Free the Land Capital Campaign
Nestled in the East Bay hills of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Justice & Ecology Center represents Movement Generation’s vision for building the new. With your support of our Free the Land Campaign, we will build a first-of-its-kind dream space in the Bay Area for our interconnected local and national justice movements to mobilize, liberate, and heal.
“Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence.”
-Malcolm X
Free The Land
In 2021, an ally gave word to our friends at Sogorea Te’ Land Trust about the imminent sale of 40 acres of land that had been held by a local family for more than a century. Sogorea Te’ knew that Movement Generation had been looking for a home—a place where we could practice collective governance and hold space for frontline communities.
On this land, among lush cedar, redwood, oak, and walnut trees, MG envisioned resilient gardens fed by rainwater catchment systems and abundant with food and medicine for our people. In retro wooden buildings, we saw future healing, gathering, and cultural spaces that would nourish our movements. We dreamed of our children playing and growing together on sunny, rolling hills blanketed by native purple needlegrass and poppies.
Photo by: Brooke Anderson
With funds raised through the private phase of MG’s Free the Land Campaign, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust purchased this land in December 2022, liberating the land from the speculative real estate market forever. With the help of Sustainable Economies Law Center, we created long-term agreements with Sogorea Te’ for MG to base our work here long term. It is a dream for us to be rooted deeply and authentically here in the East Bay, in Bay Miwok territory, and to offer this space to our movement allies, locally and beyond.
Movement Generation believes that land is imperative to justice and liberation. We are inspired by Indigenous communities reclaiming land back, as well as the New Afrikan Independence Movement, which says “free the land” as a call for an independent Black nation in North America.
Our work here is only beginning. To truly free the land where we are and liberate ourselves, we must work to restore interdependent relationships with the land and with one another. What we do to the land, we do to the people. When we free the land, we free the people.
The Justice and Ecology Center
In the face of the ongoing ecological crisis, our people need safe spaces to nourish and restore our relationships with land and build organized communities that meet our own needs. This is why MG is launching the Free the Land campaign and building the Justice & Ecology Center on this liberated land.
As the first of its kind in the SF Bay Area, it will be a community space for retreats, workshops, and strategy sessions for MG’s wide network of organizers, healers, artists, and earth workers to build capacity to guide their own communities toward a Just Transition from the extractive economy to regenerative local economies. Frontline community members will be able to participate in MG’s Earth Skills programs to build ecological knowledge and practice, as well as organize responses to shocks such as fires, earthquakes, and PG&E shutoffs. The space will center the needs and experiences of Black, Indigenous, POC, queer, disabled, migrant, and low-income communities, which are disproportionately impacted by the ecological crisis.
“Whenever I try to explain to people the conditions we are living in and the strategies we need to engage to shift how we think about our economy and relationship to the planet, I absolutely have to reference Movement Generation. They need a place where as many people as possible, especially those actively trying to change the world, can sit together and learn the truth about what’s happening and what’s possible.”
-adrienne maree brown
Movement Generation successfully raised more than $1 million from individual donors during the public phase of our Free the Land Campaign. Now we are calling on foundations to double down on their commitments to social justice and contribute an additional $5 million to this project long term.
We invite you to dream with us what this space could be—5, 10, and 100 years from now. As frontline communities face daily climate disruptions like severe wildfires and storms, now is the time we must oppose the extractive economy and simultaneously build resilient futures. Through the Free the Land Campaign, we are planting the seeds of a land-based revolution. Join us.
If you are interested in making a gift greater than $10,000, please contact Aspen Dominguez at aspen@movementgeneration.org.