ReCommon Litepaper
(This was the original publication that was published at the founding of ReCommon.)
1. Introduction
At ReCommon, our mission is to facilitate the reclamation and stewardship of common land by supporting the emergence of resilient place-based communities and regenerative economies. To achieve this, we leverage regenerative financial infrastructure and innovative governance frameworks to secure communally stewarded lands for both current and future generations to thrive on.
ReCommon is a nonprofit, tax deductible organization that draws inspiration from three pillars of thought: the Community Land Trust model of land tenure, ecological design, and distributed technologies. When woven together, these three core concepts pose a viable alternative to the current extractive paradigm of land use and ownership that is destroying the ecological systems we need to survive and thrive here on planet Earth. This particular model of land tenure is both new and old, a mix of time-honored principles and modern wisdom. Our organization is a catalyst for both global and local communities to rise up to the unique challenges of our times and emerge into a new era of abundance and connectedness.
To be sustainable, all place-based communities need to effectively manage and plan for the challenges of growth, development, food, shelter, water, power systems, local economics, ecosystem health and more.
To be regenerative, the community needs to establish resilient systems that continue in perpetuity. The gift of land must be recycled, re-used, and repurposed forever, so that the future generations of Earth stewards will inhabit a healthier world than we have today.
The scope and complexity of the problems we’re collectively facing are immense, and the solutions will need to be ambitious, scalable, and grounded in the realities of land-based economies and communities.
Lands held in community are estimated to comprise over 6 billion hectares around the globe, supporting over 2.5 billion people with food, water, fuel, or housing. Yet only 10 percent of these communally managed lands are secured with legal title, making these commons highly vulnerable to extractive industry or corrupt governments. Community stewarded lands contain over 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity, and their security is essential for protecting against further biodiversity loss.
Robert Swann, founder of the Schumacher Center for New Economics, eloquently explains the responsibility of equitably sharing the gift of land:
"The story of land is older than the story of man. Land came first; no man created it. Every society, large or small, must devise ways in which its members will share this gift. This is allocation. Members of the society must also determine under what conditions the land will be passed on to the next generation. This is continuity. And they must decide if, when, and how it may be traded with others. This is exchange."
ReCommon is creating an equitable land tenure framework for democratically managing the intricately connected processes of allocation, continuity, and exchange. It's a scalable, adaptable model that enables people to balance land wealth in private control with the needs of the community and the Earth for regenerative, perpetual stewardship of land.
The Community Land Trust
All community land trusts strike the balance between organizer, developer, and steward. Fortunately enough, the community land trust is a community development tool of uncommon flexibility that can accommodate a wide variety of land uses and development projects. Over the decades since the idea first came to fruition, community land trusts have been pushing the limits of what is possible with this governance framework. At ReCommon we are continuing the evolution of the community land trust model.
The Schumacher Center for New Economics summarizes the community land trust as,
“...a democratically governed, regionally based, open membership non-profit corporation. Through an inheritable and renewable long-term lease, the trust removes land from the speculative market and facilitates multiple uses such as workforce housing, village improvement, sustainable agriculture, and recreation. Individual or organizational leaseholders own the buildings and other improvements on the land created by their labor and investment, but do not own the land itself. Resale agreements on the buildings ensure that the land value of a site is not included in future sales, but rather held in perpetuity on behalf of the regional community."
The community land trust movement started with radical roots and was part of the ‘back to the land and village’ revival movements of the 1960s that pursued justice, equality, freedom, and resilient local communities. However, in recent years the movement has taken a turn toward affordable low-income housing. This work is undoubtedly a critical component, but alone it’s not enough to address the complexity of the systemic problems of our time. In many ways, ReCommon embodies a return to the spirit found in the roots of the community land trust movement.
Roots of the CLT
The ideas behind the community land trust have historic roots largely ignored in mainstream history. Nearly all indigenous communities viewed land as a collective gift to be held in common trust. Territorial boundaries were agreed upon, but within these boundaries the land was used communally and wasn’t the ‘property’ of any single person, family or tribe.
The community land trust concept, as developed by Schumacher Center for a New Economics president Robert Swann, offers a practical way to take land off the market and place it into a system of trusteeship on a region-by-region basis. One of Swann's primary inspirations was Vinoba Bhave, a direct disciple of Mahatma Gandhi.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Vinoba traveled across rural India by foot, campaigning for people with more land than they needed to give some to their impoverished sisters and brothers. Known as the Land Gift movement, it had much promise but wasn't quite working as planned. The reality was that the people didn't have the tools and resources necessary to be successful on their own.
Seeing that happening, Vinoba altered the system to be a Village Gift instead of an individual land gift. Now, all donated land was held by the village itself and was leased to individuals that were going to put it to good use. If the land wasn't used properly, the lease would expire and go to someone else.
In the 1960s, Robert Swann began working with Slater King, civil rights activist and cousin of Martin Luther King Jr., to develop New Communities in Albany, Georgia. They decided to structure their organization based on a legal model of the Jewish National Fund, which began to acquire land in Israel at the turn of the century and now holds 95 percent of the land in the country. Swann and a group from Georgia traveled to Israel to further investigate the Fund's impressive track record of leasing land to several types of stakeholders.
Upon returning, convinced that what they had seen was the right path forward, they purchased a 5,000 acre farm in rural Georgia, developed a plan for the land, and leased it to a group of African-American farmers. Since the 1960s, the legal documents have been well-tested and refined. Now hundreds of community land trusts are operational around the world.
It was the work of Robert Swann alongside Slater King, inspired by the Village Gift movement of Vinoba Bhave and Gandhi's idea of trusteeship, motivated by the right of African-American farmers to farm land securely and affordably, that initiated the CLT movement in America.
Principles for Managing a Commons
In 1968, Garrett Hardin proposed a theory known as the "tragedy of the commons". It describes a default situation where a common resource - be it water, grasslands, minerals, trees, etc - is overexploited by people until the common resource no longer exists or is critically damaged. The reality is that Elinor Ostrom had proven Hardin’s theory wrong before it was published. Despite ‘the tragedy of the commons’ being incorrect, the idea was promoted and spread into the mainstream narrative.
Elinor Ostrom is a global thought leader investigating how communities cooperate to share resources. She is the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for her scholarly work in managing the commons and the future of the planet. One of her main assertions is that communities can and should communicate to build common protocols and rules that ensure their sustainability. In her 1990 book, Governing the Commons, the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Ostrom outlined 8 principles which serve as an essential guide for successful management of the commons.
Clearly defined community boundaries: to define who has rights and privileges within the community, for example, to use certain resources or to perform certain actions on them.
Congruence between rules and local conditions: the rules that govern behavior or commons use in a community should be flexible and based on local conditions that may change over time. These rules should be intimately associated with the commons, rather than relying on a “one-size-fits-all” regulation.
Collective choice arrangements: to best accomplish congruence (Principle number 2), people who are affected by these rules should be able to participate in their modification, and the costs of alteration should be kept low.
Monitoring: some individuals within the community act as monitors of behavior in accordance with the rules derived from collective choice arrangements, and they should be accountable to the rest of the community.
Graduated sanctions: community members actively monitor and sanction one another when behavior is found to conflict with community rules. Sanctions against members who violate the rules are aligned with the perceived severity of the infraction.
Conflict resolution mechanisms: members of the community should have access to low-cost spaces to resolve conflicts.
Local enforcement of local rules: local jurisdiction to create and enforce rules should be recognized by higher authorities.
Multiple layers of nested enterprises: by forming multiple nested layers of organization, communities can address issues that affect resource management differently at both broader and local levels.
ReCommon provides the foundation to incorporate Ostrom’s principles for managing a commons into a scalable governance framework. With such a tool, we can rewrite the story from tragedy to victory, from degeneration to regeneration, from fragility to resilience. We will return the land to the commons where local communities can continue to steward this sacred gift in perpetuity.
2. Organizational Architecture
The essence of what we do at ReCommon is seated in whole-systems thinking and ecological design sciences. As such, our efforts span many disciplines, embrace complexity and strike a balance between organizer, developer and land steward, while collaborating with others to accomplish our mission.
At the core of our work, we create tools to reclaim, protect, and regenerate land through the use of the Regenerative Community Land Trust (RegenCLT) model of land tenure and governance. The RegenCLT model is designed to lower barriers to entry for communities seeking to acquire land through purchase or gift, and to develop a permaculture master plan for the site. This place-based plan takes into account the current state of the land, its future uses, its connection to the local and regional economy and community, and to the global community at large. The RegenCLT model is uniquely capable of acquiring all types of land, returning it to the commons, and managing it sustainably for future generations.
Conducting research and educating about the many facets of regeneration, including philosophies and techniques such as permaculture, natural building, alternative energy, web3 technology, and urban design, is integral to our mission. ReCommon will be a natural host for cutting-edge research in these fields, implementing solutions on appropriate scales based on ecological design fundamentals that can be applied globally.
ReCommon supports the development of resilient place-based communities to inhabit, enjoy and steward the land brought into common trust. We work directly with local communities to ensure that the land is properly used and protected, and that the appropriate design solutions are being implemented. These communities are organized bioregionally and are referred to as Nodes.
We use a distributed form of nested governance that empowers local community decision making within Bioregional Nodes while keeping them connected to the greater network and its happenings. Each Bioregional Node is its own autonomous Regenerative Community Land Trust and collectively constitutes the distributed commons network of ReCommon. Lastly, we fundraise and create sustainable income streams to support all of the above efforts.
Our vision is a planetary network of sovereign, interconnected regenerative bioregional communities. To see that vision through, we need to effectively raise and deploy funds towards a wide range of projects, and to reclaim large swaths of land for the commons. ReCommon is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, which allows us to receive tax-deductible donations of cash, land, and cryptocurrency.
Bioregionalism
To address the apparent paradox of creating a globally-scaled organization that can effectively manage local resources and encourage local decision making, we have incorporated bioregionalism into our organizational structure.
David Haenke eloquently explains the concept of a bioregion in his 1996 article titled Bioregionalism and Ecological Economics.
"A bioregion is a geographical area whose boundaries are determined by nature and not solely by humans. One bioregion is distinguished from another by characteristics of flora, fauna, water, climate, rocks, soils, landforms, and the human settlements and cultures these characteristics have given rise to.
“Bioregionalism is a comprehensive ‘new’ way of defining and understanding the place where we live, and of living there sustainably and respectfully. In truth, what Bioregionalism represents is only new for people who come out of the Western industrial-technological heritage. Its essence has been reality and common sense for native people living close to the land for thousands of years, and remains so. At the same time, bioregional concepts are rigorously defensible in terms of science, technology, economics, politics, and other fields of “civilized” human endeavor.
“Using ecology as the discriminator, bioregionalism takes the best and most presently relevant of the old, and synthesizes it with the most appropriate of the new. Bioregionalism is the most ecological of systems of social organization, excepting the life ways of native and indigenous peoples who still live traditionally in intact ecosystems. It is a complete and all-inclusive way of life, comprising the whole range of human thought and endeavor. Bioregionalism offers a comprehensive restructuring of most human systems using ecological design principles.
Bioregions are the ultimate natural boundaries to use as an organizational map while ReCommon expands and the distributed network of Bioregional Nodes are established around the Earth.
ReCommon is the global, digital layer that weaves together the various place-based Bioregional Nodes with RegenCLT governance. This allows for global participation while supporting the emergence of new bioregional nodes to form as people come together.
Governance Model
ReCommon is a membership-based organization. Any person can become a member by registering themselves and paying the dues. ReCommon innovates upon the three-part governance structure put forth in the classic CLT model in several ways, all in effort to balance stakeholder representation. These innovations are encompassed in RegenCLT model of land tenure.
First, governance power is shifted from an elected board of directors to the community of members directly, similar to the distributed governance of digital communities like DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. We combine a ‘one-person, one-vote’ system with the ‘balanced bucket' structure used by classic CLT boards. The result is that each person has a vote, and each vote goes through a weighted bucket system that directly corresponds to how that voter is connected with the land or project in question. These are the 5 voting buckets, each with equal categorical weight.
General Members (20%) - people that are members but don’t belong to any delineated subgroup
Stewards (20%) - leaseholders of land in trust in the ReCommon network
Elders (20%) - rights of nature representatives and holders of indigenous wisdom
Patrons (20%) - financial investors and holders of Commons Credits (section 4.2 below)
Partners (20%) - partner organizations that provide resources and support in various forms
ReCommon follows this governance structure on a global level, and as such anyone can participate. However, each Bioregional Node also follows this structure on a local level. To be a member of a Bioregional Node and participate in governance, one must actually live in that particular bioregion. This balances global connectivity and inclusivity with honoring the specificity of place and putting local decision-making first. Additionally, bioregional nodes may choose to adapt and modify this 5 bucket model to the unique needs and characteristics of their bioregional community.
What’s important with the RegenCLT model of land tenure is the system of balanced stakeholder governance is expressed in the bylaws. The nuances of the particular legal entity that the bylaws are for matters less, and will naturally vary from country-to-country. As such, when new bioregional nodes come online, we strive to establish them as a ‘minimum viable nationstate interfacing entity’ that legally protects the organization and stays compliant with local laws, but also points to the digital governance layer for the ‘source of truth’ for governance and decision-making authority.
3. Web3 Integration
The world is on an increasingly complex trajectory, and the legacy systems in place are not able to adapt fast enough to accomplish what needs to be done to avert the interrelated climate, social and ecological crises of our time. These crises have arisen because of design failure, not because of an inherent lack of resources. Instead, we are dealing with the repercussions of decades of resource misallocation and value misalignment.
We experienced a quantum leap in technology with the invention of computers and the internet. That was web1. Then, giants like Amazon, AirBnB, Facebook, and Netflix came to power. That was web2. Now, cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technologies like blockchain have ushered in a new era of technology, known as Web3. Experts in the field even suggest that the leap to web3 technology will be a more significant change than our leap pre-web to web1. New opportunities are emerging that allow us to align our economic systems with our values. We can now implement ecological economic systems that reorient value creation from extraction and degeneration to co-creation and regeneration.
The particular expression of web3 technology that ReCommon integrates into its financial infrastructure is known as regenerative cryptoeconomics.
Web3, blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies are often produced and maintained by communities of open source contributors. The digital infrastructure those communities are building is itself a commons. As such, the democratic governance and stewardship baked into ReCommon and the RegenCLT model is well positioned to adopt such technologies.
One of the main aspects that has been holding back the community land trust model of land tenure from realizing its full potential is having limited resources and service areas. These constraints have been naturally defined by the resources available to support operations, which are notoriously limited. However, connecting to the emerging collective wealth and innovative public-goods financing of the web3 movement, ReCommon can access the resources necessary to reclaim and protect the commons, regenerating landscapes on a bioregional scale.
Though ReCommon as an organization is primarily focused on the land, digital commons infrastructure is an indispensable tool for weaving together the various global movements of planetary regeneration and sustainable community development. From inception, we have designed our organization to embrace and leverage the emerging technologies of web3 and earth sciences that other community land trusts are disconnected from. By engaging with this new economy we can achieve sustainable levels of scale and impact that no other community land trust has before.
The Commons Credit
The Commons Credit is a whole-systems accounting and valuation methodology for community-held land. It serves two primary functions. The first is to properly value any given piece of land, including the ecosystem health, economic capacity, housing, food production, etc. The second is to create a way for ethical investors to finance the purchase of land and get a return on their investment, while keeping the ownership within a perpetual trust and stewardship within the community. The purchasers of these ‘Commons Credits’ are considered Patrons, representing 20 percent of voting power on both the global ReCommon level and on the Bioregional Node level, depending on the physical origination of the commons credit.
The Commons Credit serves as the digital record of a piece of land that is in the ReCommon network. When a piece of land enters a Bioregional Node’s stewardship, a Commons Credit is created as the digital representation of the value of that land at that moment, and is forever tethered to that piece of land. As the valuation of the property is assessed and changes over time, it is recorded and updated in the commons credit, using a smart-contract NFT such as Charged Particles. This ongoing assessment is the whole-systems valuation methodology, and as MRV (measurement, recording and verification) tools improve over time, the rate at which this assessment happens will trend towards nearly live-updates.
The Commons Credit becomes a way to finance community-centered land regeneration by serving as the fertile middle ground between a philanthropic donation and conventional real-estate investment. The Patron who purchases a commons credit for a particular piece of land doesn’t own that land, which is owned by the bioregional node’s trust, but they are included in both governance and upside in the appreciation of the value of that land.
The value of the commons credit tracks with the holistic evaluation of that piece of land, which will increase through regenerative use and sustainable development. When the land value goes up, it is reflected in the Commons Credit, and the Patron (the holder of the Commons Credit) can choose to sell it on the open market for profit.
A ‘royalty’ is attached to the sale of the Commons Credit, ensuring that whenever it changes hands and profit is made, some of this profit always returns to the Bioregional Node. This aligns previously unaligned incentives, connecting speculative profit made by exchanging Commons Credits directly to the ongoing funding regenerative projects on the ground. All of this happens within the container of a perpetual land-tenure model, which ensures that land is properly stewarded by community in perpetuity and that all stakeholders have a voice at the table.
In this way, the Commons Credit separates the right to finance and invest in real estate for speculation or impact from the right of ownership, while creating a recurring revenue stream for the Bioregional Node and ReCommon. By reserving 1/5th of the voting power for Patrons, the RegenCLT model weaves these financiers into the participatory governance of the land but ensures their say is always in balance with other stakeholders.
The following are a few other ways that, over time, we will seek to integrate other aspects of web3 technology into ReCommon.
Other ways to incorporate web3
Membership: Regenerative cryptoeconomics and token engineering create immense potential for aligning incentives amongst a body of members. At ReCommon, we see a clear path towards a token-based membership, with specific qualifiers that programmatically determine members participate in governance. This is an exciting component of scaling the system to connect Bioregional Nodes, to have a unified global membership that is flexible and locally-distinct.
Local Currency & Economic Resilience: Local, alternative currencies have been used throughout history. Though they've been commonly fought against by centralized state-controlled currencies, they have repeatedly proven to benefit any community they are a part of. Local currency has an economic stabilization effect because it keeps money and value in the community instead of being extracted to distant corporations. People can bypass mainstream credit channels and access previously inaccessible sources of capital, where any interest circulates back into the community. It creates the opportunity for goods and services to circulate among people who may not have much money but do have time and skills to offer.
Governance: One of the most promising aspects of Web3 technology is its ability to greatly improve systems of governance. Our current systems are easily corrupted, poorly scaled, and slow to adapt to urgent needs of the people and places they’re supposed to be protecting. Web3 contains innovative technological frameworks to encode the principles outlined by Ostrom and reflected in the RegenCLT model of land tenure. Contrary to our current governance systems, blockchain technology enables highly secure, scalable, and adaptable governance. The five-part, nested, bioregional governance structure of ReCommon will be made more resilient and efficient by incorporating these technologies.
Ecosystem Accounting & Impact Markets: Our current economic paradigm is growth-centric at all costs. If a nation's GDP is stable or decreasing, it is seen as bad. However, nearly all of the holistic solutions our society needs to implement in order to quell the complex crises of our time require us to change our economic understanding of growth. As it currently stands, economic growth is generally a result of and interwoven with extraction, degeneration and gentrification. A tree is worth more cut down than standing in a forest. Gold is worth more taken out of the ground and stored in a vault than kept in the ground.
One aspect of this new economic paradigm that ReCommon will engage with is the emerging nature-based solution (NBS) carbon markets. Web3 technologies are being used to compensate land stewards for their work in regenerative agriculture by creating a market that values the sequestering of carbon back into the soil. Healthy soil is incredibly efficient at storing carbon - so much so that it can effectively cause a drawdown effect, where we're pulling more carbon out of the atmosphere than we're adding. This can only be achieved in a significant way if regenerative agricultural practices are adopted and implemented at a large scale, one of the core transformations that ReCommon seeks to usher in. ReCommon plans on engaging with Web3 organizations like Regen Network to become an active participant in the planetary initiative to save our vital ecosystems and effectively prepare for climate change.
A positive outcome of the Commons Credit system is an assurance layer for carbon and other eco-credit classes. When a corporation or individual purchases a carbon credit and retires it, there currently exists only very weak protections to ensure the land on which the carbon was sequestered (whether in soil, forest, grasslands, etc.) is protected and that their “carbon-sequestration investment” is secure. Although the current carbon industry treats carbon that has been “retired” as physically secure, we have seen time and time again that this is far from the truth. Community managed lands have historically fared much better than private lands in this respect, as the threat of bankruptcy, commercial logging or extractive agriculture is abated.
As we transition to a slow-growth, or degrowth society, we will need to adopt new forms of economics that reintegrate the true value of functional ecosystems into the picture. It is at our own peril as a planetary civilization that we continue to let private companies pillage the commons, extracting sacred resources from future generations in the name of profit today. Web3 technology is the first time we can create an alternative economic system that acknowledges the deep value provided by natural capital like soil, water, air, trees, grasslands and biodiversity. ReCommon and the Commons Credit system are ideally suited to serve as a trusted host for this new paradigm of ecosystem accounting.
4. Ecological Design
The globally-connected yet bioregionally-specific structure of ReCommon is ideal for democratically reaching consensus on ethical design standards while implementing place-based solutions for every given piece of land. All of the solutions to the intersecting crises of our times are already out there. However, they are largely scattered, supported by niche physical and digital communities.
What all these movements need is common ground to meet on, a place where these holistic design solutions can be implemented for the benefit of all life. ReCommon is a powerful home for all these solutions to be organized and synthesized while the distributed commons network of Bioregional Nodes hold on to the physical land where these solutions can be implemented, soil can be remediated, carbon can be sequestered, food can be grown, water can be captured, people can grow and communities can flourish.
The ecological design solutions supported by ReCommon are a mix of high tech and low tech. Many of the tools, techniques, and philosophies are hundreds of years old or more, used by indigenous cultures around the world. However, other design solutions are unique to our modern times and have only become possible recently with the advent of regenerative crypto-economics. Packaging these holistic design philosophies together with the RegenCLT model of land tenure leads to a flexible framework to live the change we want to see in the world, and to create new systems that will carry humanity into an era of abundance and ecological balance.
There are many different practices, techniques and philosophies that contribute to the various ecological design solutions available to us. Together, they create a powerful toolkit that allows us to develop sustainable communities that inhabit, steward, conserve and regenerate the land. The following is an overview of some design philosophies that ReCommon abides by and strives to implement on a project-by-project basis.
Permaculture: Permaculture stands for permanent agriculture, or permanent culture. It's a design process based on whole-systems thinking and can be applied to any system to make it more sustainable and resilient by mimicking and working with the patterns and relationships present in nature. Permaculture overlaps with many other techniques and practices, including holistic management, food forests, perennial agriculture, regenerative agriculture, biomimicry, and more. Together, it creates a comprehensive palette of design principles and techniques to regenerate the earth, protect it from future degeneration and create sustainable communities of land stewards anywhere in the world. In Dave Holmgren’s 1999 book he laid out the 12 principles and 3 ethics of permaculture, all of which perfectly mesh with and strengthen ReCommon's regenerative land tenure model.
Natural Building: Natural building is a combination of many studies including material science, solar energy, and earth physics. It's an umbrella term that includes a variety of structures and building materials including cob, adobe, strawbale, rammed earth, earthbag, hempcrete, earthships, domes and more. These buildings can be made stronger, healthier, cheaper, and more simply than conventional stick-built homes, and they often incorporate mostly locally sourced and upcycled materials.
Good Urbanism: Over time, land will be held in ReCommon that is either in an urban area or will become one. When that is the case, effective and beautiful urban design will be used. There is a way to make inspiring urban environments that respect the landscape, are built to last and that people love. Organizations like Create Streets have outlined some fundamental design principles, including gentle density, greenery, interesting edge spaces, visual diversity, human-scale enclosures, walkability and more.
Alternative Energy: Alternative energy is key to community resilience and lessening, or eliminating our reliance on extractive industries, namely the fossil fuel industry. Every year we experience energy shortages because of the legacy energy infrastructure failing to meet the needs of society, and too fragile to handle our increasingly volatile climate. Clean, locally produced energy shared in community microgrids is the logical solution. There are many existing technologies that fall into this category including solar panels, passive solar, wind turbines, water turbines, geothermal, biogas, climate batteries and more. Together, they present an impressive array of alternative technologies that can provide power and comfortable living conditions, anywhere in the world.
We're at the precipice of a new generation of energy technologies that is based off of an evolving paradigm of science and understanding of nature. To quote Nikola Tesla, these breakthrough technologies "harness the wheel-work of nature". ReCommon is an ideally suited organization to consciously incorporate such technologies into its network of bioregional communities.
5. Financial Model
"Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice." -Wendell Berry.
ReCommon is a tax deductible, non profit organization with many potential streams of revenue and financing. The following is a breakdown of the various sources of income and funding.
Commons Credit Sales: The Commons Credit, the digital representation of the holistic land valuation of any given piece of land in the ReCommon network, is able to be bought and sold freely on the open market. There is a ‘royalty’ attached to each Commons Credit, so whenever this credit changes hands and profit is made, a portion of that profit goes back to the Bioregional Node and to ReCommon. This is built directly into the smart-contract that the Commons Credit is based upon and the royalty payouts are executed programatically.
Tax Deductible Donations: One of ReCommon’s primary objectives is fundraising for community organized land purchases. As a 501(c)3 entity, all donations received are tax deductible. We accept donations in the form of cash, land, and cryptocurrency. The rise of cryptocurrencies has created a powerful emerging community of digital wealth. ReCommon is a conduit for that digital wealth to deploy towards regenerative land projects that increase climate adaptability and systemic anti-fragility.
Impact Investors: Impact investments are investments made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact, not just financial return. The growing impact investment market provides capital to address the world’s most pressing challenges in sectors such as sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, land conservation, alternative finance, soil regeneration and holistic community development, all of which are encompassed by the work that ReCommon does.
Public and Private Grants: Every year, billions of dollars in public and private grants go to non profits working in the sectors that overlap with the work of ReCommon. The Regenerative Community Land Trust model of land tenure is particularly attractive for grant funding because it preserves the benefits over the long term. Money given to other organizations that don’t ensure stewardship in perpetuity may have the intended impact of the grant diluted over time.
For example, an affordable housing development grant may go to a development company, but without a continuity of management its 'affordability' will likely disappear through land speculation and other economic pressures. When ReCommon receives a grant for affordable housing development, there are bioregional stewardship structures in place to ensure that those homes stay affordable, lived in and loved for generations to come.
The same is true for farmland. A regenerative agriculture grant given to a farmer might disappear when the farmer decides to retire and sells his land to the highest bidder. When ReCommon receives a grant for regenerative agriculture, the acquired farmland is protected indefinitely, and its continued productive use for regenerative agriculture is guaranteed to continue in perpetuity by the local bioregional stewardship entity.
Organizational Income: There are two general sources of income that are built into the organizational structure.
Leasehold payments: individuals and other businesses lease land from the Bioregional Nodes for the uses outlined in the master plan of any given parcel of land. A monthly lease payment is paid by the lessee to the local Node, and portion of that passes through to ReCommon.
Membership Dues: anyone can become a member of ReCommon, and dues are paid yearly. Membership to ReCommon is available globally.
Business Income: ReCommon may partake in a number of different income generating activities as long as it is in alignment with the organizations mission to reclaim and protect the commons by supporting development of resilient place-based communities that heal both people and planet. Some examples include:
Eco-tourism: The Nodes will be host to many regenerative community activities
Retreat spaces: spaces for people to gather, grow, and relax in nature and a peaceful community
Event venues: places for people to come together and celebrate
Education: workshops and classes about permaculture, natural building other topics the nonprofit supports
Recreation: access to park-like spaces for hiking, biking, swimming, camping, etc.
Development: building and then selling structures developed in Bioregional Nodes
