Owning the Ground

Most conversations about nonprofit resilience end up in the same two places: raise more money, or run leaner. We have spent recent issues on both — earned revenue, outcome data, replication, shared infrastructure. This issue is about a vulnerability those conversations rarely name.

You can have a diversified budget, a healthy reserve, and a strong program, and still be one real-estate transaction away from losing everything. The storefront your program operates out of. The lot your community garden sits on. The land under the homes the families you serve own. If someone else owns the ground your mission stands on, your mission is a tenant — and tenants can be priced out, sold out, or told to leave when the lease ends.

The three organizations in this issue did something most nonprofits never consider. They took the ground off the speculative market. Not through a one-time subsidy that helps once and then disappears, but through ownership structures that hold the asset permanently, for the people the mission serves.

Three different assets. Three different ownership structures. One idea: the most durable protection for a mission is owning the ground it stands on.

A portion of what you pay for this subscription goes to Rooted, a Madison-based nonprofit that grows food on community land held for the neighborhoods it feeds — fitting for an issue about owning the ground a mission stands on. Thank you for making it possible.

A Philadelphia Neighborhood Is Becoming Its Own Landlord — And It's About to Let Residents Buy In for $10 a Month

The Kensington Corridor Trust, founded in 2019 in Philadelphia, has spent six years doing something developers usually do for profit and neighborhoods usually experience as displacement: buying up real estate along a single commercial corridor. The difference is who ends up owning it. The Trust now holds a portfolio of more than a dozen properties along Kensington Avenue — many of them previously vacant storefronts — and it controls them not to flip them, but to keep them in community hands permanently.

The commercial spaces rent to local businesses at roughly 25% below market: a hair-braiding studio, a candlemaker, a food pantry, a tax office, a church, an after-school cooking program. The residential units above them are affordable to households earning between 25% and 50% of the area median income. None of it is for sale to the next investor who wants to ride the neighborhood's rising values.

Here is the part worth a careful read. In 2026, the Trust is launching a Community Stewardship Trust — a model created and incubated by The Guild, an Atlanta nonprofit that has been building community ownership of local wealth-building assets since 2015. The Stewardship Trust lets local residents invest in shares of the corridor's real estate for as little as ten dollars a month, and begins paying dividends to resident-investors in 2026. The people who live in the neighborhood get to own a piece of the upside that, in almost every other gentrifying corridor in America, flows entirely to outside capital.

Why this matters now. The standard story of a "recovering" neighborhood is brutally familiar. Vacant storefronts get cheap. Investors buy. Values rise. Rents follow. The businesses and families who held the block together through the hard years get priced out right as the block becomes desirable. The displacement is not a glitch in the system — it is the system working as designed, because the people who own the ground are not the people who live on it.

The Kensington Corridor Trust inverts the ownership. Once a property is inside the Trust, it is off the speculative market for good. The Trust can hold commercial rents below market because it is not answering to investors who need the rent to climb. And the Stewardship Trust means the financial return that would normally leave the neighborhood stays inside it.

Here is what makes this replicable. Three structural elements. First, the Trust concentrates on a defined geography — one corridor — rather than scattering across a city, which means each acquisition strengthens the ones around it and the community-control effect compounds block by block. Second, it separates the two things a building does: it generates rent, and it builds wealth. The Trust keeps rents affordable and routes the wealth-building to residents through the Stewardship Trust rather than to absentee owners. Third, the ten-dollar entry point is deliberate. A model that only lets accredited investors buy in would re-create the wealth gap it is trying to close; a model anyone can join keeps ownership where the mission wants it.

First steps if your nonprofit works in community or economic development. Identify the single block, corridor, or building whose loss to speculation would most damage the community you serve. Then call Grounded Solutions Network, which provides technical assistance on community-ownership real-estate structures, and look at The Guild's Community Stewardship Trust model to understand how resident investment can be structured legally and affordably. You do not have to start with a corridor. One building, taken permanently off the market, is a working proof of concept.

If your nonprofit is not in real estate at all, the transferable insight is about who captures the upside when a neighborhood improves. Most community-improvement work raises property values and then watches the benefit leave with the next sale. Ask whether there is a structure that would let the people you serve own a piece of the value they are helping create.

Sources: Kensington Corridor Trust; Philadelphia Magazine — "To Stave Off Gentrification, Kensington Becomes Its Own Landlord" (Feb. 6, 2026); Shelterforce — "Who Holds the Power?" (Oct. 3, 2025); The Guild — Community Stewardship Trust.

A Nonprofit Just Helped Residents Buy the Land Under Their Manufactured Homes for the 10,000th Time

Most of the roughly 20 million Americans who live in manufactured-home communities own their homes but rent the land beneath them. That split is the whole problem. When an investment firm buys the community, the residents own a house they often cannot move and have no control over the ground it sits on. The new owner raises the lot rent, and the homeowner — frequently an older adult or a family on a fixed income — has no bargaining power and nowhere to go. Over the past few years, private-equity and institutional buyers have been acquiring these communities at speed, and lot-rent spikes have followed.

ROC USA, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit social venture founded in 2008, exists to break that trap. When a manufactured-home community goes up for sale, ROC USA helps the residents form a cooperative, provides the technical assistance to run the purchase, and — through its affiliated community-development lender — finances the acquisition. The residents collectively buy the land under their own homes. They set their own lot rents, govern the community democratically, and can never again be sold to an outside investor.

In 2025, ROC USA secured its 10,000th home through this model, at Turnpike Park Cooperative in Westborough, Massachusetts. The organization has now helped create 182 resident-owned communities across 14 states, ranging from eight homes to three hundred. As founding president Paul Bradley put it, ten thousand homes is the equivalent of a good-sized town — and if ROC USA were a single owner, it would hold the twelfth-largest manufactured-home portfolio in the country. It is not an owner. It is the structure that let ten thousand households become owners themselves.

Why this matters now. Manufactured housing is the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in the United States, and it is exactly the kind of asset speculative capital is built to extract from. The residents own the depreciating thing (the home) and rent the appreciating thing (the land), which is precisely backwards from how wealth is built. A lot-rent increase that an investor books as a return is, for the resident, the difference between staying and losing a home they technically own.

ROC USA's response is to flip which party owns the land. The cooperative is not a charity arrangement — it is a real purchase, at a real price, financed by real debt the residents repay through their lot rents. But because the residents own the community, the rent funds the community instead of an investor's return, and the affordability holds because the owners are the people who need it to.

Here is what makes this replicable. Three structural elements. First, the model attaches to a triggering event — a sale — rather than trying to manufacture one. ROC USA is ready when a community comes to market, because that is the moment residents have both the motive and the legal opening to buy. Second, it pairs technical assistance with financing in one package; residents do not have to be real-estate experts or find a lender on their own, because the nonprofit brings both. Third, ownership is cooperative and democratic, which means no single resident can later sell the community out from under the others. The protection is structural, not personal.

First steps if your nonprofit serves a population tied to a specific physical place — a mobile-home park, a marina, a cluster of small storefronts, a community garden on leased land. Find out who owns the underlying land and what would happen to the people you serve if it sold tomorrow. If the answer is alarming, that is the asset to focus on. For manufactured-home communities specifically, ROC USA's resident-ownership model is documented and available, and several states now have laws giving residents a window to match a purchase offer.

If your work is unrelated to housing, the transferable lesson is about the difference between owning the depreciating asset and owning the appreciating one. Look at the people you serve and ask which side of that line they are on — and whether there is a structure that could move them to the other side.

Sources: ROC USA; Cooperative Development Institute — "10,000 Homes Made Secure and Affordable"; Virginia Poverty Law Center — Virginia's First Resident-Owned Manufactured Home Community.

With 40% of U.S. Farmland About to Change Hands, One Nonprofit Is Buying Farms and Holding Them in Common

Roughly 40% of U.S. farmland is expected to change ownership over the next 15 years, as the generation that has been farming it retires. That transition is the largest land-ownership question the country faces, and the default answer is the market: the land goes to whoever can pay the most, which increasingly means investors and consolidators rather than the next person who actually wants to farm. A young or beginning farmer trying to buy in has to outbid capital that views the land as an appreciating asset rather than a place to grow food.

Agrarian Trust, a national nonprofit, is building an alternative. Through its Agrarian Commons model, the organization acquires farmland, holds it permanently in community-governed commons, and leases it to next-generation farmers on long-term — up to 99-year — affordable, inheritable leases. The farmer does not buy the land and does not carry a mortgage on it. The farmer invests in the operation, the soil, and the buildings, and builds equity in the farm business while the land itself stays in common ownership and out of the speculative market for good. The Agrarian Commons launched across 10 states with 12 founding farms totaling about 2,400 acres, from the Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons — a collaboration with the Somali Bantu Community Association — to commons in Virginia, West Virginia, Minnesota, New Mexico, and beyond.

Why this matters now. The barrier that keeps new farmers off the land is rarely the desire or the skill. It is the price of the land. Farm real estate has appreciated to the point where the income from farming cannot service the debt required to buy the farm, which means the only buyers who pencil out are the ones who are not primarily farming it. The result is consolidation, absentee ownership, and a steady loss of the small and mid-size farms that anchor rural communities and regional food systems.

Agrarian Trust's response is to separate the right to farm the land from the obligation to buy it. By holding the land in common and leasing it affordably for the long term, the model gives a farmer the security to invest a career in a place — to build soil, plant orchards, put up infrastructure — without the impossible up-front cost of purchasing the ground. The community governs the commons, which keeps the land accountable to the foodshed it serves rather than to a distant balance sheet.

Here is what makes this replicable. Three structural elements. First, the land is held permanently and separately from the farm operation, so appreciation in land value can never again price out the next farmer. Second, the lease is long and inheritable, which gives the farmer the time horizon to invest seriously — a one-year lease produces one-year thinking, while a 99-year lease produces stewardship. Third, governance is local and community-based, which keeps decisions tied to the people and the foodshed rather than to speculative return.

First steps if your nonprofit touches food, agriculture, or land. Identify the farmland in your region most at risk of being lost to development or consolidation, and the beginning farmers most likely to be shut out by price. Then look at the Agrarian Commons model and the resources at the Farmland Access Legal Toolkit, which document how community-based land stewardship can be structured. A land trust does not have to start with a thousand acres. One farm, held in common and leased to a farmer who could never have bought it, is the pattern.

If you are not in agriculture, the lesson still travels. The asset your mission depends on — whatever it is — appreciates, and appreciation is exactly what prices a mission out of the thing it needs. Ask whether that asset could be held permanently and separately from the people who use it, so that rising value protects the mission instead of evicting it.

Sources: Agrarian Trust — Agrarian Commons; Food Tank — "A New Path to Sustainable Farming: An Agrarian Commons Approach" (Jan. 2025); Farmland Access Legal Toolkit — Guide to Creating an Agrarian Commons.

Pull Your Lease and Find Three Clauses Before Your Next Renewal

If your organization rents the space it operates out of, your mission has a hidden expiration date written into a document most EDs have not read since they signed it. The lease is where your real-estate risk lives, and three clauses inside it decide how exposed you are. Most nonprofits discover what those clauses say only when it is too late to do anything about them.

Action: Pull your current lease. Find three things.

First, the renewal and notice provision: when does the lease end, and how many days before that date must you give notice to renew or leave? (Miss that window and you can lose your space or trigger an expensive holdover rate.)

Second, the rent escalation clause: how much can the landlord raise your rent at renewal, and is there a cap?

Third, the sale, demolition, or relocation clause: what happens to you if the landlord sells the building or decides to redevelop it? Write the renewal date and notice deadline into your organization's calendar and your board's calendar today. Bring the escalation and sale clauses to your next finance committee meeting so the board understands the exposure before renewal season, not during it.

ROI: A missed renewal-notice deadline can cost a relocation — easily tens of thousands of dollars in moving, build-out, and downtime — or the space itself. Knowing your escalation cap lets you budget accurately instead of being surprised. Knowing the sale clause tells you whether you are one transaction away from having to move.

Time: 30 minutes to read the lease and pull the three clauses. 15 minutes to calendar the dates.

Check Whether Your Emails Are Actually Reaching Inboxes

You can write the perfect appeal, and it does not matter if it lands in spam. Since major providers tightened their sender rules, nonprofits sending from a domain without proper authentication are quietly getting filtered — newsletters, receipts, and year-end appeals included. Most organizations never check, because the email does not bounce; it just disappears into a spam folder nobody sees.

Action: Confirm three email-authentication records are set up for your sending domain: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. You do not need to be technical. Use a free checker (search "DMARC checker" or "MX toolbox") and enter your domain; it will tell you which records exist and which are missing. If any are missing or misconfigured, forward the result to whoever manages your domain or your email platform's support team and ask them to set up all three. While you are there, send a test appeal to a personal Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook address and confirm it lands in the inbox, not in spam or promotions.

ROI: A development team's entire return depends on the email being seen. If even 10% of your appeals are being filtered, you are losing a tenth of your email-driven revenue invisibly. Authentication is free to set up and protects every send afterward — and it also makes it harder for scammers to spoof your organization's name.

Time: 15 minutes to run the check. 30 to 60 minutes for your provider to set up missing records.

Reach Out to the Donors Who Gave Once and Vanished

Every nonprofit has them: people who made a first gift — at an event, in response to an appeal, through a peer's fundraiser — and were never heard from again. They already proved they will give to you. They are a warmer prospect than any cold list you could buy, and most organizations do nothing with them because no one owns the follow-up.

Action: Pull a list of donors who gave exactly once, more than 12 months ago, and have not given since. Sort by gift size. Take the top 20. For each, send a short, personal note — not an appeal. Tell them one specific thing their gift helped make possible, with a real detail, and ask nothing. The goal is to reopen the relationship, not to extract a second gift on the spot. Two weeks later, follow up with a simple, low-pressure invitation to give again or to get involved. Track how many re-engage so you can decide whether to build this into a standing quarterly habit.

ROI: Reactivating a lapsed donor costs a fraction of acquiring a new one, and a recovered first-time donor who gives a second gift is far more likely to become a sustaining supporter. Twenty personal notes can realistically recover several gifts you would otherwise have written off.

Time: 60 minutes to build the list. About 2 hours to write 20 personal notes.

Build a Lease-vs.-Own-vs.-Partner Options Analysis for Your Program Space

Most nonprofits never seriously analyze their occupancy decision. They rent because they have always rented, and the question of whether to keep renting, buy, or partner with a mission-aligned owner only comes up in a crisis — when the landlord sells, or the rent jumps, or the lease is up and the options have narrowed to one. The decision deserves analysis before the crisis forces it, and the analysis is more reachable than most EDs assume.

You run this prompt because knowing the real trade-offs — before your hand is forced — is what lets you act on your own timeline instead of the landlord's.

Draft Crisis-Communications Holding Statements for Your Three Most Likely Scenarios

When something goes wrong — a funding loss made public, an incident involving a client or volunteer, a leadership departure, a critical news story — the first hours decide how it is remembered. Most nonprofits write their first public statement in those hours, under pressure, with the board chair and the ED editing in real time and a reporter waiting. The result is slow, defensive, or both. The fix is to write the hard parts before the crisis, when you are calm.

Build a Hiring Scorecard and Structured Interview Guide for Your Next Key Hire

Small nonprofits make their most consequential decisions — who to hire — with their least disciplined process. The job posting is vague, the interviews are unstructured conversations that favor whoever is most charming, and the reference checks are an afterthought. Then the org spends 18 months and real money recovering from a mis-hire. A structured scorecard and interview guide, built before the first candidate walks in, is the cheapest hiring upgrade available.

The Asset Dependency Map — A 30-Minute Board Exercise to Find the One Asset Your Mission Can't Survive Losing

What makes it worth trying: Every organization depends on a handful of assets it does not fully control — a leased building, a piece of land, a single major contract, a software platform, a founder's relationships, a vehicle, a license. Most boards have never listed them, and almost none have asked the uncomfortable question: which of these could we not survive losing, and how much control do we actually have over it? This exercise surfaces the dependencies that would end the organization if they vanished — while there is still time to do something about them.

It works because it is concrete. The board is not theorizing about risk in the abstract. They are naming the specific real things the mission runs on, and sorting them by how exposed each one leaves the organization.

How to run it (30 minutes):

1. Setup (before the meeting, by the ED): On one page, list the 8 to 12 assets the organization most depends on to deliver its mission. Be concrete: the program building, the land, the largest funding contract, the donor database, the case-management software, the one staff member who holds critical knowledge, the vehicle fleet, any required license or accreditation. For each, note in a word or two whether the organization owns it, rents or licenses it, or depends on someone else entirely for it.
2. Round 1 — silent scoring (8 minutes in the meeting): Each board member privately scores every asset on two scales, 1 to 3. Impact: if we lost this tomorrow, how badly are we hurt? (1 = inconvenient, 3 = existential.) Control: how much control do we have over keeping it? (1 = full control / we own it, 3 = entirely in someone else's hands.) No discussion yet.
3. Round 2 — find the danger zone (12 minutes): The board chair tallies. The assets that matter are the ones scoring high on both — high impact and low control. These are the dependencies that could end the organization and that the board does not control. Discuss the top two or three. For each, ask one question: what would it take to move this toward more control — owning instead of renting, a longer contract, a documented backup, a second source?
4. Round 3 — board commitment (10 minutes): For the one or two highest-risk assets, the board assigns a specific next step with an owner and a date: the ED brings options to the next meeting, the finance committee studies the cost of reducing the dependency, or the executive committee opens a conversation with the relevant party. No "we should keep an eye on that." A named action on at least one asset.

In-person: Physical printout of the asset list and pens. The chair draws a simple two-by-two grid (impact vs. control) on a flip chart and plots each asset where the votes land.

Virtual: Shared spreadsheet with the asset list down the side and two scoring columns. Each board member fills in their scores; the average plots automatically into an impact/control grid.

Watch out for: The board that scores everything a 3 and panics. The point is not that every dependency is a crisis — it is to find the one or two that genuinely are. Force-rank if you have to. The other failure mode is the ED who hears the exercise as a critique of past decisions; frame it at the start as forward-looking risk work, not second-guessing. (Readers of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience will recognize this as a fast, board-level version of a risk inventory — identify, prioritize, respond.)

You'll know it worked when: Within 90 days, the board has taken one concrete step to reduce its single highest impact-and-low-control dependency — pricing out a purchase, negotiating a longer lease or contract, documenting the knowledge in one person's head, or securing a backup for a single point of failure. The deeper signal is whether "what do we depend on that we don't control?" becomes a standing question rather than a one-time exercise.

There is a pattern in the organizations whose footing held while peers got squeezed. They figured out which ground their mission actually stood on — and they made sure they owned it, or controlled it, before someone else decided their future for them.

What is the one asset your mission could not survive losing — and who actually controls it today?

See you next week.

— Ted

P.S. Thanks again for supporting Rooted with your subscription.

Founder and CEO Risk Alternatives, LLC 202.758.7572 (cell) ​Website​ Author of ​​Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience​​​ I help nonprofits thrive by providing practical tools and support to address uncertainty and improve resilience.

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