The Cowrie Initiative partnered with an North Carolina State University graduate seminar to document Black Cooperatives and Community Land Trusts. Building from previous work done with the University of Michigan‘s Poverty Solutions, the NCSU seminar will create story maps identifying where these key resources are and key elements describing their history and activity.
The purpose of this assignment is to collect information on land trusts and cooperatives to augment data describing components of “The Black Commons”.
This work is being done within the broader context of describing components of “The Black Commons”; cultural, economic, and political infrastructure enabling Black community empowerment, equitable development, and policies. “The Black Commons” was proposed by the Schumacher Center as a means to support Black community economic and land development via the use of land trusts and cooperative ownership models. “The Black Commons” was furthered in recent work by Agyeman and Boone in the context of the racial reckoning of 2020.
Kofi Boone, Professor and University Faculty Scholar at NC State University, is the faculty partner for this effort and engaged his graduate seminar, Environmental Social Equity and Design, in creating the story maps. The course focused on the history, context, emerging strategies associated with enabling environmental justice and social equity in the built environment.
In collaboration with The Cowrie Initiative, course research will inform a growing archive of information about the economic development infrastructure serving Black communities addressing issues of equity and justice across the United States. A previous partnership with The University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions produced an online map of Black banks in the US. The results of this research will augment that map by also locating land trusts and cooperatives. The focus will be on Black owned, controlled, or serving organizations in the United States.