The Center for Community Land Trust Innovation was established in 2018 to promote and to support community land trusts (CLTs) and community-led development on community-owned land throughout the world. The Center:
- Collects and curates historical materials documenting the origins and evolution of the worldwide CLT movement;
- Conducts, catalogs, and disseminates academic and non-academic research;
- Produces case studies, directories, guides, and other educational materials;
- Provides training, referral, and technical assistance for organizers and practitioners working with CLTs and similar strategies for the equitable and sustainable development of place-based communities; and
- Publishes books and monographs under its imprint: Terra Nostra Press.
The Center for Community Land Trust Innovation is an outgrowth of Roots & Branches, an online archive launched in 2014 to track the origins and evolution of community land trusts in the United States. John Emmeus Davis, Editor-in-Chief of the Center’s Terra Nostra Press, was first introduced to the community land trust as a solution to the problems of land tenure by Equity Trust’s founder Chuck Matthei and worked with Chuck at the Institute for Community Economics developing the model into a movement.