To talk to us about some work that's being done in the community at large around a community land trust.

So I will hand it over to you guys.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for having us.

Um my name is Lisa Pinkney, and I'm executive director of the Footprint Foundation.

We are a family foundation that has been doing grant making since about 2013.

And since 2016, we have made um we have had a program in place called the Buzz.

You're going to hear that at some point now or maybe in the future, so I'm making sure you understand what that is.

But it's a program that we developed to create relationships and deepen relationships with the nonprofits that we do work with.

So it was meant to be an investment in talent.

Um over the years we have about 80 people that are part of what we call the Buzz Network now.

And post-COVID, we invited this group of people to work with us to uh determine how they might spend grant dollars if if it were rally to them.

So we made a commitment of four million dollars over five years to the Buzz community and had 25 of those uh community members uh work together for a co-creation process to determine how they would they would actually spend those dollars.

And one of the things that came out of that was a strategy that they call economic stability and a tactic using a community land trust to address uh housing affordability.

Uh we finished that work June of 24, if I remember correctly, it's been a long time and a really rich and rewarding process.

Um, and one of the first things that we set out to do was to engage a consultant that would help us determine what that work actually would look like, how something like a CLT model could actually work in our community, uh how it could be made to fit our community.

That's not cookie cutter, we're not looking to create a model that Atlanta has or Memphis has.

You want something that's uniquely Chattanooga.

And so we contracted with Grounded Solutions, who's one of the leading consultants in community land trust work to help us figure that out.

So we just finished up our first phase of work, which is largely educational.

We had a very small small working group, uh, just to make sure that the folks that were initially interested from a Buzz Network and some other community partners understood that community land trust 101, understood what it was, some of the things we might want to think about as we think about implementing something here.

Um, but we're just getting the work started.

Uh, phase two of this work will entail a larger uh community group that will provide input again to create and design what a community land trust could look like.

Um with that, uh this is the first time that we actually have met uh grounded solutions actually in person.

We've been meeting every two weeks for the last six months again for learning opportunities.

Uh and so we're actually meeting in the flesh, and we thought that while they were here in town, we wanted to get them in front of as many people as possible to make sure that the community was aware that these conversations were happening.

Uh, this will not be the only opportunity that you'll hear from us.

I'm sure we're hoping that there'll be many other opportunities to do that.

Uh, this is one of I think maybe six or seven meetings we've got planned these next three days.

We met with the mayor this morning.

Um we've got some folks meeting with the county mayor right now.

We'll have a public session uh with faith leaders this evening, a public session tomorrow with the general public at the library, and so we're here today just to share some more there's no ask.

It is uh strictly informational.

And so Jason Webb from Grounded Solutions is gonna talk uh a little bit about the work that Grounded Solutions does and then share with you some of that CLT 101 that we've been uh receiving over the last few months.

Thank you.

Uh my name is Jason Webb.

I am the community and technical assistants principal at Grounded Solutions Network.

Come to this work with about 40 years of experience working with CLTs all throughout the country.

Uh so for me and the organization, we work nationally.

So we work with local experts, all of you uh know your communities better than what we do, but what we bring our solutions that we know have work and can work in a number of different communities throughout the country.

Here is a little map.

We have now touched about a hundred different communities all throughout the U.S.

Uh, you know, big, small, conservative, uh, more liberal communities all throughout the United States.

We have we have worked.

A little bit of the roots of the community land trust is and we a few years ago went ahead and mapped this model because this model is about 54 plus years old here in the United States.

Now, while this slide breaks all of the rules of PowerPoint, because you're not supposed to put this much on one slide.

The important thing to pick out are really the movements, because there are a number of different movements that had a profound effect on the founders of our model.

So when you think about the US peace movement, when you think about the single tax movement, even when you think about the Grandam movement over in India, all of these movements had a profound impact on the founders of the CLT uh model here in the United States that came out of the U.S.

civil rights movement.

So our story starts in 1968, where there was an American delegation, and here are a few on the screen that actually traveled over to Israel and they traveled to Israel because they were looking for a new type of land ownership model.

Because one of the things that was the challenge here in the American South, especially in Georgia, was that African American farmers were not able to stay on their land.

They were being pushed off of their land.

So they actually came across the Mushaw model, which combined individual homesteads with cooperative farming on lease land.

Now this American delegation came back the very next year in 1969 and established new communities incorporated, which is the first community land trust here in the United States.

In the 70s, we saw the community land trust go from an agricultural model into the urban setting and predominantly really focusing on affordable housing.

We saw that even be a little bit turbocharged in the 80s because this is where a number of governments and cities started to go ahead and invest in this model in helping a number of them get created predominantly in the Northeast.

Today we have over 350 community land trusts throughout the entire country.

We're in 46 states plus the District of Columbia and in Puerto Rico.

There has been over 30,000 units built using this model.

We have seen amazing growth in the 90s, and we're seeing amazing growth now.