Impactful Development and Community Empowerment

Cover of Impactful Development

Available now worldwide, 134 pp.
PAPERBACK ISBN 9781734403091 $14.00 US
EBOOK ISBAN 9781736275900 $5.00 US

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Impactful Development and Community Empowerment: Balancing the Dual Goals of a Global CLT Movement, is the fourth in our monograph series, with seven essays exploring the debate between going to scale versus giving power and voice to the community served by a CLT.

Every community land trust attempts to gain control over enough land, housing, and other land-based assets to make a difference in the lives of low-income and moderate-income people. At the same time as it is expanding its portfolio of real estate, a CLT is also dedicated to expanding and engaging its social base–continuously organizing, informing, and involving members of its chosen community in guiding and governing the CLT itself. Ownership and empowerment go hand-in-hand.

Although several contributors take one side or the other, most portray the CLT as occupying a rhetorical and practical middle ground between impact and empowerment. They provide examples of successful CLTs in which involving residents in guiding and governing the organization has been the basis for increasing a CLT’s holdings of land and housing, rather than being a barrier to growth. In these organizations, the dual goals of a CLT are reconciled and brought skillfully, sustainably into balance.

Six of the seven essays contained in this monograph were selected from On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust, published in June 2020. A seventh essay, written more recently, was added as a provocative supplement to the others. They are gathered here because of a similar focus on a key challenge faced by community land trusts throughout the world: how to balance competing goals of scale and accountability.

Most CLTs hope to accumulate a large enough portfolio of land, housing, and other buildings to make a major impact on promoting equitable and sustainable development within their chosen communities. At the same time, most CLTs have an ongoing commitment to empowering residents of those communities, providing a mechanism by which they may shape the future of the places in which they live while giving them a voice in guiding and governing the CLT itself. These aspirational goals are sometimes compatible and sometimes not, pulling an organization in opposite directions. Leaders of a local CLT must a find a way to make them work together.

Some of the chapters included in the present monograph directly discuss the tension between these competing goals. Others showcase the work of local CLTs that have been especially effective in resolving this tension to bring impactful development and community empowerment into balance.

  • Chapter 1: Tony Pickett & Emily Thaden, “Combining Scale and Community Control to Advance Mixed-Income Neighborhoods.”
  • Chapter 2: Harry Smith & Tony Hernandez, “Take a Stand, Own the Land: Profile of Dudley Neighbors Inc. in Boston Massachusetts.”
  • Chapter 3: Brenda Torpy, “The Best Things in Life Are Perpetually Affordable: Profile of the Champlain Housing Trust, Burlington, Vermont.”
  • Chapter 4: Dave Smith “The London Community Land Trust: A Story of People, Power, and Perseverance.”
  • Chapter 5: Line Algoed, María E. Hernández-Torrales, Lyvia Rodriguez Del Valle & Karla Torres Sueiro, “Origins, Achievements, and the Proof-of-concept Example of the Caño Martin Peña CLT.”
  • Chapter 6: Olivia Williams, “Community Control of Land: Thinking Beyond the Generic Community Land Trust.”
  • Chapter 7: John Emmeus Davis, “Better Together: The Challenging, Transformative Complexity of Community, Land, and Trust.”