Collective Ownership and Self-Determination
Local communities, rather than an individual or corporation, together owns or controls the land.
The land is shared through ownership that consists of more than an individual or corporation. A group, collection of organizations, or a combination of the two own the land. Some ways this currently can be achieved is through: tenant cooperatives, multi-party or organization ownership, community land trusts (where an organization owns the land, and individual owns improvements), and ownership by an organization governed by community members.
Community Vision
Multicultural Community Coalition (MCC)
MCC builds power, combats displacement and preserves culture through collective ownership and shared program spaces. To fulfill this mission, MCC recently acquired a property in the Hillman City neighborhood of Seattle that houses a dozen East African-owned businesses at risk of displacement. MCC’s development project, the Cultural Innovation Center, will create a shared, multicultural, community-owned and operated co-working space that also incorporates a heritage and cultural arts venue. Their multicultural anchor project will house a service-delivery center for several community-based organizations serving Seattle’s growing immigrant, refugee and people of color communities.
Yordanos Teferi
Executive Director, Multicultural Community Coalition
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We can achieve a lot more by banding together. We live by the African proverb that we cite often - ‘If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.’
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It’s not easy when you set up a coalition or when you step outside of your community to form a coalition with other groups. There needs to be a lot of intentionality, and it takes a lot of hard and “heart” work to ensure the partnership remains healthy and thriving. But, if you put in that level of work to establish kinship and those deep-seeded relationships and to focus on the mission that the coalition has come up with for itself, then the rewards are great. One of our successes is that we were all able to come together and acquire a building, but more importantly, the day-to-day successes are rooted in the fact that we were able to leverage each other’s strengths and learn from one another.
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The way we have envisioned and done shared programming has been with the strengths of the individual organizations in mind--Some organizations concentrate on one aspect of service delivery while another organization focuses on another, so being able to learn from one another or leverage the work that one organization is doing to support the other organization’s work is tremendous. The level of support, kinship, and comradery that a partnership like this builds has been transformational.
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For a very long time in our region, a lot of these ethnic, underinvested in, underserved, undervalued community based organizations were having to fend for themselves. That can be a lonely situation, whereas in a coalition, with that level of sustained support you always feel like you have partners, while also serving your individual communities in a culturally and linguistically appropriate manner...It contributes to greater stability, sustainability and our ability to build collective power.”