International Center for Community Land Trusts

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.

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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.

Support this work

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.

Support Our Work

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.
