Community
Ownership
Learning & Action
Lab
Research and resources
for community-owned futures.
Redistributing the power to shape place.
Who owns the land often determines who has wealth, good health, a stable home, and a say in its future.
Across the country, communities are building alternatives to a real estate system that too often treats land and housing as vehicles for extraction. Neighbors are testing what it means to take local assets out of speculation and put them into shared stewardship.
The COLA Lab exists to learn from this work — the breakthroughs and barriers of community-led organizations on the ground — and to turn our findings into knowledge and resources the broader field can use.
We connect insights across places and identify patterns that can otherwise be hard to see. And we build frameworks, tools, and shared language that help practitioners, funders, policymakers, and field-builders advance their work.
The Commons
Ideas worth sharing. Tools worth using.
Community Ownership Field Guide: A Multi-City Panorama
Three comparative case studies, each accompanied by an implementation guide and focused on a different theme: how projects become viable, how they access capital, and the catalytic role relationships play.
City-Based Research
A look inside the organizations, partnerships, policies, and conditions shaping community ownership in individual cities, and the lessons they offer the broader field.
Community-Owned Futures Cohort
Emerging groups across the U.S. who are testing and expanding what’s possible in community ownership. Explore what they’re building, learning, and navigating.
Field Architecture
Foundational research on community ownership: its evidence base, models, approaches, and the questions shaping where it goes next.
Policy, Advocacy & Practice
Ground Works Consulting’s resources for advocates and policymakers seeking to create more supportive policy for community ownership. This body of work explores both the policies themselves and the work required to make them effective.
Financial Aggregation Feasibility
A study by The Bridgespan Group on what it would take to build shared financial infrastructure, including the feasibility of aggregating capital to better connect projects with the financing they need.
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