Upcoming events
Community self-reliance school | Baltimore
What if you had the tools to not just imagine a better world, but to actually start building it right now? What if the dream you have for your community is the seed of transformation needed to foster real and lasting change? All over the world, people are refusing to wait for governments, corporations, or fragile economies to help them meet their needs. Instead, they’re creating their own stability in the face of inflation, political turmoil, and constant disruption. How? By building community self-reliance projects that meet real needs without relying on money or the larger economy. Think: thriving urban gardens, timebanks where skills are exchanged instead of dollars, Buy-Nothing groups, and neighborhood swaps. These aren’t quick fixes, but stepping stones toward community thriving, resilience, and sustainability. That’s what Visionary Organizing Lab’s Community Self-Reliance (CSR) School is all about.
Reimagine Land: Creating Community land Trusts
Creating stable communities depends on affordable housing, long term security, and land that is community controlled and well cared for. Meeting these needs means reimagining our relationship to land and housing. Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are one potential way to do this. By owning land collectively, a community or neighborhood gains real and lasting control over how that land is used, keeping decisions about affordability, stability, and care for the land in the hands of the people they affect most.
Under the guidance of Raychel Gadson, this two-hour program will offer a deep dive into CLTs, with the goal of helping you determine if a CLT might be right for reimagining housing and land where you live. You’ll learn about the history of CLTs in the U.S., how they've been built and used, and some of the challenges they face. You’ll also receive additional readings on CLT and resources for forming them.
Imagine the future
The future we want and deserve isn’t something we’ll simply inherit. It is something we have to imagine and create together. When we learn to imagine new possibilities and create visions that help others see what’s possible, we build the imaginative muscle needed to create new worlds that repair ourselves, our relationships, our communities, and nature. In this 3-part workshop, participants will learn how to craft compelling visions for the future, develop their own visions for community repair and collective wellbeing, and examine real world examples to explore what makes a vision capable of inspiring collective action.
Community self-reliance school (jan ‘27)
What if we had the tools, will, and vision needed to solve community problems instead of relying on money, governments, or institutions to fix them? Imagine how it might heal us, our relationships, and the earth. Imagine how it might feel.
The point of Visionary Organizing Lab's Community Self-Reliance (CSR) School is to develop skills and ways of being that allow us to solve community problems by creating self-reliant communities and repairing nature, ourselves, and our relationships. By building community self-reliance projects that meet real needs without relying on money or the larger economy, we can create these communities and grow into them. Think: thriving urban gardens, timebanks where skills are exchanged instead of dollars, Buy-Nothing groups, and neighborhood swaps. These aren't quick fixes, but stepping stones toward community thriving, resilience, sustainability, and an age of repair.
Classes are taught by Matt Birkhold and Angela Kim, and consist of a mixture of large and small group discussion, reflection on our own experiences, case studies of community self-reliance in practice, and imagining new possibilities together.
thrive against the grain: AN virtual workshop on connecting to and trusting our inner wisdom
Behind every neighborhood or community, are countless stories of struggle, resilience, connection, and change. When those stories are not preserved, something essential is lost: not just our sense of the past, but our ability to make sense of the present and imagine what’s possible for the future. Oral history is a powerful practice for preserving the lived experiences, knowledge, and memories that define who we are and illuminate the path forward. In this 2 hour introductory workshop, you will be introduced to the practice of oral history and why it matters. You will learn interview tips and practical tools to build an oral history project from the ground up.