Beyond Ownership: What the Community Movement Commons Teaches Us About Land Justice in Urban Contexts

Land justice asks us to think beyond land ownership alone. It invites us to consider how land is governed, stewarded, and utilized to support thriving communities — and how inequitable systems of land ownership and decision-making can undermine them.

This topic grounded our latest Land Justice for Funders webinar, which featured leaders from Resist, Neighborhood Birth Center, One Project, and the Kataly Foundation. Together, participants explored how collective land ownership and community stewardship in urban neighborhoods can support community health, movement building, and long-term resilience — and what philanthropy can learn from models that intentionally redistribute power rather than simply redistribute resources.

Throughout the conversation, speakers returned to a common theme: land justice can take many forms and extends far beyond acquiring property. Across both rural and urban contexts, land justice efforts create pathways for communities to exercise self-determination, build lasting relationships with place, and shape the future of the lands and neighborhoods they call home.

Land as Infrastructure for Community Care

Blue Sky Executive Director Onika Abraham Lee opened the session by reminding participants that land injustice underlies many of the systems philanthropy seeks to address — from environmental degradation to barriers to outdoor access, housing inequities, and community displacement. Rather than viewing land justice as a single issue area, she encouraged funders to see it as a lens that can shape work across many fields of philanthropy.

The Community Movement Commons offers one example of what that lens can look like in practice.

Developed through a coalition of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-led organizations in Boston, the Commons is reimagining land as shared infrastructure for community wellbeing. The vision includes a Neighborhood Birth Center, low to no cost housing for student midwives, a nonprofit office and organizing space, healing and cultural gathering areas, gardens, and outdoor community space, all collectively governed by participating organizations rather than owned by any single institution.

As Jazz Gomez of Resist explained, the goal is not simply to purchase property, but to “decommodify land” and redistribute both land and decision-making power to communities that have historically been excluded from ownership through slavery, land theft, worker exploitation, and gentrification.

Collective Ownership Creates New Possibilities

For Nashira Baril, Executive Director of the Neighborhood Birth Center, collective ownership fundamentally changed what was possible.

Across the US and in MA, maternity wards and community birth centers have disappeared under the weight of unsustainable real estate costs. Without a different approach to land ownership, opening a neighborhood birth center simply would not have been financially viable. Through the Community Movement Commons, however, the organization can focus on providing full-spectrum midwifery care while avoiding the financial pressures that have forced similar centers to close.

The impact extends beyond the building itself. The birth center expects to support  hundreds of births annually while serving thousands more through free parenting programs, childbirth education, and community gatherings. Meanwhile, the Commons creates shared space for organizers, artists, healers, and grassroots nonprofits to build relationships alongside one another.

Rather than treating land as merely an investment asset, the project treats it as the foundation that makes community care possible.

Relationships Before Governance

A large part of the conversation centered not on the legal structure of collective ownership, but on the relationships that make it work.

Nashira described years of gathering, listening, and building trust before formal governance structures ever existed. Investing in relationship-building became essential when the project encountered setbacks, including zoning challenges that required the partners to rethink their original plans. Rather than abandoning the vision, the coalition relied on the trust they had already built to adapt together and actually dream bigger.

Nashira reflected that the partnership continually invites members to practice another way of working, in sharing both responsibility and risk rather than carrying challenges alone. When financial uncertainty arose, partners encouraged one another to turn first to the collective rather than immediately relying on conventional financial institutions. That shift represented more than a funding strategy; it embodied the solidarity economy the project hopes to build.

For funders accustomed to evaluating organizations individually, the Commons offers another model: investing in relationships, networks, and shared governance can create resilience that no single organization could build alone.

Philanthropy Can Invest Differently

Jazz described how Resist has begun aligning its financial practices with its mission by shifting investments toward community-controlled land and democratic governance. Hans How, Integrated Capital Officer, shared how, to date, the Kataly Foundation, through its leadership team and board, liquified all of its mutual funds and reinvested $255 million into a values-aligned strategy explicitly designed to divest from state-sanctioned violence and non-extractively reinvest assets into communities in ways that build their political, economic, and cultural power. Read more about Hans How’s perspective in Kataly’s June edition of After Philanthropy, where he explores why community ownership of land is critical infrastructure — not overhead — and offers insights for funders interested in land justice, integrated capital, and long-term community stewardship.

Rather than separating grantmaking from investment decisions, the discussion encouraged funders to consider how all forms of capital can proactively advance community ownership and long-term stewardship.

Jidan Terry-Koon, Head of Ecosystem Engagement at One Project, reflected on her own learning journey, describing how listening to grantee partners reshaped her understanding of land justice. Part of this process was reclaiming an indigenous worldview of relationship to place and land, not just making the case for land justice from an issue-area orientation.

This process led One Project toward multi-year unrestricted funding, new approaches to evaluating impact, and a broader understanding of scale, measured by community wellbeing instead of rapid replication.

The conversation also surfaced practical questions for philanthropy: How can funders support community governance? What technical assistance is needed for collaborative ownership models? How might investment portfolios — not just grant budgets — better align with land justice principles? During breakout sessions, participants reflected on donor control, the capacity required for collaborative stewardship, and opportunities to shift institutional assets toward community-led solutions.

Final Invitations for Funders

The conversation offered several invitations for philanthropy:

• Recognize land justice as a cross-cutting lens. Land shapes and spans conservation, community health, environmental education, housing, economic opportunity, and belonging.
• Invest in community governance, not only projects. Collective ownership requires time, trust, facilitation, and long-term relationship building.
• Support infrastructure that communities control. Shared spaces for healing, organizing, and cultural life create lasting capacity beyond any individual program.
• Align all forms of capital with your values. Grantmaking, investments, and institutional practices all shape who has access to land and power.
• Recognize that transformation happens through relationships. As the Community Movement Commons demonstrated, durable systems change begins long before the paperwork is signed.

The Community Movement Commons reminds us that land justice is not simply about changing who holds a deed. It is about creating new ways of living, governing, and caring for one another that allow communities to thrive.

As Jazz reflected in closing, the future of land justice is already taking shape. The question for philanthropy is not whether this movement will continue — but rather, how funders will choose to participate in what comes next.

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Community Movement Commons: Land Justice in an Urban Context was the second webinar in a 2026 Land Justice Series co-hosted by Blue Sky Funders Forum, the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation, Highstead Foundation, Resist, and the Maine Climate and Environmental Funders Network. This series highlights working examples of land justice in practice, featuring bold funders integrating land justice into their portfolios alongside the visionary community partners with whom they work. Our hope is for participants to leave with inspiration to begin or deepen land justice practices in their grantmaking and be better equipped to turn conversation into aligned, collaborative philanthropic action.

Interested in joining the next Land Justice webinar or the Land Justice Funder Organizing Group? Sign up for Blue Sky’s newsletter to be notified of upcoming opportunities, or reach out to Onika Abraham Lee at onika@blueskyfundersforum.org.