(English) Roots and Branches

(English) ROOTS & BRANCHES is a digital archive of historical materials tracing the origins and evolution of the community land trust (CLT), as both a model and a movement.  Our focus for now is on the United States, although homage is paid to the international precedents on which the modern-day CLT is based.  The model pioneered in North America in the 1970s has now leapt across the seas to inspire fledgling CLT movements in Australia, Belgium, England, and France.  In the future, we plan to add materials from these countries to those we have already collected from the USA.

This website is an outgrowth of a slide show created by John Emmeus Davis for the National CLT Network, entitled Roots of the CLT.  That production has been revised many times since its debut in 2006.  The latest edition can be found here, under Videos.  Another seedbed for Roots & Branches is the opening essay in The Community Land Trust Reader, published in 2010 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.  Entitled “Origins and Evolution of the Community Land Trust in the United States,” this historical essay has been updated, revised, and converted into a mini-ebook – which can be read or downloaded byclicking here.

Roots & Branches is a non-commercial labor of love by CLT practitioners who have volunteered their time to preserve essential pieces of the movement’s history for their peers – and for the next generation.  We are not professional archivists or trained historians.  Nor are we academics, intent upon presenting an “objective” view of the social landscape.  We are advocates, celebrating what is special about today’s CLTs by connecting them to theoretical ideas, social experiments, political struggles, and unsung heroes of the past.

We are also gardeners, keeping alive the stories of people who had the conviction and courage to pioneer a new way of owning land and taking care of what is built or grown upon it.  Rudyard Kipling once wrote: “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”  We hope that is true, for this website is not only a compendium of photographs, videos, and documents; it also a collection of personal interviews and oral histories, preserving the stories of individuals who were instrumental in creating a model and building a movement.

Our plan is eventually to populate the section entitled Interviews with dozens of oral histories.  You will discover, however, that only a few print interviews have been added to date.  This section of the website is a work in progress – as is much of Roots & Branches.  We have prepared the ground, laid out the paths, and planted a hundred perennials.  There is still much to do, however, before this ambitious project becomes a thing of beauty.

That’s where you come in.  We have searched our own computers, closets, and shoeboxes for all the mementoes we could find.  Now it’s your turn.  We invite your participation, not only in telling us what is mistaken or missing, but in helping us to gather materials that will make this website more accurate and complete.

Any member of the website’s development team or advisory committee, listed under About Us, will gladly review any digitized historical materials you’d like to have considered for inclusion on Roots & Branches.  Although we’re not a library, where every text or image that comes to our attention will be added automatically to our virtual shelves, we are a community, with a diversity of perspectives on what and who might have really mattered in the history we share.  As we grow this website, we’ll do what we can to let a thousand flowers bloom.

 

Source: CLTRoots, by e-mail.

Deja una respuesta

Tu dirección de correo electrónico no será publicada. Los campos obligatorios están marcados con *