We’re re-defining how business is done, how real estate is developed, and how community is built.
Community wealth building strategies increase asset ownership, anchor jobs locally and ensure local economic resilience.
We take a systems approach to creating sustainable communities by addressing the root causes of economic inequality.
At The Guild we wrestle with meaningful questions with a shared sense of purpose and trust. We recognize and uplift each other’s agency and strengths and leverage that into collaborative impact and joy. We are a driven, effective, and compassionate team that addresses entrenched and systemic issues impacting black and other communities of color, and poor and working class communities, in order to transform real estate into a pathway for stabilization and self-determination.
What we do
Development
We build 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 that we are exploring 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.