Resources

Resource Hub

Affordable Housing & City Transformation Resources

The Junction Village Community Land Trust strives to transform our communities and city for the better, creating more affordable housing and diverse housing types and living options that will benefit all residents. Here you can find resources related to creating affordable, sustainable housing solutions, and for designing more liveable neighbourhoods and cities that allow for more community connection and flourishing. Some of these resources include policies and projects endorsed by the JVCLT.

The Alliance for a Liveable Ontario
Endorsed by the JVCLT

The Alliance advocates for policy changes that will help improve Ontario communities and environments, making the province more liveable for all. Take a look at their advocacy resources, and the Five Ways Home project. Join the Alliance today, and support the work of making our province more affordable, sustainable, and equitable for all.

Five Ways Home Campaign
The Alliance for a Liveable Ontario Project
Endorsed by the JVCLT

The Alliance for a Liveable Ontario's Five Ways Home Campaign has identified five action areas that best explain what needs to happen to solve the province's housing crisis. These are to: 1) Build in the right places; 2) Build a wide variety of housing types; 3) Build smarter and faster; 4) Invest heavily in non-market, affordable housing; and 5) Make housing affordable and part of liveable communities. You can download the full report here, or informational flyers here.

Strong Towns
Endorsed by the JVCLT

Strong Towns is a media advocacy nonprofit that supports people and communities across the US and Canada advocating for a radically new way of thinking about how we build our world. One of their priority campaigns is to support incremental housing policy changes, allowing for more affordable housing development over time. Visit their Action Lab for resources, check out the Strong Towns podcasts, or see the Local Conversations to connect with advocates in your community, like the Strong Towns Guelph group. You can also read their article "Organizing and the Community Land Trust Model" here.

Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to Housing Crisis
By Charles L. Marohn, Jr. & Daniel Herriges

This book explores how America's housing market is stuck in a financial trap: by putting housing at the core of the economic system, housing is treated as an investment, meaning prices must continue to rise. This in turn causes distress for residents, as housing is also shelter and a fundamental need for all. Housing can't be both a good investment and broadly affordable—insisting on both is the trap. However, we can escape this trap if we rethink our approach to housing. The book provides a fascinating history of the financialization of housing, and promotes the Strong Towns' approach of incremental development and local organizing to address the housing crisis. You can also watch this webinar on Escaping the Housing Trap by Charles Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns.

Reclaim: Community-Led Housing
Funding Partner of the JVCLT

Reclaim empowers communities to solve housing issues through knowledge-sharing, collaboration and reciprocity. Check out the Affordable Housing+ Solutions Lab, and the Community-led Development Workshop Guide, which is a part of Reclaim's Community-Led Housing Toolkit (available to partners).

Guelph Affordable Housing Strategy

The City of Guelph has developed an Affordable Housing Strategy. The strategy builds on the work of the City’s Official Plan and the 10-year Housing and Homelessness Plan led by Wellington County as the Service Manager for social housing and homelessness programs. You can also see the Project Initiation Presentation here, and a 2023 report on the state of housing in Guelph here.

One Bowl

One Bowl is a First Nations governed social enterprise focused on building culturally appropriate housing solutions with First Nations. They work collaboratively to create high-quality, sustainable and energy efficient housing solutions including Boréal Homes and modular builds that are both beautiful and affordable.

8 80 Cities

8 80 Cities is guided by the idea that if everything we do in our cities is great for an 8 year old and an 80 year old, then it will be better for everyone. They strive to ignite action and challenge the status quo to create healthier, more equitable, and sustainable cities for all people. Check out some of their stories and insights, and their resource hub.

ACORN Canada

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) Canada is a multi-issue, membership-based community union of low- and moderate-income people. They believe that social and economic justice can best be achieved by building community power for change. ACORN members advocate for policy changes in order to make housing a right for all, rather than a wealth investment. Check out updates and resources from the Ontario chapter here, and resources for advocacy and organizing here.

Community Land Trust Resources

Below are a number of helpful resources relating to community land trusts (CLTs) in Canada and beyond. This includes educational resources for those new to learning about CLTs, as well as resources for building CLTs, and exploring some of the complexities of growing and managing CLTs.

Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts
Funding Partner of the JVCLT

The Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts (CNCLT) is the convening place for CLTs across Canada. They strive to support the growth of CLTs with the primary purpose of acquiring, developing, and/or stewarding permanently affordable housing, land, and other assets that contribute to a thriving community. The CNCLT has numerous helpful resources about CLTs, including FAQs and their CLT 101 presentation. You can also check out their podcast, The CLT Files, which explores some of the various issues facing CLTs in Canada and beyond.

Grounded Solutions Network

The Grounded Solutions Network strives to build and preserve communities where everyone can live and thrive. The Network has helpful information about CLTs, including a Startup CLT Hub and a Resource Library.

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Could Land Trusts Help Solve Ontario's Housing-Affordability Crisis?
TVO Today Article

There are already over 13 CLTs in Ontario. Read about some of their successes and their potential for addressing the province's affordable housing crisis in this article by Kelsey Rolfe. The article highlights the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust in Toronto, as well as other CLTs in Ontario. like the Muskoka Community Land Trust and the Union Sustainable Development Co-operative in Waterloo.

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Are Land Trusts the Future of Canadian Housing?
The Globe and Mail Article

This article by Frances Bula explores CLTs in Vancouver and elsewhere in Canada, considering what they could mean for the future of Canadian housing. There are over 40 CLTs in Canada currently, and that number is continually rising. The article focuses on Vancouver's False Creek South Neighbourhood Association's efforts to start a CLT, and considers the widespread positive impact CLTs can have across Canada for addressing affordable housing issues everywhere.

Making the First Acquisition
Case Study of the Ottawa Community Land Trust

As part of the series “Supporting Affordable Housing Acquisitions”, the CNCLT has shared the story of how the Ottawa Community Land Trust was able to acquire their first building. You can also find more case studies and other relevant information here.

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Scaling the Community-Based CLT
Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust Case Study

This case study by the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (NLT) demonstrates how to scale a sustainable CLT model encompassing land acquisition, development, asset management, community governance and operation of permanently affordable housing. It documents and disseminates the invaluable insights gleaned from NLT’s scaling journey, aiming to inform the work of other CLTs and stakeholders.

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Putting the Community Back into Community Land Trusts: Community Control, Collective Ownership, and a Return to Radical Roots
Chapter in Handbook of Critical Perspectives on Nonprofit Organizing and Voluntary Action

This chapter by Jennifer Sumner and Graham Hughes explores the roots of CLTs in the Civil Rights Movement, comparing this history to how the primary role of CLTs today has become to provide affordable housing. It considers this trend in the CLT movement within the context of neoliberalism and colonization, and the prospect of recolonization through mission drift. It argues for a return to the movement’s roots in community control and collective ownership and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

Land Stewardship & Bioregional Resources

Here you can find resources relating to land stewardship, as well as for bioregional regeneration. Bioregionalism is a place-based way of thinking and living rooted in organizing human societies based on the natural terrain and ecological boundaries of a region, rather than national or political boarders. To regenerate the Earth, we must live in ways that respect local environments, cultures, and economies, while fostering deeper connections with the Land.

The BioFi Project
Endorsed by the JVCLT

The Bioregional Finance for Planetary Regeneration project supports bioregions to transition to regenerative economies. They aim to ensure financial resources flow to the many small groups all over the world working towards planetary and community regeneration. You can sign up for the BioFi Community of Practice on Hylo here to learn from experts and connect with like-minded people striving to connect the flows of capital to the flows of life.

Design School for Regenerating Earth
Endorsed by the JVCLT

The Design School is helping people live into the story of Bioregional Earth by regenerating their bioregions and building a planetary network of learning exchanges. Members are organizing together on the ground in bioregions while simultaneously building a growing online learning community, which you can join here. By joining, you'll also be able to participate in the upcoming Learning Journey (starting in March), How to Organize Your Bioregion.

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The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth
By Joe Brewer

This book by Joe Brewer (co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth) present a clear-eyed understanding of the severity of the predicament we're in and demonstrates how it is possible to regenerate the entire Earth. Combining the best scientific knowledge about human behaviour, cultural evolution, and the dynamic Earth with looking to millennia of Indigenous wisdom; a path towards better futures can be taken.The book offers a clear and cogent pathway for more sustainable bioregions and cultures we can all create together.

7-Generation GTB (Greater Tkaronto Bioregion)
Legacy Project

In a time of unravelling and uncertainty, 7-Generation GTB (Greater Tkaronto Bioregion, aka Greater Toronto Region) is about social regeneration (generations in community) and ecological regeneration (community in bioregion). This project follows on the legacy of David Crombie's 1992 Regeneration report and is connected with the Design School for Regenerating Earth to live into the powerful story of a Bioregional Earth. We are currently in a polycrisis, where multiple planetary boundaries have already been crossed, and issues of climate change and environmental degradation are converging with political, social, and health crises in unprecedented ways. This community of organizers, activists, and regenerative land stewards are working to address these interconnected crises. If you are in or near the GTB area and interested in this work, see how you can get involved with the 7-Generation GTB project.

Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury: Land is the Key to the Transformation of Society
By George Monbiot (40th Annual E.F. Schumacher Lecture)

This address by George Monbiot raises the seldom-asked yet fundamental question: how is it possible to own land? Why is it that so many pressing issues, like the collapse of ecosystems and biodiversity loss, the exclusion and marginalization of so many people, and the housing crisis, are rooted in our current systems of land ownership—and yet we don't question these systems themselves? Why is it that land ownership is seen as a kind of right for those with enough wealth, and yet housing is not generally seen as a right for all? Watch the lecture recording, or read the essay here.

Sociocracy Resources

At the Junction Village Community Land Trust, we use sociocracy as our model of governance—a structure that emphasizes equality and collaborative decision-making. It uses consent-based decision-making and feedback loops to ensure all voices are heard and decisions reflect the needs of the group. Here you can find resources for learning about and implementing sociocracy, as well as for other related organizational resources, such as for Nonviolent Communication.

Sociocracy for All

Sociocracy for All is an organization that educates people and organizations about sociocracy, and offers sociocracy training and consulting. Their website includes numerous helpful resources explaining sociocratic structures and processes, such as consent decision-making, sociocracy circles, circle roles, and a guide for the process of creating new circles.

What is Sociocracy?
Introductory Video by Sociocracy for All

This 20 minute animated video provides an overview of the basics of what sociocracy is, and how it can benefit communities and organizations. It outlines sociocratic decision-making, which is based on consent, and also non-hierarchical—instead of top-down decision-making, authority is distributed across semi-autonomous and interlinking teams, called circles. The video also explains how sociocratic circles operate, including how information flows between them and throughout the whole organization.

Sociocracy Primer
E-Learning Course by Ted Rau & Sociocracy for All

In this series of videos, Ted Rau walks viewers through some of the basics of sociocracy, breaking some of its complexities down into easy to understand lessons. The full program takes around 75 minutes, and can be returned to at any time.

Take Course

Collective Power: Patterns for a Self-Organized Future
By Ted Rau

Whether team leading, managing, or engaging, this book by Ted Rau empowers changemakers, overcoming fragmentation for purposeful synergy. It helps groups unite against polarization, and address global hurdles through purposeful collectivism. Discover a comprehensive roadmap for collective building, focusing on unity, power sharing, and governance for meaningful change. Learn to strike a balance between centralization and decentralization to nurture agency within your collaborations.

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Sociocracy: Thinking Smarter Together
TedX Talk by John Buck

In this Ted Talk, John Buck illustrates the benefits of sociocratic governance, highlighting the widespread success of organizations and communities using sociocracy across the world. He begins by using the metaphor of an octopus to explain how sociocracy works. An octopus has nine brains—one for each arm, and a central brain that acts not as a hierarchical commander, but rather as a facilitator that assists with coordination. Sociocratic organizations function somewhat like an octopus, using a kind of "ninth brain technology" to be able to support each other and collaborate with each other effectively. Everyone in the group contributes to the "ninth brain" or collective intelligence, meaning no voices are left out, and the group is better able to achieve its aims.

The Center for Nonviolent Communication

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a communication approach that focuses on fostering empathy, understanding, and connection by emphasizing the expression of feelings and needs without blame or judgment. The Center for Nonviolent Communication is an international nonprofit peacemaking organization who believe that everyone’s needs matter and dialogue can resolve differences peacefully. They support learners, trainers, and change agents around the world to create create an environment where everyone's needs can be met peacefully. Check out their YouTube channel, or read some of the research on the effectiveness of NVC.

Community & Social Change Resources

The Junction Village Community Land Trust is about more than just building houses—rather, our mission is also to foster connected, resilient, and thriving communities. This includes advocating for and working towards necessary social and political change within our local communities, municipality, province, bioregion, and country. Here you will find some helpful resources for not only improving how we live in community with one another, but also for transforming how we think about community, society, and the Land on which we live. These resources include some texts that have been especially influential to the JVCLT vision and members.

Ontario Nonprofit Network

Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN) is the independent network for Ontario’s 58,000+ nonprofit organizations. They engage with members to address issues related to housing, economic policy, climate action, and more, to ensure the voices of our communities reach governments, funders, and other stakeholders. Check out their resources related to advocacy for an Ontario Housing Acquisition Fund, or read about how nonprofits are essential to the thriving of democracy.

Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice
At the University of Guelph
Partner of the JVCLT

The Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice is an arts methodology research hub at the University of Guelph that assists researchers and organizations in creating engaging digital media projects that harness the power of storytelling to explore complex issues and contribute to positive societal changes. The JVCLT has partnered with Re•Vision to collaborate on creating a series of digital storytelling projects that will explore some of the complexities of community building and place-based belonging that impact the Junction Village Guelph, the CLT, and Guelph more generally. These stories will be made available for viewing soon, and you can explore some other Re•Vision projects here.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
By Robin Wall Kimmerer

This book by Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer presents a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world. The book (and the essay that was a precursor to it) explores the ethic or reciprocity at the heart of the gift economy, showing that we can learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to change how we interact with one another. While our capitalist economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and hoarding of resources, the gift economy shows how abundance can be generated within and flow throughout the community. This text and other Kimmerer works have been highly influential to the JVCLT and our vision for nurturing connected, reciprocal, and resilient communities.

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
By Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

This powerful book is not an easy read—it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, it presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behaviour patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of. Modernity is driven by expansion, colonialism, resource extraction, neoliberalism and rabid consumption—leaving us with a world that is profoundly out of balance. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability? This text has been especially helpful for us as we've reflected on the potential of the JVCLT for bringing about necessary social change in our communities. Two of our members recently gave a talk on Hospicing Modernity and the JVCLT at the Unitarian Congregation of Guelph, which you can watch here.

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is an arts/research collective that uses their website as a workspace for collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures. GTDF is also a practice of embracing care and integrity in facing the death of old worlds and the birth of new possibilities, while confronting complicity in violence, unsustainability, and modern-colonial habits. It involves holding space for difficult conversations, and learning to unlearn, detach, and show up responsibly for the collective healing and transformation of both self and world. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (aka Vanessa Andreotti) is one of the founders of GTDF (author of Hospicing Modernity).

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
By Kristen Ghodsee

This book provides a tour through 2,000 years of utopian thinking and experiments, exploring better ways to arrange our daily lives and live together in community. For centuries, humans have been dreaming up better ways to organize how we live together, share our property, raise our children, and determine who’s part of our families. Some of these experiments burned brightly for only a brief while—but others carry on today. The book offers a radically hopeful vision for how to build more contented and connected societies, alongside a practical guide to what we all can do in the meantime to live the good life each and every day.

I Want Community – But Am I Prepared to Put the Work in?
The Guardian Article

Community is billed as the cure-all for isolation, ageing and even climate change. Are we prepared to put the work in? This article by Elle Hunt explores some of the benefits and challenges of living in community. Community can be an antidote to isolation and a means of addressing many societal issues today, but it also requires effort to maintain good relationships. Is it worth it? We think so.

Economy: Regenerative Economics & Degrowth/Postgrowth Resources

Our vision for the Junction Village Community Land Trust takes guidance from regenerative economics, which involves taking a whole systems approach to economics and the environment, and aims to have a positive impact for all human and nonhuman life. Regenerative economics and the related goal of a circular economy moves away from capitalistic and neo-liberal models that prioritize exponential growth and harmful resource extraction over environmental wellbeing to instead support long-term environmental flourishing and social equity. Below are some resources related to regenerative economics and degrowth/postgrowth.

BioFi Project
Endorsed by the JVCLT

8 Principles for a Regenerative Economy
Introduction to Regenerative Economics by the Capital Institute with John Fullerton

This article outlines the eight core principles of regenerative economics, based on the understanding that regeneration is the process that delivers sustainable living systems as the outcome of that process. It looks to nature and living systems as a model for building stable, healthy, and sustainable economic systems rooted in our capacity for regeneration. You can also watch the video introducing regenerative economics here, and an overview of the eight principles here.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
By Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry by Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer presents a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world. The book (and the essay that was a precursor to it) explores the ethic or reciprocity at the heart of the gift economy, showing that we can learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to change how we interact with one another. While our capitalist economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and hoarding of resources, the gift economy shows how abundance can be generated within and flow throughout the community. This text and other Kimmerer works have been highly influential to the JVCLT and our vision for nurturing connected, reciprocal, and resilient communities.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
By Tim Jackson

Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson presents a challenge to conventional economics by openly questioned the most highly prized goal of politicians and economists alike: the continued pursuit of exponential economic growth. Jackson demonstrates that building a ‘postgrowth’ economy is a precise, definable and meaningful task. Starting from clear first principles, he sets out the dimensions of that task: the nature of enterprise; the quality of our working lives; the structure of investment; and the role of the money supply. He shows how the economy of tomorrow may be transformed in ways that protect employment, facilitate social investment, reduce inequality and deliver both ecological and financial stability.

How Degrowth Can Save the World
Video by Andrewism

This video by Andrewism (Andrew Sage) considers how capitalism is based on the destructive logic of perpetual expansion, devastating the living world. In the face of ecological breakdown, we need to restore the balance. We need to end the artificial divide between society, economy, and nature. We need degrowth. Andrew Sage is an writer, artist, YouTuber and activist who has dedicated his efforts to invigorating imaginations and encouraging people to create a better world in the shell of the old.

Post-Growth Entrepreneurship
TedX Talk by Melanie Rieback

In this Ted Talk, Melanie Rieback discusses a different way of approaching business that is not based on economic models of exponential growth, but rather embraces "post-growth entrepreneurship." She argues that forms of social entrepreneurship rooted in capitalistic systems may not be the best path for truly solving social issues, as a focus on profits can inhibit long-term positive impact. Instead, Rieback helped create the first post-growth incubator for nonprofits and startups, which reframes business as a form of activism, art, spirituality, and creative expression. This business model embraces flat growth curves and rejects the need for investors, scaling, and exits. Watch the video or check out these additional resources to learn more.