Events

Join Just Communities for a live conversation on how PAD is redefining land development by centering homeowners, preventing displacement, and creating pathways to long-term wealth building. Overview Homeownership has long been one of the primary ways families build stability and generational wealth. Yet for many homeowners, especially lower-income and legacy homeowners, the barriers to improving or expanding their property are financial, technical, and structural. The Partnership for ADU Development (PAD) is a City of Seattle pilot program designed to address those barriers directly.  Through a co-development model using ground leases, PAD enables homeowners to partner with a mission-driven developer to...

Join Just Communities for a live conversation on how Mayor Dickens’ administration is translating principles into practice with the opening of the city’s first municipal-backed grocery store.  Learn how your city can boost access to healthy food in underserved areas through this public-private innovation. Overview Healthy communities must have healthy food.  Yet many cities still have food deserts due to long-standing disinvestment. For decades, access to healthy food evaded Atlanta’s south side communities. When one national grocery chain after another declined to serve Atlanta’s majority- Black population, the City rose to the challenge. Azalea Fresh Market isn’t just another grocery. ...

Join Just Communities Executive Director Tsedey Betru with Kaitlin Cernak and Victoria Barrett of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and David Wilts of Digital Masterplanning for a conversation that connects transportation planning, community engagement, and equitable development through a shared lens: who participates, who is heard, and how decisions are made. Overview Community participation shapes more than public meetings. It influences how transportation systems are designed. It informs planning decisions. It affects how development projects take shape and whose priorities are reflected in the process. As more of these conversations move online, organizations across sectors are asking similar questions....

Join Aaron Goodman, Manager of the Community Benefits Ordinance for the City of Detroit, joins Meagan Niebler, Community Democracy Program Manager at Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services, and Tsedey Betru, Director at Just Communities for a conversation on how to explore community benefits agreements and ordinances work in practice and what communities can learn from experiences on the ground today. Drawing on perspectives from local government, community engagement, and environmental justice, this session will examine how communities move from reacting to decisions after they are made to building the relationships, leverage, and influence needed to help shape them from the...

Join Just Communities and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy for a critical conversation that challenges the assumption that climate action is too expensive for local governments. This presentation examines land value capture (LVC) as a powerful, underutilized source of financing for local climate investments. We will review relevant instruments and discuss how they can be implemented to build inclusive, resilient development that centers community power. Overview The magnitude of the climate crisis presents an opportunity to look beyond the extractive economic and financial systems that have been complicit in fueling current challenges. As cities worldwide explore innovative financing mechanisms...