We are a driven, effective, and compassionate team that addresses entrenched economic injustice issues impacting Black and other communities of color, and poor and working class communities.
Our History
In 2015, we started out by being Atlanta’s first co-living company, creating spaces for “changemakers” — social entrepreneurs, artists, and community organizers — to live, work, gather and thrive. In addition to providing live/work spaces, our program targeted their venture and personal development. Our workshops and trainings covered everything from advanced business basics, to personal finance coaching, and even things like mindful meditation, to provide holistic support.
Since then, we’ve evolved and grown, when it became clear that these changemakers were at the threat of being displaced due to gentrification. Our city is grappling with both residential and commercial gentrification, with legacy residents and businesses both at the frontline of displacement. This kind of development only serves to widen the already existing racial wealth gap. Instead, we take a community-centered approach to development. Our upcoming deals are focused on creating a pathway for community ownership.
We’re a worker-owned cooperative
As we sought to build community-owned models for real estate, it was equally important for us to live into those democratic values within our company.
When each worker (member) shares in the ownership, where there is democratic participation in decision-making, and when we move in solidarity as workers in navigating the highs and lows of operating the business, there is a greater sense of unity, ownership and commitment. Investing the time and energy to achieve consensus on critical or urgent decisions, adapting the way we communicate and practice accountability as a collective, and overcoming our reflexes from traditional, hierarchical workplace structures are just a few of the ways we continue to grow and evolve.
We understand that to partner well with and support communities in their journey to shared ownership and collective governance of local assets, it’s important for us to live into those same values at an organizational level too
Development
We build and manage affordable mixed-use spaces for long-term residents, entrepreneurs, artists and activists. We also partner with other community-based developers and offer technical assistance and consulting services to develop projects through a community wealth-building lens.
Ecosystem Organizing
We partner with other community-based organizations to transform the economic and political landscape, with the goal of building ‘solidarity economies’ with justice and equity-centered institutions.
Integrated Capital Fund
Our fund, called Groundcover, uses non-extractive capital to invest in scaling up cooperative models that create a pathway for ownership for Black and other communities of color.
Entrepreneurship & Real Estate Programming
Our programs support entrepreneurs of color looking to build sustainable wealth for their communities via structures like worker-owned cooperatives. We also work to help entrepreneurs acquire commercial real estate, with a focus on helping Black-owned businesses retain ownership in gentrifying neighborhoods.
Community Ownership
We create community-owned real estate models. Features include permanent affordability of housing, resident control, collective decision-making, and taking housing off the speculative market.
Our community ownership models
We believe in a future rooted in democratic collectivism and the holistic wellbeing of Black and Brown communities. In these thriving neighborhoods, residents can depend on each other, foster genuine relationships, and feel safe and secure. To build toward this world, The Guild develops and trains residents on community-owned real estate models that allow marginalized communities to collectively govern their neighborhoods as a pathway to building local power and self-determination. We believe that housing should be a human right, and not something to be bought and sold for the highest price, only enriching those with access to capital. In this way, community wealth remains where it belongs — circulated within communities rather than concentrated in the hands of a few investors.
To create a future where neighborhood residents can enjoy their communities without fear of displacement, The Guild develops residential and commercial real estate projects that are owned by the working-class Black and Brown residents of the communities where they are located. Two models we use to meet this goal are our Community Stewardship Trust (CST) and The People’s Land Trust (PCLT).
Our fund to scale community ownership
The extractive real estate industry has been at the heart of nearly every injustice and inequity impacting our communities — from gentrification and food apartheid to the defunding of public education and funding of the carceral system. But here at The Guild, we know a people-centered framework is possible and part of an emerging movement across the country. In an ecosystem, groundcover is the layer of vegetation that protects the topsoil from erosion and drought.
Across the country, communities of color act as rich groundcover — bolstering local economies through small businesses, adding cultural vibrancy, and strengthening democracy by organizing for racial justice and equity. Yet, due to gentrification, and systemic racism overall, this rich groundcover is eroding. Black communities, and other communities of color continue to be disproportionately displaced and economically marginalized. At the heart of these compounding, capitalism-fueled crises, is the issue of prioritizing profits over people.
In order to repair and restore this rich groundcover, we believe it is necessary to invest in alternative development models that prevent community erosion and build community wealth.
