CommonLand offers the experience, technical skills, pragmatic solutions, and systems thinking to tackle housing and community development challenges so that clients can strengthen their organizational impact, portfolios, and meet their community development goals. I grew up in big cities with the benefits of close-knit neighborhoods, mostly in Pittsburgh, where steel mills, multi-cultural neighborhoods, and the civil rights movement shaped my values of economic, racial, and social justice and equity. Living in Washington DC as a teen and young adult deepened my understanding of how people with power and wealth can either create or squash the conditions and opportunities that lead to safe, secure, and equitable neighborhoods. With an academic background in land use policy and zoning, I entered the work world as a carpenter, housing inspector, and rehab specialist while homelessness surfaced as a symptom of how our real estate system creates winners and losers based on race and income. In response to real estate market speculation that caused increasing homelessness and loss of affordable housing, Vermont’s community land trust movement emerged as a solution, grounded in the First Nations' concept of "the commons." Land Trusts remove land from the speculative market to ensure that current and future generations have safe, secure, and affordable housing and neighborhoods. As the land trust sector exploded over the past three decades, other community development tools like Community Development Finance Institutions, micro-business lending, and cooperative ownership models emerged to mitigate the structural, racial, and economic disenfranchisement of people our society marginalizes from wealth creation. CommonLand Solutions’ brings these values to its clients, with services that include convening partners, financial packaging, securing grants, and project management to make nonprofit, municipal, and cooperative projects happen.