The Guild

The Guild develops community-owned housing, commercial, and mixed-use spaces to disrupt the status quo of extractive real estate. They develop these models to build a just and resilient future, shifting power away from corporations, private equity, and developers who have no real stake in their neighborhoods, to marginalized communities instead.

The Guild is focused on reimagining real estate development to build community wealth and resilience.  Their work is based on the idea that there is an alternative economic development model where more people, especially those marginalized and excluded from our current systems, can own and govern more of the assets that make their communities vibrant. To do this, they deploy two models of community ownership: the People’s Community Land Trust and The Community Stewardship Trust, alongside Groundcover, an integrated, reparative capital fund to scale community-owned and -governed development. Their programming and education training works synergistically with their real estate strategy to nurture a healthy solidarity ecosystem.

In 2015, The Guild started out as Atlanta’s first co-living company, creating spaces for “changemakers” — entrepreneurs, artists, and community organizers — to live, work, gather and thrive in addition to providing live/work spaces and programming targeted their venture and personal development. It became evident over time that truly resolving the growing real estate crises required major shifts in the way real estate itself is funded and financed. Our journey from inception to now has been focused on uncovering and addressing the root causes of systemic inequality, leading us to our current thesis of removing property from the speculative market via shared ownership and community wealth building.