About Us
Community Land And Power (CLP) is a new Durham-rooted land, housing and environmental justice org and future co-op. We are fiscally sponsored by the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network.
Our mission is to facilitate and steward intersectional organizing, political education, coalition building, leadership development, and policy interventions that catalyze sustainable, community-led stabilization, reclamation, and development without displacement, prioritizing the leadership of historically marginalized residents.
The values guiding our work will be rooted in the principles of interdependence, solidarity economies, and Land Back to Right Relations.
Though affordable housing has been Durham residents’ number one demand for multiple years, the majority of our representatives continue to deprioritize this need and worsen the crisis. CLP will heed and broaden the call by organizing public political education events and guiding the formation of neighborhood councils, under the leadership of deeply rooted orgs and residents, that have the power to actualize transformative, sustainable, permanently affordable, reparative spatial justice projects across Durham and beyond. Given housing is the largest expense for most U.S. households, with Black and Brown residents suffering disproportionate burdens, this project will build collective power to engender political realignment with the working class.
Long term vision
We are starting where we live in Durham, NC, though our long-term vision is to build collaborative ecosystems and networks to share strategies and resources across the state in partnership with the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and other vision aligned orgs.
We will build out projects that redistribute, enable access to, and decommodify land through community land trusts, cultural, environmental or agricultural easements, or land and housing co-operatives, which can also be set up as climate resiliency hubs – spaces residents can invest in and turn to in times of escalating climate disasters – as well as hubs supporting and generating local solidarity economies.
origin story
Though the work wasn’t done as “Community Land and Power”, the origin of this project started in 2022 when Leslie St Dre (CLP's founder and lead instigator) organized with their neighbors facing eviction, including Sheba Everett (CLP Advisory Board member) to stop their evictions and win their forever homes. They formed a united front as the Eno River Tenants' Association and issued a petition to hold the landlord accountable to their performative land acknowledgment and boldly demanded they stop the evictions, make full repairs, and turn over the homes to tenants using the shared equity land trust model. After ERTA also interrupted their landlord's annual meeting, carried out multiple call-in and targeted email campaigns, got multiple articles in the press, including one that was front page news, and the petition reached over 700 signatures (a high number for Durham), the landlord agreed to temporarily stop the evictions.
The organizing continued and inspired some of the landlord's organizational partners to cut ties with them, volunteers left the org, and some funders pulled their money. Subsequently the landlord agreed to cancel 1.5 years of rent, make repairs and turn the homes over to a local housing land trust org at no cost, so that the tenants could be set up as land trust homeowners. This winter 2025, over three years after the start of our struggle, the tenants are officially becoming land trust homeowners on land that is protected forever along the beloved Eno River.
This was a historic victory in a state that bans tenant protections, and it was won through enduring sweat equity, a united front, and solidarity from across the city. We will use this momentum to grow CLP and to defend, reclaim and steward land, housing and environmental justice projects across Durham and beyond!
team
Leslie St Dre, Community Land and Power’s founder and lead instigator, is a long-time organizer, educator, artist, and strategist who has been working with housed and unhoused tenants to advance land and housing justice for the past thirteen years, much of it in the Bay Area, and the last five years in Durham, NC.
ADVISORY BOARD
Brandon Williams, Director at Frontline Solutions and Walltown Community Organizer in Durham, NC.
Sheba Everett, Tenant Leader with the Eno River Tenants Association and Director at Branches Community School in Durham.
Dr. Danielle Purifoy, JD/PHD, a Black queer lawyer and Professor of Geography and the Environment at UNC-Chapel Hill who’s research focuses on environmental justice, the racial politics of development in Black towns and communities, and Black ecologies and futures.
Dr. Rania Masri, Co-Director and Organizing and Policy Director of North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, human rights advocate, and a community organizer for justice against systems of oppression.