Mission

NEBRS Community Land Trust empowers our community
to steward vacant, underutilized properties.
We improve access to outdoor spaces
and community health,
while bringing land back to the commons.

NEBRS is dedicated to our community:
its land, its people, and its institutions of self-governance.

NEBRS operates within the communities of the Monongahela Valley East Shore,
a river valley most recently named by the Lenape people,
and whose traditional stewards are
the Šaawanwaki (Shawnee) and Onöndowa'ga:' (Seneca).
We acknowledge their storied histories, their survivance, and their sovereignty.
We strive to ensure that our work supports their power.

More about NEBRS

NEBRS is a grassroots organization that operates by community consensus, working to acquire vacant land in order to return it to community control. We seek to act as a directly democratic department of ecology, land management, ritual restoration, and collective dreaming. We aim not only to reclaim land, but to reweave the threads of community.

Our organization was founded because we believe that human relationship to land is the soil from which belonging grows, and public control of the land base is a direct response to multiple crises facing our neighborhood, from mental health, to spiritual thirst, to poverty, to gun violence. We believe that common ownership of land must be the basis of any lasting systemic change. In this spirit, we recognize the deep connections between environmental and racial injustice, fighting to heal a history of abuse that has left “exploited places” for “exploited people”.

Home to one of the United States’ oldest legacy polluters, the communities served by NEBRS are a sacrifice zone, suffering egregious impacts from industrial processes. Like many other "fenceline" communities throughout the US, our neighborhoods are predominantly Black, experiencing extremely high rates of unemployment and food insecurity, and income levels well below state and federal averages. A third of households live at the federal poverty level or below. Tragically, environmental justice and negative health indices mirror economic patterns, with all indicators exceeding 90%: from toxic releases to air, to drinking water non-compliance; from heart disease to asthma and diabetes.

Whether as a cause or a result of these outcomes, our communities are deeply divested, facing unparalleled levels of hyper-vacancy and blight, some nearing 40% of lots. Tangled ownership and delinquent taxes make even the few green spaces we do have difficult to access legally. While our community envisions multi-parcel projects–greenways, pocket parks, public art, and community gardens–these remain out of reach due to limited municipal resources.

Yet the damage is not only material. Generations of extractive industry and racial capitalism have frayed the spiritual and emotional fabric of our communities. Cultural displacement and chronic environmental violence have also eroded the rituals that connect people to place. We seek to repair these wounds reclaiming land for healing. NEBRS was born to interrupt cycles of harm and shift our response from damage control to visionary care.

Alongside a new generation of community leaders in our region, we exist to counter our community’s long decline by building a “just transition" rooted in common land and mutual aid, weaving together residents and visionary organizations to extinguish the systems of harm that deny us a more beautiful future.

We believe that our organization can model a way forward for the many communities in our region that are just like ours, struggling to escape the shadow of exploitative industries, building towards new economies that honor people and land. In this spirit, we are focused on the next fifty years: building truly democratic neighborhoods, opposing eco-cide, and supporting land re-matriation to repair the relationship between people and place. We know that our residents, our kin, and the land itself–not manufacturing, not developers–are the truest sources of both wealth and justice.

Finally, we recognize land as our first teacher and the primary site of justice, abolition, and repair. To survive the multiple ongoing catastrophes that beset our communities, NEBRS recognizes that we must “stay in place”. Our neighbors are our greatest assets, and their dreams shape every aspect of what we build together.

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