Feature image: London CLT consultation day May 2022
The Community Land Trust Network is launching a new programme of work to develop practices that enhance equity, diversity and inclusion within the network and member practices.
The work is steered by our EDI Action Plan, which expands on core commitments in our new strategy and was developed with recommendations from research we commissioned or co-funded in recent years, staff team training with the Social Justice Collective and a series of working group discussions with CLT Network members from racially marginalised backgrounds, facilitated by Kin Structures.
This work is made possible by funding from the Oak Foundation and will enable us to co-design better practices to nurture diverse community decision-making power in neighbourhoods across England and Wales.
Co-designing practices to nurture diverse community decision-making in neighbourhoods across England and Wales
To build long-term structural capacity across the movement, this initiative will focus on four core activities:
- Launching an 18-month peer practitioner network for CLT leaders of colour, led by a facilitator with lived experience.
- Subsidised memberships, bespoke 1:1 support and other support steered by the cohort for five CLTs who are both led by racialised people and experiencing financial hardship.
- Launching a 12-month learning group for all interested CLTs to improve their inclusive governance practices, with learning webinars for the full network
- Documenting case studies and best practices so that we can institutionalise these lessons learned in the long term.
Why does this matter?
Our movement is full of powerful community leaders – but leaders of colour have higher barriers to overcome
Across England and Wales there are individuals and communities with the skills, drive and networks to take on community organising and leadership roles – and many already do through CLTs or other types of community-led organisations.
However, organisations led by people of colour face discrimination that makes the barriers we all encounter even larger and harder to surpass. As many have experienced, and as the Ubele Initiative evidenced in their A Place to Call Home 2.0 report, organisations led by people of colour find it harder to raise funds, access support and resources, take risks, and be seen as credible partners.
In both the Community-led Housing for All report and working group sessions, we have heard from leaders of colour in the CLT movement that a Black and Minority Ethnic community-led housing peer-to-peer practitioner network would be a powerful organising body to share learning and address systemic issues.
Groups are not necessarily ‘hard to reach’, but rather are ‘easy to ignore’, suggesting that prioritisation and targeted action is required to ensure the opportunities and benefits of community-led housing are more widely distributed.
We can bring together a practitioner group for leaders of colour to come together in solidarity, connect as a key reference point for engagement, and institutionalise changes for current and future generations of community-led stewardship leaders.
Diversifying who gets to make decisions about their neighbourhoods
Neighbourhoods can be better for everyone when people with diverse experiences and circumstances are able to have a say in their communities – but not everyone is getting the opportunity to be heard.
We’ve got some real opportunities for community cohesion, but there’s some risks if we don’t all get involved. We need it to be done by the people, for the people
CLTs are a powerful way for people to come together and take agency in decisions about their communities. However, the current state of the sector creates many barriers – high pre-development and development costs, a dearth of consistent funding for community asset development projects, and intensive time demands navigating complex systems that hold small community-led projects to similar standards as thousand home development projects.
Understandably, the people with capacity to navigate these challenges can end up being disproportionately people with extra time (people without care responsibilities or serious health issues, people in secure living situations, people who are retired or don’t need to work 35+ hours a week) and people with high-level technical knowledge from professional backgrounds (lawyers, financial professionals, developers, business executives).
All CLT leaders give their time and skills generously, and many boards benefit greatly from representatives with professional skills. However, if a CLT is led by or making decisions only with a small segment of the community, they are missing out on building a team that is enriched and given purpose through different types of skills, firsthand knowledge of housing precarity, nature exclusion or social services, and diverse social networks. Given that people of colour are more likely to experience social exclusion, housing insecurity and discrimination in our existing social housing systems, it matters to approach this issue with explicit racial inclusion perspectives and practices.
We can work together to implement policies, take action and shift how our movement works to bring more people with diverse experiences and perspectives into leadership and decision-making about the future of our communities.
Honouring CLT origins and learning for the future
As a member network for English and Welsh CLTs, we have a responsibility to carry and codify the legacy of CLT origins into our own national contexts.
The CLT movement has its origins in the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, with prominent peace and civil rights leaders coming together with a vision of creating communities that could offer Black Americans safety from racist violence, while creating land and economic security.
This summer we heard perspectives on justice, and what these roots mean to us, from communities across Wales, England and Scotland in a webinar on land, justice and community in Great Britain. Protecting our diverse and local cultures, uplifting the voices and powers of those excluded by their poverty or race, these themes resonate across our nations and our global movement.
You’re planning villages, you’re planning education. You basically have a chance to plan a life – and lives. And plan ways to help our people.
We can better systematise how we honour the history and legacy of our Civil Rights roots by uplifting stories of groups that are doing the work to redress inequalities in our own neighbourhoods and making these practices a core part of how CLTs operate.
We are hugely grateful to the Oak Foundation for awarding us this funding and giving us the opportunity to change how CLTs can drive inclusive change in their neighbourhoods. Read our full EDI Action Plan here.