Funding Collective Land Ownership: Sustainable Economies Law Center

Changing the legal and social infrastructures allowing for collective ownership and governance

If you’re a paying subscriber here at Unsettling, thank you! That you have enough faith to contribute to what I do goes a long way in providing both the confidence and the accountability for me as a writer that I need to continue this particular Substack. But what’s more, as this is a pay-it-forward kind of project, your subscription also helps fund work on the ground, going to groups experimenting with making real change in how we relate to land, place, and one another. We say 10% of each subscription gets donated back to such efforts, but in reality it tends to be a bit more just because I like to round up when I send in a check. So if you’re a $60/yearly subscriber, know that $7-8 of that fee is being passed on to grassroots groups.

Past contributions have gone to projects like the Central Agrarian Commons via Agrarian Trust and Land Back efforts in the Owens Valley. Back in May, I sent out another donation from the Unsettling community, this time to the Sustainable Economies Law Center as part of their “Future of Work” campaign.

SELC plays a really critical role in the broader movement for a more just and earth-centered economy. Not only do they provide legal advice to those trying to start up cooperatives and land trusts and more, they’re also something of an experimental hub for thinking about how we can do things differently, whether that’s shifting how we run change-based organizations to make them more equitable, or seeing how we can use existing law—which tends to make ends like collective ownership rather difficult—in creative ways, or changing the law itself to better meet the needs of cooperative enterprises.

I’ve followed SELC’s work on and off for years, and for a little bit had the chance to be a part of it: I attended the first gathering of the Nonprofit Democracy Network, a project they help sponsored, and then joined on as part of the planning and facilitation team for the next gathering, which we titled Tools for Collective Self-Governance. I haven’t been involved with the effort since early 2020 (that moment in time which so many of us know as the point of disruption in our lives), but the network is continuing to help non-profits shift to SELC’s “worker self-directed” model and other less hierarchical and less extractive practices.

I was inspired in the spring to send our collective funds to SELC because, as part of their Future of Work fundraising campaign, they were in turn sharing earnings with Somos Tierra Campesino Collective. I had a chance to talk to a couple staff members about the collective’s work back in the spring, and still hope to do a post solely about Somos Tierra, but for now here’s the basic project description:

Somos Tierra Campesino Collective is a group of migrant campesinos in Sonoma County, California working to incubate a farmworker-owned farming enterprise and acquire the land base for long-term sustainability and power-building.

The Collective has three goals:

1) Creating a culturally appropriate entity that can hold land

2) Securing and transferring land to the collective as a form of reparations

3) Supporting the land-endowed entity to design and build their culturally appropriate worker-led organization that will farm and steward the land

No website for the group to share as yet, but like I said, I hope to share more in a future post. I’ll keep the focus for the moment on SELC itself, because they have been building resources for those interested in land justice and collective ownership for some time, which are worth spotlighting.

Key among those are the many toolkits and templates available on their Resources for Land Stewards page, where you can find guides including a Seeds of Land Return Toolkit, a sample Land Rematriation Easement, and a guide on How to Start a Permanent Real Estate Cooperative.

Cover image for the online Seeds of Land Return Toolkit

They’re also doing policy work to intervene in the current fast-paced takeover of land ownership in many communities by profit-oriented institutions. Focused on their home base of Oakland, the policy recommendations in their Ban Land Grabs Policy Overview would help all cities and communities struggling with displacement, homelessness, and dire inequality:

• Ban for-profit, non-cooperative entities from buying residential property in Oakland. This would mean that only public entities, not-for-profit entities, natural persons, and limited equity cooperatives can own Oakland’s homes.

• A natural person cannot own more than one home (building or unit) in Oakland.

• Homes can be sold, at most, for how much they were purchased, plus 2% a year and value of improvements, for new purchases of residential property in Oakland.

• Increase Oakland’s transfer tax and rental business license tax to fund permanently affordable housing.

SELC is also in progress on a Community Housing Law online resource, similar to the one they already maintain on law for cooperatives.

And if listening or watching is more your style, they also have an extensive set of videos on YouTube covering much of this material and more.

So, yes! SELC is awesome, as some of you here already know, and if this is the first you’re hearing of them, please do follow a few of these links. For all the talk about law there’s often more cartoons involved than one might expect.

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At the end of the year we’ll be sending out another donation, based on all the subscriptions from the second half of the year. While I have an ever-growing roster of groups that I can draw from for that, I’d love to hear from readers: who would you like to support? What efforts would you like to receive a boost, both in the small amount of cash we send their way and in the attention from a post like this one highlighting their work? What land justice or reparations projects are inspiring you right now?

Send your thoughts and suggestions to unsettling@substack.com, or leave them in the comments below.

Thanks for reading and supporting Unsettling.

And of course, now is a great time to subscribe:

Until next time,

Meg