By raising capital to finance community controlled assets we will increase our regional capacity to invest in existing, scalable BIPOC small businesses and secure permanently affordable real estate. Through establishing this infrastructure, we will be able to facilitate BIPOC and allied communities cooperatively organizing to finance, purchase, and steward community owned properties.
This will enable us to disrupt the rapid racialized displacement in Athens, GA and surrounding counties and anchor BIPOC communities in the NEGA region through development of community-controlled assets aimed at improving their overall quality of life. We intend to center our development strategy around low-cost land acquisition for our developments.
Housing justice is central to the larger struggle for liberation and sustainability for BIPOC 2SLBQTIA+ communities. Access to safe, affordable, and quality housing stabilizes our communities through building the strength in our numbers.
Our proposed work intends to slow the dilution of our power and create infrastructure that facilitates collective purchase, ownership, and governance of planned developments in our community that actually meet our specific needs. Additionally, we are carving out a pathway for our community to empower itself through cooperative economics.
This is an opportunity to reject individualism and build community resilience in the face of forces trying to keep us poor, sick, and suffering. Our work aims to enable self-determination through solidarity.
One primary reason why many charitable interventions fail to liberate our communities is the fact that they are not led by those most directly impacted by the issues they are attempting to solve. BIPOC 2SLBQTIA+ folks are uniquely positioned to propose and implement solutions that increase housing access & eliminate homelessness. Our work has the potential to be a critical component of BIPOC 2SLBQTIA+ resistance especially emerging out of the South.
Reclaiming this space, refusing to be pushed out… all of this gets us closer to the world we want to create. We intend for our project to give folks a taste of what’s possible and go on to seed freedom dreams across the Northeast GA region.
