The Southeastern Connecticut Community Land Trust (SE CT CLT) is establishing itself as a serious and creative land steward in New London County. In 2023 we approved two Fund for Land Equity loans to finance SE CT CLT property acquisitions expanding the organization's portfolio. Current Borrowers
Southeast Connecticut Community Land Trust expands its work
The Southeastern Connecticut Community Land Trust (SE CT CLT) is establishing itself as a serious and creative land steward in New London County. In 2023 we approved two Fund for Land Equity loans to finance SE CT CLT property acquisitions expanding the organization's portfolio. Kinfolk Land Collective
Mindful that the goal of affordable access to land is easier to achieve in communities that already enjoy privilege and generational wealth, Equity Trust has been stretching to prioritize and expand support for the efforts of communities with less or no privilege or wealth to acquire and share in the benefits of land ownership. Our patient outreach bore fruit in …
Black Family Land Trust
The Black Family Land Trust is a North Carolina-based conservation organization that works to stem and reverse historical land loss among African American families and minority farmers, mostly in the Southeast U.S. We have made nine loans since 2017 to people involved in one or another of their programs, providing operating capital and/or bridge financing to small farmers awaiting USDA …
Saint Francis House
Saint Francis House (SFH) is an intentional community in New London, CT with a social justice mission focused on southeastern Connecticut. It was our original partner in the Francis Fund and has helped incubate numerous grassroots organizations including the Southeastern Connecticut CLT, our current partner in the renamed Southeastern Connecticut Fund for Land Equity. This loan helps finance deferred …
Assisi Community
Assisi Community is a faith-based intentional community in Washington, D.C. with a social justice/peace and nonviolence mission. It was the borrower of the Equity Trust Fund’s very first loan in 1992, used to purchase one of the two houses its members live in (the purchase of the other house in 2000 was also aided by an Equity Trust loan). In …
Benincasa Community
Benincasa Community is a Catholic Worker-style intentional community formerly based in and primarily serving underprivileged people in New York City. Members have an extensive network of supporters and close relationships with a wide variety of activist organizations. This loan finances the purchase of property near New Haven, CT where the community will be able to grow food for itself and …
Smith Hill CDC
Smith Hill CDC is a community development corporation focusing on affordable housing and community services in a multiracial/multiethnic neighborhood adjacent to the state capitol building in Providence, Rhode Island. They have completed numerous projects offering both rental and homeownership opportunities for low- and moderate-income families and individuals, primarily by redeveloping blighted buildings and lots. Two current projects involve the conversion …
Nutwood Farm
Nutwood Farm is a regenerative agroforestry farm cultivating a wide variety of edible perennial nuts – primarily hazelnuts and chestnuts but also including walnuts, pecans, butternuts, and heartnuts – for local distribution in Western Massachusetts. As the state’s first small-scale nut farm, it is “in the forefront of young innovative farms shaping the future of community-based, ecologically sound, regenerative food …
Natural Borders Farm
Natural Borders Farm is a grass-fed beef and lamb farm in central New York run by Elva Svendsen. Inspired by our work with Caretaker Farm in Western Massachusetts, she is seeking to permanently protect her land as an affordable working farm using Equity Trust’s model. Our loan refinanced her bank mortgage, freeing up some cash to invest in farm infrastructure …
Koinonia Farm
Koinonia Farm, an intentional community founded in rural Georgia in the 1940s, was a pioneer in the property stewardship movement out of which Equity Trust itself eventually emerged, and it is still going strong more than seventy-five years later. Membersemphasize simple living, racial equality, nonviolent resistance, the sharing of resources, and cooperative work.
It became a flashpoint in the …
Berkshire Co-op Market
The Berkshire Co-op Market is a thriving forty-year-old consumer-owned grocery store in western Massachusetts. In 2018, we joined a coalition of community lenders led by Cooperative Fund of New England and including PVGrows, Common Capital, Franklin County CDC, Coastal Enterprises, Inc. to pool funds and finance the construction and outfitting of their new facility. Berkshire Co-op member-owners also provided …
Hart’s Mill Ecovillage and Farm
Hart’s Mill Ecovillage and Farm is a planned intentional community in North Carolina that “embodies a world in which people live in justice and harmony with each other and the land.” It will utilize a limited-equity ownership model to preserve the long-term affordability of its homes and provide a farmer an affordable shared-equity ground lease on part of the property. …
Echo Farm
Echo Farm is an organic farm with an unusual niche operating on former dairy land in Essex, New York now protected by a conservation easement held by the Open Space Institute. Doing business as Farmstead Catering, it bills itself as “a CSA for your wedding day,” offering farm-to-table catering for celebrations set in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. …
Equity Trust Completes Sale of Former Office
Over twenty years ago, a group of residents in a small brick building in downtown Turners Falls, Massachusetts contacted Equity Trust (then located in Voluntown, Connecticut) for help. The building, home to two families and the Brick House, a community resource center, was on the market, and the residents were concerned that it would be sold to an investor with …
Making a Dairy Farm Affordable in NY
Dean Zapp, a third generation dairy farmer, and his wife Michele, wanted to protect the property where they operate Delapenta Farms — 83½ acres in Ancram, NY, in the central part of the Town of Taghkanic, in Columbia County — by adding conservation and affordability restrictions to their land, and to use proceeds from the sale of those restrictions to …
Tryon Life Community Farm and Cedar Moon
A new loan made in 2015 not only enables an evolution in a property ownership arrangement originally designed in part by Equity Trust, but also represents an innovation in our lending practice that could become a model for future projects. With the participation of project supporters recruited by the borrowers, Tryon Life Community Farm and the Cedar Moon collective, we …
Woodland Community Land Trust
The Woodland Community Land Trust operates in an impoverished Appalachian community in northeastern Tennessee, where access to land and political and economic power has been tightly controlled by a few major extractive companies. For almost forty years, Woodland and its sister organizations, Woodland Community Development Corporation and Clearfork Community Institute, have acquired 450 acres of land and become involved in …
Three Springs Community
Three Springs is a twenty-five-year-old intentional community near the geographic center of California. It holds about 160 acres of land in common “to promote and demonstrate ecologically sustainable living and agricultural practices” and “to protect the unique flora and fauna of the Sierra Nevada foothills.” Members grow flowers and native plants to sell at farmers markets and to local restaurants; …
New London Homeless Hospitality Center
The New London (Connecticut) Homeless Hospitality Center (NLHHC) is a non-profit human services agency whose mission is “to serve as a bridge out of homelessness by helping our guests pursue their self-selected path to permanent housing.”
Begun as a coalition of citizens, faith communities, and service organizations, the Homeless Hospitality Center has operated a daytime hospitality center and overnight shelter since 2007, and also offers employment and health care assistance. Riverland Farm
Riverland Farm is a certified organic vegetable farm in Sunderland, Massachusetts growing for CSA member families, local grocery stores, and local producers of value-added products. Equity Trust’s first Riverland-associated loan was used by the property owners to renovate their tobacco barn to create farm office space and a vegetable washing, packing, and storage facility, enabling them to wash and store …
Jubilee House Community
Jubilee House Community (JHC) is a non-sectarian faith based community that has that has been working in Nicaragua since 1994 through their nonprofit Center for Development in Central America. JHC has helped organize 1,600 small farmers into a cooperative business to market their organic crops, strengthening existing agricultural cooperatives and developing new ones. 
