitat

Jean-Baptiste Soulard, OFS de Plaine Commune, Directeur du Développement

Julien Gug, Procivis Alsace, Secrétaire Générale

Céline Priem, Logeo Promotion, Directrice Déléguée

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Meeting the Moment: Solidarity and Partnerships with Indigenous Peoples in the California CLT Movement
2026-06-09 13:00 - 14:30 (America/Denver)
This event was part of the 2026 Global Community Land Trust (CLT) Virtual Summit. Explore the full program here.

Grabación

Recursos

Transcripción

ESPAÑOL

La California Community Land Trust Network organizó una sesión centrada en el intercambio de experiencias sobre cómo los CLTs están construyendo relaciones de solidaridad con comunidades indígenas en California.

Esta sesión presentó iniciativas lideradas y co-lideradas por comunidades indígenas que utilizan los community land trusts (CLT) para impulsar procesos de Land Back, rematriación (devolución de tierras ancestrales a las comunidades indígenas), reparaciones, soberanía alimentaria y revitalización cultural. A través de relatos y estudios de caso, las personas ponentes compartieron cómo estos esfuerzos se desarrollan mediante alianzas, construcción de coaliciones y formas de gobernanza comunitaria, así como los desafíos y oportunidades que enfrentan en el contexto político actual.

La conversación también abordó aprendizajes sobre cómo construir relaciones significativas con comunidades tribales y explorará el papel que los CLTs pueden desempeñar en el fortalecimiento del liderazgo y la autodeterminación indígena.

Recording

Resources

Slides

Transcript

ENGLISH

The California Community Land Trust Network hosted a storytelling session exploring how CLTs are engaging in solidarity with Indigenous communities across California.

This session featured Indigenous-led and co-led initiatives using community land trusts to advance Land Back, rematriation, reparations, food sovereignty, and cultural revitalization. Through case-based storytelling, speakers shared how these efforts are being shaped through partnerships, coalition-building, and community-led governance, as well as the challenges and opportunities they are navigating in the current political context.

The discussion also highlighted lessons on building meaningful relationships with tribal communities and explored how CLTs can support Indigenous leadership and self-determination.

Speakers

Darlene Franco, Wukchumni Community Land Trust, Tribal Chairperson & Chief Executive Officer of Wukchumni Tribe

DARLENE FRANCO has worked all her life in Native communities, including directing statewide Native language revitalization programs, coaching Native youth sports teams, leading health and wellness cultural programs, providing cultural curriculum development, and teaching and practicing her Tribe’s culture and running ceremonies for her people. She is a member of the Wukchumni Tribe, whose ancestral homelands are near what is today known as Visalia in Tulare County. For the past year, Darlene has been attending California Truth and Healing Council (CTHC) sessions throughout the state to learn about other California Native Americans’ successes and struggles. She also regularly participates in agricultural groups and activities, from basketry workshops to Traditional Ecological Knowledge programs.

Aerin Monroe, Pathways of Purpose, Co-Founder & Co-Director of Pathways of Purpose & LFL Community Land Trust

AERIN MONROE is a writer, media producer, agroecologist and environmental consultant with his BA in Environmental Studies and Community Organizing from Cal Poly Humboldt. With a horticultural, natural landscaping and organic farming background, Aerin’s work is focused on Afro- Indigenous foodways and land stewardship, climate resilience, environmental justice, sustainable food systems, regenerative agriculture, ecosystem restoration and sovereignty for BIPOC communities. Pathways of Purpose theory of change is inspired by his vocational identity development process and unique educational path in Environmental Justice and Advocacy.

Ruth Wortman, Humboldt Healthy Families & LFL Community Land Trust Partner, Founder

RUTH WORTMAN is of many nations both Native and non-Native. She is of Yurok, Tolowa Dee-ni’, Mattole and Wiyot descent. She is the cultural coordinator for Sorrel Leaf Healing Center and founder of Humboldt Healthy Families. Ruth participated in restoring the Salmon Ceremony for the local Tribal communities. Along with her professional life, Ruth is a mother, ceremony leader, cultural bearer for traditional practices and lifeways, tending to and weaving community wellness regionally, with cultural revitalization and recovery pathways for intertribal Native families, Women and Two-Spirit communities.

Alice Lincoln-Cook, FireKeepers Alliance & LFL Community Land Trust Partner, Co-Founder

ALICE LINCOLN-COOK (Karuk) draws on a lifetime of working as an independent artist, traditional basketweaver, culture bearer, and cultural fire expert: she is passionate about teaching the practices she grew up with to help others manage ancestral lands and waters in a good way, that is healthy for our people and our culture. Prior to serving as President and Board Member with the California Indian Basketweavers Association (CIBA) for eight terms where she coordinated multiple basketweaving conferences and outreach events, Alice taught basketweaving to California Native Tribal members, and worked with local schools, nonprofits, and state and federal agencies throughout the Pacific Northwest. Alice was instrumental in reviving CIBA’s Following the Smoke program, an inter-agency training retreat that brought hundreds of Tribal practitioners and affiliates together to connect good fire with traditional land management practices. Since obtaining her Basic 32 Red Card firefighting certification, Alice has become a highly sought-after speaker at universities, conferences, and Basic 32 fire training programs both in California and nationally.

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Land and Justice: First Nations Housing and CLTs in Australia
2026-06-10 09:00 - 10:30 (Australia/Melbourne)
This event is part of the 2026 Global Community Land Trust (CLT) Virtual Summit, a six-week series of online events from May 5 – June 10. Explore the full program and register for more events here.

On June 10, as the final event in the 2026 Global CLT Virtual Summit, the Australian Community Land Trust Network will host a panel exploring the role of CLTs in advancing First Nations housing and land justice in Australia.

Bringing together practitioners, advocates, and researchers, this session will highlight emerging First Nations-led CLT initiatives and recent research supporting the relevance of CLTs in Indigenous housing contexts. Speakers will share how Country-centred, community-led approaches are being developed in response to ongoing housing challenges, alongside the policy barriers that continue to shape the movement.

The discussion will also examine how these experiences contribute to broader conversations on decolonizing housing systems and inform future directions for CLTs in Australia and across the Global South.

Designed for CLT practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and the broader public, this session will offer insights into how CLTs can support Indigenous leadership and community-led housing solutions. The event will be conducted in English, with interpretation available in Spanish and live captions available in 60+ languages to support accessibility.

The global #CLTVirtualSummit2026 is a six-week series of free online events running May 5 – June 10, 2026, and anchored by World CLT Day on May 15. Organized by CLT and community land networks from around the world, the summit brings together practitioners, residents, organizers, and allies to reclaim and honor the Black and Indigenous leadership traditions that gave rise to the CLT model and continue to shape community land stewardship globally.

REGISTER HERE

Speakers

Australian CLT Network

Blue Mountains CLT

Wilya Janta

Event Organizer

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The CLT Center convenes practitioners, researchers, and communities from different regions to share experiences and strengthen the CLT movement globally. This event is free and open to all. If you’re in a position to support our work, your contribution helps us continue offering free events, resources, and peer exchange opportunities across contexts.

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Our Land, Our Survival: Communities Mobilizing Against Land Grabbing and Dispossession
2026-06-16 11:00 - 12:30 (America/Halifax)
Recording

Resources

English transcript

Book: Our Land, Our Survival (Terra Nostra Press)

Support Barbuda’s land defenders (GLAN)

Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña

Slide deck (English)

Grabación

Recursos

Transcripción español

Webinar Description

Across the globe, communities are confronting intensifying pressures, from climate disasters and speculative development to militarization and extractive investment, that threaten collective land, self-determination, and survival. In this context, alternative land tenure systems are not only policy tools, but acts of resistance.

The International Center for Community Land Trusts hosted a discussion centered around Our Land, Our Survival, by Dr Line Algoed and published by Terra Nostra Press. Drawing on cases from Barbuda and Puerto Rico after the 2017 hurricanes, the book shows how communal land systems become powerful tools to resist land grabbing, community displacement, and disaster capitalism.

We were especially honored to welcome Leilani Farha, Global Director of The Shift and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, who opened the session with remarks on land as resistance in the face of the global land rush. Her presentation framed the broader discussion on housing, land, and human rights.

Moderated by Amber Khan (University of Washington, US), the webinar featured perspectives from:

Line Algoed, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Postdoctoral Researcher (Belgium)

Jackie Frank, Barbuda Land Rights and Resources Committee (Barbuda)

Mario Núñez Mercado, Caño Martín Peña CLT, Executive Director (Puerto Rico)

Together, the speakers explored how communities are implementing alternative land tenure systems to push back against dispossession and defend land as more than property.

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The CLT Center convenes practitioners, researchers, and communities from different regions to share experiences and strengthen the CLT movement globally. This event is free and open to all. If you’re in a position to support our work, your contribution helps us continue offering free events, resources, and peer exchange opportunities across contexts.

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Speakers

Line Algoed, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Postdoctoral Researcher (Belgium)

DR LINE ALGOED is a researcher and educator at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) whose work focuses on land governance, climate justice, and community-led resistance to displacement. Her research examines how communal and collective land systems function as tools of protection and self-determination in contexts marked by disaster, speculation, and extractive development.

Drawing on long-term engagement with communities in Puerto Rico and Barbuda, Dr Algoed explores how alternative land tenure systems can serve not only as mechanisms of housing provision, but as strategies of resistance against land grabbing, disaster capitalism, and colonial or imperial pressures. She works at the intersection of urban studies, political ecology, and human rights, with a particular interest in how land can be defended as a shared and living resource.

She is the author of Our Land, Our Survival, recently published by Terra Nostra Press, which documents community struggles to protect collective land in the wake of the 2017 hurricanes.

Leilani Farha, The Shift and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, Global Director (Canada)

LEILANI FARHA is the Global Director of The Shift, an international movement to secure the right to housing, and served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing from 2014 to 2020. A lawyer and global advocate, her work focuses on housing as a human right and on confronting the financialization of housing and land. During her UN mandate, Leilani investigated housing conditions across the world, examining how global capital, speculation, and extractive economic systems impact communities’ ability to remain in their homes. She has been a leading voice in reframing housing and land as social goods rather than commodities, calling for systemic reforms that center human rights, dignity, and community control.

Leilani is also the Executive Producer of the documentary Push, which highlights the global housing crisis and grassroots resistance movements. Through The Shift, she works with governments, cities, civil society organizations, and community leaders to advance rights-based housing policy and protect communities from displacement.

Jackie Frank, Barbuda Land Rights and Resources Committee (Barbuda)

JACKIE FRANK is a community leader and advocate from Barbuda dedicated to defending the island’s communal land system and advancing local self-determination. Following the devastation of Hurricane Irma in 2017, she became actively involved in efforts to protect Barbuda’s centuries-old system of collective land ownership from privatization and external development pressures.

As Barbuda has faced growing threats of land grabbing and large-scale speculative projects, Jackie has worked alongside community members to raise awareness of the importance of communal tenure as a foundation for cultural survival, economic resilience, and environmental stewardship. Her advocacy emphasizes land not as a commodity, but as a shared inheritance that sustains identity, livelihood, and collective rights. Through grassroots organizing and public engagement, she continues to support community-led resistance to displacement and to promote models of land governance rooted in accountability, participation, and long-term stewardship.

Amber Khan, University of Washington, Postdoctoral Scholar (US)

AMBER KHAN, PhD, MPH is an applied interdisciplinary disaster scholar focused on community-led solutions to the climate crisis, centering on community-led land use and policy, affordable housing, and preventing displacement and gentrification. In her current role as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington, she leads an international study with the International Center for CLTs on the application of CLTs in building climate and disaster resilience. In her role as a participatory action research fellow at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), she designs and conducts research on climate displacement, migration, and resettlement with Indigenous-led organizations.

Mario Núñez Mercado, Caño Martín Peña CLT, Executive Director (Puerto Rico)

MARIO NÚÑEZ MERCADO is the Executive Director of both the Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña and the Corporación del Proyecto ENLACE del Caño Martín Peña. A community leader for more than 25 years, he rose through the ranks of the G-8 — the community-based organization representing the eight neighborhoods along the Caño Martín Peña waterway — serving as its president, treasurer, and spokesperson before joining the board of ENLACE as vice president. He assumed executive leadership of both entities in September 2019, a transition that was itself an expression of the project’s community empowerment model: the first community leader to hold the role. The Corporación del Proyecto ENLACE leads the integrated development plan for the Caño Martín Peña district, working to restore a vital urban waterway while improving infrastructure and quality of life for residents. The Fideicomiso de la Tierra is the collective land tenure instrument that ensures those residents cannot be displaced as their neighborhood improves. Mario has been a resident of the Las Monjas community within the district throughout his life.
