Solidarity and Mutual Aid

While Land in Common may provide support to various people and organizations as part of our work, we are not a “service organization.”

We are a movement-building, mutual-aid community enacting land justice and collective liberation in Wabanaki homelands through rooted relationships with each other and the land.

We build relationships in order to meet personal and community needs for land and livelihood, and to to grow our collective power to resist, heal, and create. This means that we don’t just “help” people. We invite people into relationships through which they can find support while also being in reciprocity and solidarity with others. We build on these relationships to grow and sustain movement for collective survival on and with the land.

Embodying our Values

If we’re working for collective liberation, then our ways of working and organizing ourselves need to reflect this commitment. We won’t get to a different world without also transforming ourselves and our organizations.

We therefore resist many aspects of conventional nonprofit culture and practice, while learning from our many ancestral traditions of cooperation, communication, and care, to build structures and cultures that get the work done while also enabling us all to show up for each other as our full selves.

Some of our practices include:

  • A non-hierarchical Staff Collective, in which all staff share leadership and management responsibilities. If we had an executive director, it wouldn’t be any of us, it would be the land.

  • A staff pay structure that compensates staff at the regional “living wage” level based on number of dependents, plus an equity adjustment that increases pay proportionate to people’s experiences of structural injustice.

  • A commitment to professional-level hourly compensation for all labor of our BIPOC leadership council.

  • Regular practices of community self-reflection about dynamics of power, needs for community support, and ways to show up for each other more effectively.

  • Financial policies that prioritize using money in ways that heal and transform, and avoiding practices–such as the speculative investment of an endowment–that generate wealth through exploitation and theft.

We actively center a culture based not on bureaucratic procedures and institutional roles (read some reflections on this here), but on deep trust, mutual care, and ongoing transformational learning and relationship-building. We are continuously inspired by Wabanaki and other Indigenous traditions of relationality and reciprocity, feminist and queer mutual care practice, and anti-racist, anti-colonial community-centered movement building traditions.

Land in Common is an Escape Vehicle

We believe in the power and potential of our community land trust model. At the same time, our goal is not to build an organizational structure that will last for a thousand years. We don’t know what structures will be needed in the future we are living into. What we do know are the values and the qualities of relationship that we commit to holding and enacting, and that give us direction in the face of uncertainty. We think of our organization and our work not as a model, but as an escape vehicle.

We are putting together the best parts that we can find from this world to build something that will carry us, and our next generations, toward something more liberated and livable. We don’t know what this world will look like, or what will be needed to live in it. All we know is that we need to head there, quickly and courageously, adjusting as we go, disassembling, reimagining, and reassembling the vehicle along the way. We also know that the “we” needs to be expansive, including everyone who has been left behind or discarded by the enclosures of colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy.