What We Do
The NWCLT Coalition connects individuals and organizations to provide professional support, to share knowledge and best practices and to work together on common goals.
The NWCLT Coalition creates an environment (in-person and on-line) for members to solve common challenges and inspires creative solutions that build organizational capacity and strengthen the industry. Members work collaboratively to promote and preserve permanently affordable homeownership opportunities.
The NWCLT Coalition educates CLT practitioners, board members, homeowners and community members about the unique aspects of shared equity (community land trust) homeownership.
We educate local, county, state, regional and federal governments to ensure funding is maintained. Together we advocate for policies that facilitate the development of shared equity homeownership.
MEET NWCLTC
History
A History of Innovation
The Northwest Community Land Trust Coalition (NWCLTC) began as an informal peer-to-peer networking group in the fall of 1999 and has, as a group of between 25 and 60 CLT practitioners met twice every year since then.
The enterprise CRM system utilized by community land trusts across the United States – Homekeeper – had its origins in the Northwest. Opal Community Land Trust, Homestead Community Land Trust and Kulshan Community Land Trust worked together to create an online workflow system built on top of Salesforce. The system ultimately became Homekeeper, a CRM solution that enables community land trusts to track homeowner, property, funding and other data, and to measure impacts of their work.
The Coalition formally incorporated in August of 2005 and hired dedicated staff in April of 2008.
Between 2008 and 2009, the Coalition offered a capacity building Institute (CBI) that seeded the growth of community land trusts in the region. The CBI was the first of its kind in the country, a comprehensive training program for new community land trust staff. The institute’s curriculum included fundamentals of the CLT model, program aspects of managing a community land trust such as ground leases and resale formulas. The Institute also addressed issues of organizational sustainability, housing development, accounting and bookkeeping for CLTs, and other topics of interest to the participants. Eighteen new or established CLTs took part, learning from 13 professional trainers.
Since 2011, the work of the Coalition has been led by a volunteer Board that meets monthly to plan the Annual Gathering and coordinate efforts to benefit the membership.