Dear Friends and Colleagues –
Before leaping into another year of publications, presentations, and convenings, we wanted to pause for a moment to look back at the road recently travelled by the Center. This newsletter will serve as a “Year in Review,” therefore, celebrating what we accomplished together in 2021.
I won’t repeat those highlights here. Instead, on behalf of the Center, I want to thank some of the organizations and individuals who made it possible for us to have such a productive year.
At the top of the Center’s gallery of gratitude must be our colleagues at Sustainable Housing for Inclusive and Cohesive Cities (SHICC). Over the past four years, SHICC has played a major role in spurring the growth of CLTs across Europe and the United Kingdom. SHICC has also been the Center’s most valued partner in planning major events this year in support of the larger CLT movement: the International CLT Festival and World CLT Day. While many individuals lent their passion and expertise to these events – as moderators, translators, or panelists – four of SHICC’s leaders, Geert De Pauw, Joaquin de Santos, Julia Vitiello, and Annabel Pidgeon, deserve special recognition. Without them, we would not have attempted nor succeeded in pulling off a host of high-profile, high-risk events on an international stage.
Like every other NGO, the Center relies on charitable donations to subsidize our projects and operations. We are grateful for the funding we received this year from the Ford Foundation, World Habitat, ENLACE/Cano Martin Pena CLT, and – via our allies at SHICC – the Brussels Capital Region and the European Regional Development Fund.
One of our donors deserves a special mention. Jerry Maldonado will be leaving the Ford Foundation at the end of this month to join the leadership team of PolicyLink. He has been more than our benefactor; he has been a partner, advisor, and long-time champion of community land trusts. (His personal advocacy for CLTs was on full display in the Foreword he contributed to our publication, ON COMMON GROUND, and in last year’s joint interview with David Ireland, which can be found on our website: www.cltweb.org). We are grateful for Jerry’s steadfast support for the CLT movement and wish him well in his new position.
Finally, without listing everyone by name, I want to acknowledge with gratitude the wonderful individuals who govern the Center, who staff the Center, or who guide our programs and plans by serving on one (or more) of the Center’s five workgroups: Organizational Sustainability, Research & Teaching, Racial Equity, Global South, and the Editorial Board for Terra Nostra Press. They make it possible for a small organization, operating on a tiny budget, to make a big difference in helping to grow the global CLT movement. My thanks to all.
John Davis, President
Center for CLT Innovation
Highlights for 2021
Despite the challenges that we all faced wrestling with a global pandemic, our efforts at the CLT Center were more successful than we would have imagined back in January. As John Davis mentions in his year-end message, we could not have accomplished any of this without the help of our many allies, volunteers, and funders, who greatly expanded the reach of our small NGO. Some of the Center’s key accomplishments for the year included:
- Co-sponsoring the first International CLT Festival with our colleagues at SHICC and the Brussels Community Land Trust (CLTB) – recording and archiving a series of provocative presentations and conversations among leading CLT practitioners.
- Co-sponsoring the first World CLT Day, along with the same colleagues at SHICC and CLTB. A collection of social media posts and an edited compilation of videos and photos can be found at the World CLT Day archive.
- Publishing five English monographs, one Spanish monograph, and a Spanish translation of On Common Ground through our imprint Terra Nostra Press. [This book, En terreno común, is the first major work in Spanish about community land trusts.]
- Expanding language accessibility for our webinars and online materials. During the CLT Festival, all events were presented in at least two simultaneously translated languages; some events were presented in four (English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese). The Center’s website was improved with automated translation of most materials.
- Continuing to expand and enhance the Center’s website, aspiring to become the world’s most complete collection of online resources about CLTs and related forms of community-led development on community-owned land. We added full GIS functionality to our global CLT map; we extended our timeline of the CLT movement (which now starts thousands of years in the past and traces the CLT story through 2021); we added a research section featuring the work of young scholars; we updated the CLT news page; and we greatly expanded our video library, which is now searchable by keywords.