Our Story

The beginning of BLLI was a shared inquiry about what our current movement needed to co-create, maintain, and grow liberated spaces for Black people in alignment with our values of indigenous sovereignty, a caring economy, and shared governance without borders. Through our collective work and experimentation it became clear that a huge barrier to building the necessary infrastructure to try on, evolve, and grow new systems was the existing non-profit and funding infrastructure. Our people needed time and resources to build the necessary and “compliant” structures to hold the work. Our people also found that the leadership granting philanthropic funds was often disconnected from peoples’ needs on the ground. As a result, these philanthropic granting schemes often struggled to implement their values into practice.

In response, BLLI created an incubation container that wages Reparations campaigns to provide resources, governance practices space, and shelter with administrative and legal infrastructures for land steward projects and networks. Our goals with incubation are to provide the structure necessary for land stewardship networks and leaders to carry out their land visions. We are committed to 3-5 years of support that includes: fundraising, admin, staffing, facilitated space and governance models training, and connection with partners and resources needed for the land networks to create their visions fully. We endeavor to be a one stop shop to hold land stewards through the process of seeding and growing their vision. BLLI is committed to growing and evolving our work to meet the needs of ourselves as land stewards and the land steward networks we are incubating and co-creating with.