Who is this guide for?

Communities (and their allies) who are facing climate displacement and seeking adaptation strategies grounded in resistance, reparative justice, and community control and cohesion.

What will you Find?

• How CLTs are rooted in Black and Indigenous resistance to land dispossession. That history is this guide’s foundation. 

• How climate risk is not distributed equally. CLTs offer communities a path forward toward self-determination, a human right.

• Contexts, goals, and design considerations for a community seeking to design a CLT in 3 different scenarios: building resilience in place, facilitating climate mobility, and recovering after a disaster.

• Stories from 9 communities sharing how they built CLTs. Their experience is a gift and a resource.

• Guiding principles and questions to support collective community visioning toward just, climate-ready futures.

Learn More

There is nothing new about communities being told that the land beneath their feet does not belong to them. Dispossession has a long history in this country. Redlining. Urban renewal. Adaptation “solutions” designed around individual households rather than the webs of kinship and care that actually holds communities together. The climate crisis did not create these conditions, it inherited them. 

The land is speaking. Storms arrive with more fury. Heat settles longer and heavier. Floods come where they have not come before. These are not warnings of what is coming, these are the present tense. The question before us isn’t whether to respond, it is whether our response will be worthy of the lives here and those who come after us. 

Federal government support has never been enough – it is eroding faster than the coastlines. Meanwhile, speculation moves quickly and climate gentrification is reshaping who can live where. Wealthier households adapt or relocate on their own terms. Everyone else negotiates with forces that were never designed with them in mind. Who stays and who goes has been about power and who controls the land. 

Pathways toward just, climate-ready futures require us to remember old and experiment with new adaptation strategies. Community Land Trusts grew from tradition and can provide one of our best pathways forward. They were first documented in the U.S. South in the 1960s when Black sharecroppers and Indigenous people facing retaliatory evictions built a new legal form of collective ownership as an act of survival and resistance. 

When we are faced with crisis, we turn to the enduring cooperative stewardship practices that have supported Black and Indigenous communities through ecological and economic shifts for generations. Collective ownership keeps land, governance, and decision-making in community hands, whether communities stay, move, or rebuild. 

Produced by the Climigration Network and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, “Together We Thrive” explores how a community could design a Community Land Trust, or CLT, to build resilience in place, facilitate community-led relocation, and/or support disaster recovery. 

Nine communities anchor this resource with stories from Houston, Texas, to Lahaina, Maui, to the unceded lands of the Wiyot Tribe. Each one demonstrates what becomes possible when communities move with intention, grounded in their own values and histories, rather than at the mercy of external forces. 

The guide is shaped by questions asked by community leaders, informed by academic and policy research, and anchored in real-world expertise of CLT organizers across the country. 

Acknowledgements

In partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a dedicated team of Climigration Network members create this guide, including lead author Eric Asinas Zeitz; researchers David Southgate, Barrett Ristroph, Meghan Sullivan, Shalini Matharage; and Advisory Team members Beth Butler, Rebecca Jim, Johanna Lovecchio, Deputy Chief Crystlyn Rodrigue, Rich Stolz, and Amy Cotter.

We would like to recognize and thank the members of the Climigration Network’s original Together We Thrive workshop series in 2023 for helping set our path toward creating this resource. These initial workshops compiled stories, insights, and resources from Climigration Network members to serve as a starting point for future research and practical work on the topic. 

This resource draws heavily on the expertise and knowledge of community land trusts and other shared equity organizations across the country. We are deeply grateful to those who took the time to speak with us and share their wisdom as experts, including:

• Dr. Ashley Paige Allen, Founding Executive Director, Houston Community Land Trust

• Robin Hickey, Chief Financial Officer, Elevation Community Land Trust

• Steve Kirk, President of Rural Neighborhoods, Florida Keys Community Land Trust

• Autumn Ness, Executive Director, Lahaina Community Land Trust

• Sam Snyder, Community Engagement and Communications Manager, Elevation Community Land Trust

• Marina Starleaf Riker, Communications Director, Lahaina Community Land Trust

• Brenda Torpy, Lead Consultant and Former Executive Director, Champlain Housing Trust

• Michelle Vassel, CLT Director and Tribal Administrator, Dishgamu Humboldt Community Land Trust 

• Maggie Whitcomb, Founder and Former Executive Director, Florida Keys Community Land Trust

We are also profoundly grateful for those who have been so intentional about sharing their approaches, stories, and insights in writing, presentations, videos—all in solidarity, so that we and others can learn from their progress. A complete list of all the different organizations highlighted throughout the resource can be found in the guide. We encourage you to click through the links in the resource to learn more about each community example directly in their own words.