Land activism

Community-owned assets or organizations are those that are owned and controlled through some representative mechanisms that allow a community to influence their operation or use and to enjoy the benefits arising.

Benefits of ownership in infrastructure projects such as dams and irrigation are claimed to include increased responsiveness to needs of that community and the community valuing the projects more highly.

Communities can sometimes buy the land they live on and manage them through locally-run trusts. There are many examples of this in Scotland including Eigg, Assynt and Ulva.

In Saranac Lake, New York, after the local Ames Department Store closed due to bankruptcy and residents were forced to travel 50 miles (80 km) to Plattsburgh for staples, the town was approached by Walmart which offered to build a 250,000-square-foot (23,000 m²) supercenter, but the community felt that Walmart would negatively impact local business and increase traffic. As an alternative a community-owned store was organized and shares were sold to community residents. $500,000 was raised by about 600 residents who made an average investment of $800. The store, Saranac Lake Community Store, opened in October 29, 2011, in remodeled facilities in downtown Saranac Lake. Powell, Wyoming, also has a community store established in 2002 under similar circumstances. In both instances the securities were intrastate offerings registered under less onerous state securities laws rather than federal law. Funds were raised in a similar way for an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, a coffeehouse in Oakland, and restaurants in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York and Hardwick, Vermont. In Hardwick two enterprises were created, one which operates a restaurant which prepares meals using locally grown food, another which bought and equipped the location as a restaurant.

The New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance a nonprofit corporation has worked to make financing of community owned business less onerous. H.R.2930, the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act [1] Archived 2012-12-15 at the Wayback Machine, would relax securities law requirements making it easier for a community to raise money for community owned enterprises.

• Commons
• Community wealth building
• Community wind energy
• Cooperative
• List of fan-owned sports teams

• Bryden, J and Geisler, C (2007) Land Reform and Community - a ‘new wave’ land reform? Land Use Policy
• Community Owned Business This article by the American Independent Business Alliance explains the distinctions between community-owned and cooperative businesses and indexes many examples of community-owned enterprises in different business sectors.
• "Love a Local Business? Advise it to be careful about selling shares!" blog post by Katovich Law Group
• "Local Stock Exchanges and National Stimulus" by Michael H. Shuman, originally published in the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's Community Development Investment Review Volume 5, Issue 2, 2009
• "Community Development Investment Review" Volume 5, Issue 2, 2009, foreword by David Erickson, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
  • Full review
    • Could “Small Is Beautiful” Replace “Too Big to Fail?” Don Shaffer, RSF Social Finance
• New move over land reform, BBC News Online, 19 August 2003

A community land trust or(CLT) is a nonprofit corporation that holds land on behalf of a place-based community, while serving as the long-term steward for affordable housing, community gardens, civic buildings, commercial spaces and other community assets on behalf of a community.

CLTs balance the needs of individuals who want security of tenure in occupying and using land and housing, with the needs of the surrounding community, striving to secure a variety of social purposes such as maintaining the affordability of local housing, preventing the displacement of vulnerable residents, and promoting economic and racial inclusion. Across the world, there is enormous diversity among CLTs in the ways that real property is owned, used, and operated and the ways that the CLT itself is guided and governed by people living on and around a CLT’s land.

The International Land Coalition is a global alliance of civil society and farmers' organisations, United Nations' agencies, NGOs, and research institutes. ILC's stated mission is to "promote secure and equitable access to and control over land for poor women and men through advocacy, dialogue, knowledge sharing, and capacity building". Its vision is that "secure and equitable access to and control over land reduces poverty and contributes to identity, dignity, and inclusion". The ILC aims to build the capacity of its members and partners through people-centred development.

The ILC Secretariat is hosted by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome, Italy, and is supported by regional platforms in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Common land is collective land (sometimes only open to those whose nation governs the land) in which all persons have certain common rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect wood, or to cut turf for fuel.

A person who has a right in, or over, common land jointly with another or others is usually called a commoner.

In Great Britain, common land or former common land is usually referred to as a common; for instance, Clapham Common and Mungrisdale Common. Due to enclosure, the extent of common land is now much reduced from the hundreds of square kilometres that existed until the 17th century, but a considerable amount of common land still exists, particularly in upland areas. There are over 8,000 registered commons in England alone.

Agrarian reform and land reform have been a recurring theme of enormous consequence in world history. They are often highly political and have been achieved (or attempted) in many countries.

Land reform is a form of agrarian reform involving the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution, generally of agricultural land. Land reform can, therefore, refer to transfer of ownership from the more powerful to the less powerful, such as from a relatively small number of wealthy or noble owners with extensive land holdings (e.g., plantations, large ranches, or agribusiness plots) to individual ownership by those who work the land. Such transfers of ownership may be with or without compensation; compensation may vary from token amounts to the full value of the land.

Land reform may also entail the transfer of land from individual ownership—even peasant ownership in smallholdings—to government-owned collective farms; it has also, in other times and places, referred to the exact opposite: division of government-owned collective farms into smallholdings. The common characteristic of all land reforms, however, is modification or replacement of existing institutional arrangements governing possession and use of land. Thus, while land reform may be radical in nature, such as through large-scale transfers of land from one group to another, it can also be less dramatic, such as regulatory reforms aimed at improving land administration.

Nonetheless, any revision or reform of a country's land laws can still be an intensely political process, as reforming land policies serves to change relationships within and between communities, as well as between communities and the state. Thus even small-scale land reforms and legal modifications may be subject to intense debate or conflict.