This workshop explores how The Guild builds community-owned land, housing, and real estate models that advance self-determination for Black and working-class communities. Founder Nikishka Iyengar highlights the strategies, challenges, and lessons behind creating shared equity and community-controlled spaces that foster long-term stability and economic justice.

Peek behind the scenes of what it takes to do this work during an Instagram Live session.

As Atlanta's Black communities are rapidly displaced and destabilized due to gentrification and systemic racism, cooperative economics and collective ownership of assets present an antidote and viable alternative to the status quo. Join The Guild as we talk with Kiyomi Rollins (The Kenekt), Nedra Deadwyler (Civil Bikes) and Kamau Franklin (Community Movement Builders) about their ongoing work towards fostering community ownership of housing, commercial real estate, and cultural spaces.

With rapid gentrification and displacement happening in Black communities in Atlanta and other communities of color, it's easy to feel ungrounded as development happens to and around us, but not really for or with us. What does community ownership of land and housing mean? How can neighborhoods and everyday people build agency, power and resilience where we are, for ourselves?

In this session, Zach Murray and Avery Ebron of The Guild discuss the the basics of how community owned housing models are financed and what "community wealth" really means building, maintaining and stewarding sustainably affordable neighborhoods.