Fall Newsletter 2024: Rooting our power in the land

Dear friends,

Fall is always a time that bustles with the labors of life, the challenges of transition and change, and the anticipation of deepening cold and darkness.

But this fall is demanding much more.

We face major escalations of the many systems of violence, supremacy, and plunder we’ve been struggling to overcome for generations, and many of us are awash with renewed fear, grief, and anger. Stormclouds gather new strength on a horizon that was already bearing hurricane winds to so many of our communities and to the land and waters that sustain us all.

We are being called now to step up –perhaps some of us like never before– for a new historical moment in the necessary and ongoing work of community defense, structural change, healing, and visionary creation.

What do we need to be able to stand in our power, to step into our courage, to hold and nourish each other, and to deepen our lived commitments to the transformative work of liberation?

Let’s remember the true sources of our strength: our brilliant, beautiful and imperfect selves, learning what we need to learn; our interwoven communities, building sanctuary and solidarity; our collective capacities to love, imagine, and create; the life-sustaining land and waters from which we all come and to which we return; and the strength of generations upon generations of movement ancestors standing behind us. This is enough.

We are enough, if we fight and build together.

Moments like this can serve to clarify what is most important, what is strong and what is fragile, and where our deepest sources of power can be found. If a system or institution can be dismantled in just a few election cycles, was it actually reliable or resilient? What kinds of structures and forms of collective power do we need to build that can more effectively withstand destabilizing changes in our political and planetary climates?

One thing we know for sure is that building secure and reciprocal relationships with the land is essential to all of this work. Land provides our communities and movements with nourishment, safety, guidance, space to gather, connect and heal. Land enables us to grow strength that can’t just be undone in a volatile election cycle.

Land is the soil in which we root new forms of life that can survive ongoing and escalating storms.

Thank you, dear friends, for being in community with us. Thank you for your commitment and care, and for your courage to keep showing up. We are resolved, together, to challenge the forces of white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, colonialism, and the exploitation of life, labor, and land wherever they appear. We are resolved to nurture sanctuary and solidarity, to care for each other and the land, and to never cease in our work for a more viable, just, and joyful future.

May we hold each other as the land holds us all!

With love and solidarity

the Land in Common crew

Funding the Core Work

We have many exciting and important projects in the works, and many more aspirations that we don’t yet have the capacity to pursue. Building rooted power in the form of land and infrastructure is necessary and expensive! Funding is one of the most powerful way to ensure that this work continues and grows.

Supporting Our Collaborations

We’re pursuing deep collaborations with a number of incredible land justice efforts that need community support. Please consider sharing resources with one or more of these projects:

• Presente! Maine community center. Building a permanent home for Presente’s life-sustaining mutual aid efforts in the Portland area.
• The Ensemble of Color healing sanctuary. Help build infrastructure for a retreat & healing space for survivors of human trafficking.
• La Finca cooperative farm. Help create a debt-free future to ensure the success of this BIPOC-led land project.
• Little River Commons. Support our ongoing work to envision and build this land into a hub for collective liberation organizing and land reconnection.
• Wolankeyutomone kisi apaciyewik Fund. Make a commitment to sustaining Wabanaki land reconnection.

Volunteer

We’re building our capacity to welcome volunteers into many aspects of the work. Over the next few months, we’ll be creating a list of volunteer needs and opportunities involving many different skill sets. This includes things like:

• Fundraising support
• Land care and clearing of harmful or not-yet-adapted plants
• Trail building and maintenance
• Farm support
• Creation of beautiful signage (any fine woodworkers out there?)

If you’re interested in volunteering, please get in touch and share a bit about your interests, skills, and availability. Email:

Presente! Farm is wrapping up their 4th season of farming for community mutual aid. Presente farmers and volunteers honored the land with labor and love all season, and the land returned the care with delicious food to sustain community.

Wild Mountain Nursery just harvested 3,000+ fruit trees and shrubs. Many of these were wholesale plants for FEDCO, and others will be sold retail or distributed as “solidaritrees” to land justice projects.

La Finca Cooperative has been hard at work fixing up the farmhouse, harvesting veggies, caring for rabbits, and planning an upcoming community financing campaign (more soon!).

Celebration Tree Farm & Wellness Center is hosting educational & wellness events as they head into their 10th season of producing ecologically-grown trees for celebrating the season.

With support and inspiration from our friends at the UMass Amherst Building Solidarity Economies project, we’ve been deepening our connections with the visionary folks at Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi. Most recently, our Co-Coordinator Ethan Miller joined Cooperation Jackson’s Kali Akuno for a conversation about land justice in Amherst.

Here’s an article about the event, along with a transcript of the conversation (audio/video, unfortunately, are not available).

We’ve been growing the commons in some really exciting ways over the past few months. We want to give this new land more space than the newsletter allows, so just know that we’ll be sharing news about two major projects over the next few weeks.