Josie Howard, Communications and Event Officer for the Community Land Trust Network, shares an account of a member gathering held in Bridport in October. This session aimed to connect and inspire members with a site visit to Bridport Cohousing CLT’s Hazelmead neighbourhood, and opportunities to shape the CLT Network’s plans for the upcoming five years.
On Friday 24th October, we brought together 14 community land trust practitioners in Bridport, Dorset. This was a Community Land Trust Network member gathering to learn from each other’s experiences and to shape our member network’s plans and priorities for the next five years. Attendees then visited Hazelmead, Bridport Cohousing CLT’s award-winning 53 home neighbourhood in North West Bridport.
The CLT Network brings together a movement of community leaders taking action in their villages, towns and cities, taking land and buildings into community ownership to develop affordable homes, support local businesses and restore nature. As a network, our aim is to learn from each other and collectively mobilise to transform the policy, planning and funding systems so communities can take agency in creating the futures of their neighbourhoods and places.
In this member gathering, we were joined by leaders from Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, and Oxfordshire. These participants ranged from CLTs who have just found a site, through to CLTs that have completed many affordable homes and other assets, and enablers that support communities through this journey.
Celebrating successes and learning from challenges
In our first workshop session of the day, participants were invited to share their successes, challenges and feedback. What was striking was how many people were experiencing similar issues: concerns about flooding and water management, trouble navigating a planning system not set up to support community-led development, and difficulties accessing land. Through this discussion, CLTs were able to offer their ideas and experiences in support of each other.
What do members want to see from the CLT Network?
At the heart of the day was the question of what members want to see from the next 5 years at the CLT Network. Attendees were asked to reflect on 3 core areas of the CLT Network’s work.
1) Peer learning and networking
The CLT Network is a movement full of leaders, whose knowledge has been hard won in a system not designed for community-led development. This means that CLTs can often be forced to approach problems creatively. As a movement we are strongest of all when we can work together to share this wisdom so communities are not constantly reinventing the wheel.
Ideas centred around how our online forum could be used better to support CLTs through issues by offering smaller, more focussed working groups. Leaders also expressed a desire to balance online connection with more opportunities to get inspired through in person events, visits to projects where it has worked, and opportunities to celebrate the movement.
2) Standardising the Basics
If we want all communities and community leaders to have the opportunity to organise through community land trust, we need to offer clear, comprehensive access to information. Many attendees underlined how valuable it would be to bring new leaders into the movement if there were accessible ways for beginners to get up to speed with the basics. Not only this – having more accessible learning materials would help more CLTs to set up. This would also help our fundamental goal of making the movement more inclusive and accessible.
Ideas centred around organising resources into self-guided training programmes, building on our online handbooks, and reviewing the template policies we have on offer for all CLT Network members. Finally, participants pressed the value of being able to reach the CLT Network staff team to work through difficulties.
3) Advocacy and lobbying
Through collective lobbying, the CLT Network has gained a huge amount of ground in recent years to change the land, planning and housing systems so they support communities to lead. Recent successes include:
- Shaping the Community Right to Buy to be more useable for communities, alongside our sector partners.
- The introduction of community led exception sites and support for community-led development in the national planning policy framework for England.
- Support for CLTs and community-led development in proposals for new towns.
- Further exemptions from leasehold and commonhold reform for CLTs’ ethical use of leaseholds.
- Government-commissioned research is now underway on how the government could unlock suitable finance for community-led development.
Participants pressed for the CLT Network to keep pushing to unlock more funding ringfenced for community-led development and stewardship, as well as to keep pushing for planning and land policies that would make CLTs a more mainstream and viable option. These changes would help to unlock the many affordable homes and community projects in the pipeline that have stalled, as well as smooth the paths for more communities looking to take power through a CLT structure.
After our morning workshop (and a lot of chatting over a delicious lunch!), it was time to make our visit to Bridport Cohousing CLT’s Hazelmead project.
Visiting Hazelmead – the largest cohousing neighbourhood
Hazelmead is the UK’s largest cohousing neighbourhood, developed by a hybrid cohousing CLT, and is home to 53 households all living in sustainable, affordable homes. Residents include NHS keyworkers, people living in social homes, and shared ownership homes. Bridport Cohousing CLT has carefully managed their home allocations to create a flourishing, diverse community that strikes a balance between older individuals and couples, and young families. In fact, the whole neighbourhood is designed for community life, with no fences or low fences, flourishing front gardens, pedestrianised paths where children can play, and communal growing spaces.
Representatives from visiting CLTs said they felt inspired by being able to tour the neighbourhood and homes. Some said that this was an excellent example to take back to their village to raise awareness of the possibilities of cohousing. Others shared that even though they weren’t taking a cohousing approach, they would explore replicating Hazelmead’s measures to foster community life, energy efficiency or flood management. All of us were inspired to hear the journey to completion that the Bridport Cohousing CLT community shared, and we were struck by the relentless commitment that their team showed through setbacks and wins.
After our tour, we were invited into their strawbale common house, which is close to completion. This beautiful, sustainable space will be used for activities for the cohousing residents and the wider community, as well as to host more visitors aiming to learn from their example. The common house is a true community effort: much of it was built by residents, who used clay dug from the site itself and lime rendered the walls by hand. They join other CLTs like RUSS and WeCanMake in experimenting with natural materials and community builds.
Over homemade tea and cake (some made from Hazelmead’s homegrown apples), we heard board and resident members of Bridport Cohousing CLT speak about how living in this community has transformed their lives. In the words of one resident member: “I’ve been able to do things I never thought that I would do. I’m a different person because of both the encouragement and safety net my fellow community has given me to try difficult things.”
All in all, this day brought so many rich things about the CLT community to life, and real connections were created as we learned from each other. We give our warmest thanks to everyone who was able to join us and to the team at Bridport Cohousing CLT for their tour and generous welcome, especially to our guides and to the people who kindly opened their homes to us.
What’s next?
The CLT Network staff team is taking this workshop to the road to hear from more CLT Network members in Hastings (8th Nov) and Swansea (5th Dec). We held a similar open feedback session at the Leeds Community Homes Northern Way Summit in September.
For anyone who can’t make it to an online session. We will be running feedback sessions online after our AGM (22nd Nov) for any CLTs who might not make it to an in-person session. Register for our AGM here.
We will be feeding all of these ideas into our strategy for the next five years, building our collective power to transform systems and build sustainable, socially just communities.