Anna Bergren Miller: Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit entities dedicated to maintaining community control of real property outside conventional, speculative land and housing markets. Though they may serve other ends — including the stewardship of green space or agricultural land — CLTs are typically designed around the provision of permanently affordable housing for low-income individuals and families.

The features of CLTs vary by country. However, many are patterned after the original United States model and have the following features in common. The central feature is that CLTs separate ownership of land and houses. CLT’s allow residents to buy a house while securing a long-term lease on the underlying land from the CLT. While the trust is typically organized as a nonprofit steered by a board of directors comprised of CLT homeowners, area residents, and other stakeholders, it maintains permanent ownership of the land while the homeowner owns the house and any improvements to it.

Resale of the house is restricted to CLT-approved buyers. In addition to the principal investment and the value of improvements, the house seller recoups a limited portion of the house’s appreciation on terms contracted in advance with the CLT. This setup protects CLT housing from appreciation typical of housing markets to ensure at least some permanently affordable housing for the community.

The CLT concept was developed by Robert Swann, who was in turn inspired by Ralph Borsodi. Swann and Borsodi shared an interest in the Indian “Gramdan,” or village gift movement. Other historical precursors including Native American land-use practices and the New England commons. In partnership with Slater King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s cousin, Swann established the first CLT in the U.S. in Albany, Georgia. New Communities Inc. was explicitly modeled on the Jewish National Fund’s Israel land-lease policy.

Although growing, the worldwide CLT movement remains relatively small. Nonetheless, a 2011 survey identified nearly 250 CLTs in the U.S. alone. CLTs are also active in several other countries including Belgium, France, Italy, Kenya, Australia, New Zealand, and England. Vermont’s (CHT) is the largest CLT in the United States. Founded in 1984 as two separate nonprofit organizations that merged in 2006, CHT operates in three counties and oversees 565 owner occupied homes plus 2,200 rental apartments. The trust offers other services — including homeowner education, home improvement and energy efficiency loans, and assistance — to five housing cooperatives.

CHT’s shared equity program sells homes on trust-owned land to prospective homeowners who meet certain income and asset requirements. Homebuyers pay closing costs of $6,000-8,000, but the down payment (20-30 percent of market value) is covered by state and federal grants. Upon resale, CHT homeowners receive their original contribution plus 25 percent of any appreciation. In 2015, 44 new CHT residents purchased homes at an average CHT net price of $137,214, for an average CHT monthly cost of $994.78.

Because CLTs are effective in expanding affordable housing, cities are increasingly supporting them in various ways, including policy.

View a report on CLT policies here.

Learn more from:

• National Community Land Trust Network
• 2011 CLT survey
• Shareable article

Photo by T Hall

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The NPDN is not the only attempt to learn how to operate effective nonprofit organizations; what sets it apart from other similar projects is how it defines “effective.”  For the NPDN, deliverables, quantifiable metrics, and program delivery are limited measurements of effectiveness; equally important is the extent to which the relationships, culture, and governance of the organization enacts values of justice, community, and sustainability while creating the potential for systemic transformation. This group of organizations envisions a liberated, resilient, and dynamic movement capable of solving social problems at their roots; and they have come together to help each other build it.

Participating organizations had varying areas of focus: providing legal services for immigrants, organizing permaculture action day, creating feminist media, ensuring access to abortions, and coordinating new economy organizations. Like trees in a forest, they may appear separate but underneath the surface they are connected. This diverse group is united by two characteristics: (1) an understanding that the success of all of their work depends on transforming patterns deeply embedded into our social, political, and economic system;  and (2) a need for organizational models that enable them to collaborate more effectively and equitably.

The gathering charted much of the terrain of democratic organizational governance. Each participating organization facilitated conversations or gave presentations on one of a number of topics including staff structure, culture creation, strategic planning, participatory budgeting, tactical fundraising, just compensation, and efficient and equitable decision-making. Since the end of the gathering, organizations have been staying in contact one-on-one, participating in group check-in calls, sharing support through a Slack group, and building an online resource bank.

This three-day gathering was just the beginning. Organizations across the country and around the world are acutely aware of a central struggle we all face:  many of our solutions to social problems reproduce the very problems they are trying to solve, and until we solve that dynamic, we we will never be able to really accomplish our goals.  This nascent network is not just bringing the conversation to the nonprofit sector, it is coming up with solutions and experiments to work through the struggles it observes.

Want to learn more and hear about upcoming opportunities to participate? Sign up here and we’ll keep you in the loop!

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Kevin Stark: It’s easy to group all enterprises that promote “sharing” into a single category. New technology has made it much easier for people to share almost everything — cars, houses, work spaces, just to name a few. There’s really no shortage of ways that people can pool resources. But there’s a huge difference in the goals between for-profit sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb and nonprofit groups like tool libraries, time banks, and makerspaces. Juliet Schor, professor at the sociology department at Boston College, explores this tension between for-profit and nonprofit sharing groups. Schor has carefully outlined her findings in her prolific writings on the subject.

In one paper, she interviewed dozens of young people that were using for-profit sharing companies to determine their motivations for using the service. For starters, she argues that for-profit companies like Uber and Airbnb are contributing to inequality in America (also a subject that Schor has written about). But what else is different? Are users motivated by different things? Class or demographic distinctions? How has the economy shaped modern sharing organizations and vice versa? Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

Kevin Stark: One argument for the for-profit sharing companies like Uber is that they provide a frictionless way for people to find work.

Juliet Schor: The on ramp to earn on one of these platforms is easy compared to other kinds of jobs. Our interviewees report that they can get on these platforms even if they have criminal records, which bar them from other types of employment. The other side of it, however, is that just being accepted to earn on these platforms, doesn’t mean that you will get work. TaskRabbit has a very high hourly rate; we have people earning $100-$150 an hour, but you may not be able to get work.

We don’t have the data from the company, but my sense is it is operating like a winner-take-all model. Certain people on the platform are doing well, they have great ratings and they’ve done lots of tasks. They get hired a lot. On Airbnb, you can list your place but we find that your race and education level are related to whether you can get people to book it. People who live in areas with higher rates of non-whites, for examples, are less likely to get bookings. They get lower reviews and lower prices.

You argue that Uber et-al are contributing toward inequality. Who is being crowded out?

This conclusion is not the product of a full economic analysis. It’s from our research which looks at the dynamics at the individual level and extrapolates to what might be happening at the full economy level. In the past, many people would not have been taking up the type of work that they are on platforms. The platforms were originally marketed as cool, technologically advanced, ecologically helpful — they had a discourse of common good.

Many were launched during the recession and attracted a young, highly-educated, white group of people as customers, and more importantly, as earners. What I’ve argued happened is that the platform de-stigmatized blue collar and pink collar work for these people. We are finding people with graduate degrees who are cleaning houses on TaskRabbit or students who are bicycle couriers. They are doing … work that traditionally has been done by people who didn’t have college degrees. Some of them talk about these status questions. This is a very highly educated, relatively privileged group of people, in comparison to the labor force that has done this type of work in the past.

Do you think that that’s derived from the incentive for the companies to make money or how they are designed, or a reflection of our society and access?

The larger context is the economy. The growth of inequality in this country started as more of an 80 percent and 20 percent phenomenon. My story is about inequality within the bottom 80 percent. What’s happening is that when you have problems of wage stagnation or high debt for young people, education debt, lack of economic opportunity, lack of good full time jobs with upper mobility, then these college educated young people, are facing less opportunity relative to comparable people in the past. That puts them in a situation where they are trying to get more opportunity, to better their situation.

The companies come along and offer them something that makes sense to them, that’s not too at odds with their status identities. So, to answer your question, it’s really both. I do think the larger economic trend of the shrinking middle class, declining mobility, wage stagnation, growing under and unemployment, all those well-known trends are important for understanding how these platforms came into the market. They came in during the depths of the recession. It is very favorable for companies that want to hire people. They will get more highly qualified people without having to pay the extra money. It is a cascade affect in bad economic times. Everyone gets pushed down, but it is like a ladder. The ones at the bottom get slammed. It goes in the other direction. When things improve and the labor market gets tight, people can move up.

There are the for-profits that we’ve talked about, but also the nonprofits — seed banks, time-banks, makerspaces. What’s the distinction?

In our research, we started by studying nonprofit sharing initiatives, such as a time bank, a maker space, a food swap, and what we call open-learning, free online educational resources. The nonprofits generally start with an idea about creating an alternative kind of exchange or market or set of social practices. We found that people participate or sign up for these spaces because they are ideologically aligned with them.

With the time bank, for example, they think it’s a great idea that everyone’s time is valued equally and that, they can barter services. But many of the people don’t need bartered services, so they treat the time bank like it’s volunteering. They give stuff to people, but they don’t necessarily cash in their balance. In practice, they don’t like the idea that what they are offering is only worth as much as other people. Some of them are solo practitioners of massage therapy or yoga teachers or whatever. The time bank has a $10-15 an hour economy for generally available skills like driving or walking a dog. But a yoga teacher or a massage teacher is more likely to charge $75 or $80. The time bank didn’t work out so well because there were divergent valuations and the idea that everyone’s time being equal is such a big jump from the market where there’s a large inequality in how people’s time is valued. There was also class prejudice, where people would reject those with poor grammar or a bad website. On the one hand, people know they are going to an amateur market, but on the other they want something more professional.

One of your organizing lines seems to be built around the idea of public benefit, and you write that sharing platforms can also function in the “public good.” What about at the scale of Uber or Airbnb?

A lot of the nonprofits, the scale wouldn’t work. They are designed to be local. Some are for face-to-face services, like a time bank. On the other hand, there could be an app that just gives you local options, as, on Uber it just gives you all the cars around you. You could do something like that with a timebank. But you would have to allow for local conditions. Here’s another point about nonprofit efforts that have been made for general labor service platforms, like Loconomics, which aims to be a general labor platform or a pilot program in the U.K. where a municipality launched a labor services platform.

The idea was that people who needed stuff done could hire people with spare time — a kind of nonprofit TaskRabbit. There are two issues: If you have imbalance in the market — which we do, with a weak labor market, it will be hard for the platform to work. TaskRabbit can do it because they have an algorithm that privileges certain people. But a nonprofit doesn’t want to function that way. You don’t want an algorithm where a few people get tasks. The other thing is that with general labor service platform you can’t tailor to the specific needs of types of labor. The one-size-fits all market does not work very well.

Your critique of Andrew Yarrow’s “Thrift” — that he didn’t dig deep enough to understand what the thrift movement meant to its participants. What’s motivating users of Uber and Airbnb, and is that different from, say, a tool lending library user?

With the nonprofits, people are motivated by several common good claims. One is ecological. People think that these are lower-footprint way of doing things. The second is social, either to have social connection or in cases like a time bank, a critique of inequality. That’s important to people. Then there is the critique of the big impersonal corporation, and a preference for the local and the face-to-face and the personalized. There’s almost an aesthetic dimension to that. That’s been important for a lot of people in both types of platforms. You also see this on some of the for-profit platforms, for example, with choosing Airbnb rather than a hotel chain.

That’s a major motivation we’ve found. With the food swap, there is a critique of the industrial food system. With the for-profits, the number one motive is money, although, these other things also come into play. On Airbnb people think that it is reducing eco-footprints because fewer hotels are being built (they don’t think about how people are traveling more because of Airbnb). And there’s another aspect for the people who are earners on the platforms, which is that they don’t want nine-to-five jobs and want a certain amount of autonomy or flexibility. Maybe they have other careers or obligations. They aren’t nine-to-five people. This is another set of motives around autonomy and flexibility.

Header photo by Yoel J Gonzalez via Unsplash

The post Juliet Schor on the Striking Differences Between Nonprofit and For-profit Sharing Enterprises appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Enspiral Space is Enspiral’s co-working facility in Wellington, New Zealand. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Anna Bergren Miller  describes the inner workings of Enspiral, one of our favourite, P2P-based, social entrepreneurial networks. This article was originally published at Shareable.

While it seems clear that New Zealand-based social enterprise network Enspiral is doing exciting things in the social impact space, it can be difficult, at first, to understand what exactly Enspiral is. It is easier to begin with what Enspiral is not. Enspiral is not an incubator or an accelerator. It is not a training program, nor is it an advisory service. The website’s FAQ page, which describes Enspiral as “sort of a ‘DIY’ social enterprise support network,” offers both a promise and a warning to would-be Enspiralites. “If you’re an independent, entrepreneurial person with a deep commitment to service and social change and want to discover your own way to have an impact alongside like-minded people, Enspiral is fertile ground,” it suggests. “But you’ll need to find your own way, and there’s no program or official support.”

Enspiral’s hard-to-pin-downness is in part a product of its decentralized organizational structure, which is sometimes described as an open value network. The avoidance of power hierarchies is at the heart of the network’s mission. “From the beginning, the first idea was more people working on stuff that matters,” said founder Joshua Vial. “But it was also this idea about decentralized organizations—that there’s a real possibility, with technology now, for different management structures.”

Enspiral Members answer the question: What is Enspiral?

Vial launched Enspiral in 2010, several years after quitting his job at a web development company to split his time between volunteering and contract work. He began meeting people who, like him, were interested in social and environmental issues, but who—unlike him—didn’t have a steady source of income. “So I thought, if I can help other people get higher-paid contract work, maybe we can do interesting things together,” he recalled. He reoriented his consulting business to a collective focused on helping socially-minded professionals find work. “I started saying yes to every contract that came my way, and scrambling to find people,” he said. “We were just looking for like-minded folks.”

In four years, Enspiral evolved from a vision of “more people working on stuff that matters” to a global network of socially-minded individuals and enterprises. (Courtesy Enspiral)

From the start, Enspiral eschewed salaries and emphasized a marketplace model of resource distribution. “There are people with skills and there are different projects, but they’ve got clear budgets and clear deliverables,” explained Vial. “We allocate people to projects in different ways. That’s the key mechanic to getting things done.”

Around 2012, as the company continued to grow, Enspiral hired an administrative staff, which they called a “support crew.” But within a year, it became apparent that “it really didn’t work for us at all,” said Vial. “We started to get divergent experiences from the support crew and the contractors, and it felt like we were just under-resourcing a management team. We were doing things like you would at a normal organization.” So the administrative staff did something that is unlikely to happen at a “normal organization:” they fired themselves.

The Enspiral network includes over 150 contributors and friends from around the world. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Today, the hub of the Enspiral network is Enspiral Foundation, which Vial pictures “as the campfire we all sit around to have a collective discussion.” Enspiral regularly hosts public gatherings, like afternoon teas at Enspiral Space, its co-working office. Individuals interested in participating on a more regular basis can become an Enspiral Contributor by paying an annual fee to cover core operating costs. (The Foundation subsidies people who want to be involved but cannot afford to pay.) The next level of commitment is membership. Enspiral Members are usually involved in the group for at least a year before being invited, and are expected to participate in collective decision-making, and to attend retreats and other in-person events.

Individuals can choose among multiple levels of engagement. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral, though legally a limited liability company, acts as a cooperative. Every Enspiral Member owns one share in the organization. Shares cannot be sold, and the company does not pay dividends. “It’s your citizenship card in the collective, pretty much. Our Members are the ultimate locus of power in the group,” explained Vial. Enspiral Members make administrative decisions and budget collectively, with help from several open-source software programs. These include Loomio, a collective decision-making platform, and Cobudget, both of which were developed within the Enspiral network.

Enspiral Members participate in collaborative decision-making and budgeting. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral Ventures are companies that have voluntary revenue sharing and mutual support agreements with Enspiral Foundation. The agreements are flexible, and may be changed with one month’s notice from either party. Enspiral Ventures do not have any decision-making power in Enspiral Foundation beyond allocating the part of the budget they contributed through the collective funding process. “But because the Members are pretty much starting and running the companies, they’re doing it as a way of putting some of their effort and money into support for our whole mission of Enspiral,” said Vial. “It’s much less about, ‘Let’s go find sponsors we’re not that close to to give us money, because they want to get brand recognition,'” he explained. “It’s much more a collective of companies saying, ‘We’re all dependent upon one another. If we can make this central organization strong, then we’ll all get benefits from a richer community.'”

Enspiral Members commit to attending online meetings and in-person events, including retreats. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral’s financial model is simple: pay what you want. The organization experimented with equity-sharing, but Enspiral Foundation recently returned the shares. “We didn’t want to have the different dynamic of companies being bound together because they had no money to start with, and then they gave equity instead,” said Vial. “As opposed to other Ventures, which, because they were cash-rich, just contributed cash the whole time, and then can walk away with one month’s notice.”

As a result, Enspiral Ventures’ contributions vary by company. Enspiral Services, Vial’s original company, collects up to 20% of the revenue generated by each independent contractor under its umbrella. It then gives one-quarter of these contributions to the Foundation, using the remaining 15% to cover internal expenses and fund Services projects. Contractors can change the percentage they contribute to Enspiral Services on a contract-by-contract basis, and Enspiral Services, like all Enspiral Ventures, can renegotiate their contract with Enspiral Foundation at will. “It’s like, if you’re giving the Foundation too much money, then change your contract and tell us what you want to pay,” said Vial. “It becomes a prompt for conversation if some people contribute a lot and others don’t. It also gives you really good visibility over the value people put on the network.”

Enspiral Foundation is funded by voluntary contributions from Enspiral Ventures. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Dubious by the standards of conventional business practice, Enspiral’s funding strategy is working. Vial estimates that company brings in about NZ$10,000 each month through Enspiral Foundation, plus another NZ$10-12,000 from Enspiral Services. As the company expands, and as the Ventures secure larger contracts, a logical next step is direct funding of new social enterprises. “I think we’ll start to have enough financial strength to really invest in stuff rather than bootstrapping it,” said Vial. “Because a lot of us are tired of that approach. It’s hard work, especially when you do it over and over again.”

This sign appeared in Enspiral’s kitchen, a reminder that learning to say “no” is as important as saying “yes” in a collaborative workplace. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Not every company can be Enspiral, notes Vial. It would be hard to apply the Enspiral approach to existing organizations. “It’s just too different,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey everyone, you’re not getting salaried any more.'” And getting an Enspiral-type endeavor off the ground takes a certain amount of both patience and faith. Vial has heard from a number of groups worldwide interested in emulating Enspiral, but as yet none have come to fruition. In most cases, interest fizzled out after Vial made it clear that he could offer advice but not financial support.

Nevertheless, “I think if you’re doing a professional services collective, or if people are doing a community of social enterprises, then it’s a really powerful model for organizing,” said Vial. He sees particular promise in the area of urban innovation. “I think a lot of what we’ve learned is directly relevant to them,” he said. “When I look at the ‘let’s change our cities’ sort of community, often they’re really strapped for cash, and they’ve got really marginal business models.” Bike shares and community gardens are great, said Vial, “but they’re either cash sinks or they just scrape by.”

What worked for Enspiral would work equally well for would-be urban reformers, he says: convincing highly-paid professional service workers (like lawyers, accountants, or programmers) to sign on to a collective based on contract work. “It was hard work, but it wasn’t really risky,” explained Vial. “And off the back of that, this really rich ecosystem and financial base emerged for funding the more marginal businesses.” He wants people interested in urban environmental and social justice to know that Enspiral is there for them. “We’d love to help them get up and running,” he said. “I think this could be a really significant way to leverage wider resource flows for people who want to change the city, and change the world.”

Anyone can get involved in Enspiral, either through virtual friendship or at in-person community events, like this women’s tea. (Courtesy Enspiral)

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