Management and stewardship of land
This is intended to be our main line of action and the reason we established ourselves as a legal foundation. Our proposal is to collect donations and inheritances so we can access land that we can cede to transformative projects, and at the same time act as a legal umbrella that can hold community projects in ownership and make sure their principles are upheld.
We have established a set of criteria to evaluate possible steward projects, taking into account both the Foundation’s principles and values and the material and human viability of the project. Similarly, we have also set criteria to evaluate potential land, with a strong focus on resilience and Emprius’s deployment strategy. This deployment strategy has been refined and will continue to be developed by understanding the Foundation as a tool serving the rural world, and therefore will be shared and reviewed with leading collectives in this field.
To clarify what stewardship transfers would involve, we share with you several ways this can be done.
Classic purchase and transfer
It consists, on the one hand, of finding and acquiring land that seems strategic to us, negotiating its purchase with the owner and opening a public call to find collectives and/or entities that want to manage it. We will use criteria questionnaires and qualitative interviews to determine who receives the stewardship.
Legal ownership of the land will belong to the Foundation and will be transferred to the project with no end date, as long as the proposed principles are maintained and align with Emprius principles. The Foundation will monitor these stewardships to ensure this is the case.
Supporting and accompanying projects
Support for existing groups and projects in the process of negotiating a purchase. The Foundation can act as intermediary and be the one who acquires the land, but the capital or part of it is provided by the projects themselves.
Donations from active rural projects
We foresee—because some founding members have expressed interest—that there may also be the possibility that existing rural community projects might want to donate their land to the Foundation to ensure that it continues to host a transformative project that transcends the current members of the project. This way, once the project’s own loan is repaid, it could keep paying contributions to the Foundation, which works to strengthen and scale the model.
Productive land
We still need to define what to do if we receive productive land as an inheritance or donation that doesn’t allow for communal projects but where we see keeping it in cultivation as transformative.
Fostering and spreading communalist culture
We champion community and communal management as a transformative way of caring for the land around us, one that lets us move towards a fairer and more redistributive degrowth. We accompany communities in their collective-building process and want to research and spread communal principles.
We also want to influence public administration so that laws and support schemes can be adapted to more community-based realities and to more collective forms of tenure and management of rural assets.
Shared tools
Beyond land, we also acquire infrastructure that can be useful for the rural and communal model we want to promote and that can help grow and strengthen the communities participating in Emprius. Some examples of tools we’re considering are: mobile sawmill, wood chipper, Yeomans subsoiler…
Our proposal is that each shared tool is managed by a community or project within Emprius’s grassroots base and is offered at a territorial scope that makes sense for any transformative project that might need it. The terms of the transfer will be defined for each tool.