Gower Community Land Trust
We want to create a Community Land Trust to buy plots of land on Gower suitable for food growing, grazing, recreation, education, woodland and biodiversity management and anything else that is of benefit to the community and environment.
Community Land Trusts are local organisations set up and run by ordinary people to develop and manage assets important to that community, like community enterprises, food growing, workspaces or homes. More detailed information about CLTs can be found here: http://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk
We want to know about your ideas, skills and capacity to be involved in order to create site specific project plans. Potential sites for projects will be posted on the Gower Community Land Trust Facebook page before new forums and groups are set up to take them forward… such as a 43 acre woodland and rough grazing site at The Old Forge, Cartersford (North West of Swansea airport).
In order to raise the finance necessary to buy land, projects will need to be financially sustainable without any dependency on voluntary or public sector funds, though those may be applied for at the set up stage.
Community Shares:
Gower Community Land Trust (GCLT) will issue community shares to raise equity for the acquisition of land.
GCLT will be able to pay interest on those shares but its primary motive will be to enable a community of people to engage in sustainability projects, either practically on the land, or through providing patient capital / ethical investment to enable those sustainability projects to succeed.
The initial equity raise will also need to provide a contingency fund to pay administrative costs and for project co-ordination whilst project plans are developed and agreed by GCLT members.
We anticipate using a well established crowd funding portal to raise and receive any money invested, which will not be drawn down until the purchase of any asset has been completed. There will need to be a non-refundable deposit or initial subscription fee to cover administrative costs.
Values and principles:
It will be the responsibility of a democratic elected management committee to oversee that the business development process is inclusive and in line with GCLT’s objectives. Each shareholding, regardless of size, will be equivalent to one vote.
GCLT will also be underpinned by other co-operative values and principles, common to the co-operative movement: http://ica.coop/en/whats-co-op/co-operative-identity-values-principles
