The Guild

leaning into EMERGENCE

2022 Annual Report

When The Guild launched in 2015 as Atlanta's first co-living company, we brought together social entrepreneurs, artists, and community organizers in a live/work environment. Our goal was to support the people doing the most critical work with both affordable housing as well as programming to support their leadership development and personal growth.

Since then, The Guild has evolved quite a bit. As we pulled back the layers on various intersecting inequities — from gentrification in a majority Black city like Atlanta, food apartheid, to redlining — we realized real estate development is at the heart of so much.

We then set out to build a different type of real estate paradigm, one that grappled with the root causes of these inequities. This work involves creating alternative real estate models, but also alternative business models. As we say at The Guild, the means are the ends — how we do something is as important as what we do. This report shares some of our processes that are driven by our values, and gives you a glimpse into what 2022 was like for us.

Contents

This report is a summary of all the work we did in 2022. For ease of navigation, you can click on the hyperlinks below to jump to any particular section.

Welcome

Our Collective

Development & Financing Updates

A New Partnership: Incubating a Community Land Trust with Housing Justice League

Groundcover: Updates from our Fund

Programming Overview + Updates

2022 Press & Fellowships

2022 was a year of emergence...

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. It emphasizes critical connections, authentic relationships, listening with the body and the mind."

- adrienne marie brown

2022 was a reminder that the work of creating systems change equires navigating complexity skilfully. It requires a rejection of binary thinking. Not only are we working to repair and transform generations’ worth of trauma and extraction, we are also doing this work within presently unfolding, intersecting crises — from the ongoing pandemic and climate disasters, to the onslaught on labor rights and ongoing carcerality and police brutality. Often times, while there is recognition of the magnitude of the fight we’re up against, we still default to organizational structures and rhythms that are part of the extractive system(s) we’re working to dismantle. The traditional approach to building organizations — how we think about scale, productivity, or impact metrics, for example — don’t allow for the level of emergence, agility, and experimentation that is necessary for long-term social change.

We spent the year reflecting on what we need to have in place organizationally to address the material needs of our communities and team in the present, while keeping our goal of alternative institution-building in clear focus. This continues to be an ongoing inquiry and exploration, but it has shown up in a few tangible ways this year for us. For one, when it comes to working towards land-based liberation, we continue to be values-driven but model agnostic. Leaning into a spirit of responsible experimentation, we intentionally invest in and develop a few different community-ownership models. Two, we have made some changes in our internal rhythms and meetings, to be able to distinguish between “busy” work and deep work, and to give us the ability as individuals and as a team to focus on authentic relationships and critical connections that adrienne marie brown references. The latter remains somewhat of a challenge, but the seeds for it were sown in 2022. Overall, we entered 2023 with a clear articulation of both our values and the value we bring to the ecosystem, not just in terms of what we do, but how we do it.

our cooperative

A worker cooperative is a values-driven business that puts worker and community benefit at the core of its purpose.

The main features of worker cooperatives are that workers own the business, as opposed to just upper management or investors. And they participate in and benefit from its financial success on the basis of their labor contribution to the cooperative. Worker-owned cooperatives also adhere to the principle of one worker, one vote

As we sought to build community-owned models for real estate, it was equally important for us to live into those democratic values within our company.

legal incorporation

In 2022, with legal counsel and support from Jason Wiener. pc, we formed a cooperative via amending our LLC bylaws. Georgia’s Cooperative law (Title 46, Chapter 5, and Title 2, Chapter 10, Georgia Code), is only applicable to rural telephone cooperatives and cooperative marketing associations, respectively, and

also recognizes the registration of foreign electric cooperatives, but not other types of cooperatives. After exploring Colorado’s cooperative LCA statutes (Colorado is informally known as the “Delaware for cooperatives” ), we landed on the bylaw amendment as the best strategy for us. We’re excited to help grow the ecosystem of cooperatives in Georgia based on the year’s worth of work we did in our own co-op development.

what we learned in our first year as a worker-owned cooperative

Our first year of incorporating as a cooperative was not without its challenges. Democratizing power via collective decision-making is a muscle we don’t get to use often in a world where power is concentrated. We learned that each of us were at different levels in terms of learning how to run a business, and needed different training and support to be able to make more informed decisions about the day-to-day operations and leadership of our cooperative. We also had some hard conversations around accountability to each other, so we could ensure labor in the co-op was held equitably. We worked with co-op coach and facilitator Shantae Edwards to help us begin developing shared agreements, and this work of strengthening our cooperative muscle as a team continues into 2023. We’re most proud that we have created a workplace where people of different abilities and capacity are able to find belonging, shared purpose, and healthy levels of productivity.

AVERY EBRON (he/him)

Director of Community Products

DANI Brockington (she/her)

Director of Storytelling & Engagement

ANTARIKSH TANDON (he/him)

Development and Design Director

ZACHARY MURRAY (he/him)

Organizing & Movement Building Director

NIKISHKA IYENGAR (she/her)

Founder & Ecosystem Director

Mary Jane Mcclain

(she/her)

Community Development Coordinator

The model we developed for community ownership called the Community Stewardship Trust (or CST) brings together residents in Black and Brown communities to co-own and steward properties that meet the community's needs — affordable housing, grocery stores, or spaces for local small businesses and organizations. It's a model that supports residents to thrive in place — and directly benefit from development happening in their own neighborhoods. In 2022, we spent a lot of time on the legal design of the CST to ensure that it strikes a balance between creating affordability and community wealth building. We’re starting out with one property (918 Dill Ave) in the CST, but the infrastructure we’re building allows us to similarly acquire, develop and move other properties off the speculative market and into the hands of the community. Below is a video we created to show how this all works.

PRO BONO LEGAL PARTNERSHIP

In order to create an ownership opportunity for what the SEC calls “non-accredited investors”, we evaluated different offerings and exemptions, and landed on a pathway that is the most efficient and flexible way to meet community members where they are. Parameters that we deliberated were minimum and maximum investment amounts, transaction costs, tax implications for community investors, tax implications for the CST and so forth. We’re gearing up to file our investment offering with the state of Georgia in early 2024. Typically, legal fees for offerings like this tend to get exorbitant for community groups to absorb, so we're especially grateful to Orrick for our pro bono partnership. Once we're successful with our filing, we plan to share out an open source toolkit for other community groups to utilize.

updates on planning and building permits

We received our building permit in May. This process involved receiving comments on our drawings from the various departments within the Building Department, and subsequently coordinating our responses in conjunction with our consultants. This was an iterative process, with the permit being issued once all comments had been addressed in the drawings and the various building department reviewers were satisfied with how we had addressed their concerns.

For us, coordinating this work included ensuring effective communication between the reviewers and our consultants when necessary, as well as making modifications to the design as required. This is accomplished through a series of emails, calls, and meetings, where we have the opportunity to walk the plan reviewers through our design intent, and demonstrate how we’re satisfying all life safety and fire egress requirements for each part of the building. This can range from the minute and hidden - such as penetration protection drawings and specifications, which show how the openings for pipes and ductwork runs will be protected as they pass through fire-rated assemblies (walls, floors, ceilings; the primary concern being limiting spread in the event of a fire) - to the tangible and visible, such as ensuring that the stairs are sized to match the capacity required for the building, or that all windows along an egress route are rated to protect the egress path from the spread of fire. In this way, code requirements inform our built environments directly; the size, shape, and materiality of our spaces being premised on a baseline criteria, from which architects and consultants take their cues for further design and development.

The next stage in the overall permit process is to schedule inspections at specific milestones during construction. These are opportunities for the building department officials to verify that construction is proceeding according to the approved construction drawings.

financing updates

When we received our updated budget in late summer, we were stunned to find that the overall costs had increased by approximately $3 Million relative to the last pricing we had received 8 months prior. Some of this was a result of the design being developed, and the pricing reflecting more specific design documents. However, the majority of this increase (~$2.6M) was a result of large macroeconomic conditions affecting construction prices writ-large. At a time when even market-rate projects were being put on hold as their rental revenues could not satisfy the debt services associated with the newly inflated costs of construction, we had to reassess our path forward. The primary challenge was the following: we needed to borrow more to be able to cover the increased costs, however, we were being forced to borrow even less than we were able to do previously because of rising interest rates. As a result, the amount of construction debt which we needed, far exceeded the permanent mortgage that the project’s affordable rental revenue could support. In a typical income-producing mixed-use project, the project’s construction loan is “taken-out” but a permanent loan i.e. Lender B (permanent lender) pays Lender A (construction lender) the entire sum owed on the construction loan, while issuing a mortgage for that same sum to the owner. The project’s rental revenue then services this debt over the term of the loan. Accordingly, the maximum mortgage that the project’s rental revenue can support generally determines the maximum construction loan a project can obtain.

We were confronted with this problem. We had already decided that we would not be raising rents after we had been compelled to shift half of the units’ rents towards 80% AMI levels the previous year. We wanted to hold rents steady at 60% AMI levels and 80% AMI levels, and not pass on the burdens of the current economy to the prospective renters. This left us with only one option - to raise more equity to bridge the $3 million gap. Accordingly, our construction lenders are proceeding with the construction loan, with the understanding that we will be launching a capital campaign to cover the gap by the time the project transitions to the permanent loan in 2 years time.

While obtaining a building permit is an essential part of the process for a project to be able to begin construction, there is another equally critical component of work, without which we would be unable to ensure the quality of the building. This is the process commonly known as Construction Administration (CA). It begins once the General Contractor (GC) puts the design documents out to bid, and ends once the building is built and has been added over to the own

Subcontractor Bidding

The bid documents go out to various vendors and subcontractors who supply, fabricate, and assemble every one of the building’s various pieces under the supervision of the GC and the Architect. The GC is responsible for identifying the relevant subcontractors for each scope of work involved in the overall effort, and for soliciting bids to present to the owner for their review and consideration. It is good practice to solicit multiple bids on the same scope of work to ensure that the owner is provided with an ability to choose. This process began for us in May when we provided our GC, Ujamaa Construction, with the design documents to be put out to bid. We waited roughly three months to receive bids from the various trades. Once all bids were in, Ujamaa presented us with an updated budget collated from the bids they thought were most appropriate for the project. This budget was $3 Million over the budget we had been holding! While there had been a few changes in design since the previous budget, the majority of this price increase was a result of construction price escalation since the advent of the pandemic (more on this in the Capital section).

Scope Reviews

Regardless of the significant price increase, once we received the bids, we began the months-long process of scope reviews. These are meetings scheduled with multiple subcontractors to go over their bid in detail. It is an opportunity to ensure that the subs didn’t miss anything in their bid and to clarify any questions they might have. This can prevent costly changes once construction is underway. A rigorous scope review process is critical to ensuring that the building meets design intent, and often times various components of the building are either re-designed or modified during this process. Though challenging, the process can also often be inspiring as an Architect, Owner, GC, and Sub-Contractor all get together to focus their attention on specific parts of the building in sequence, to figure out how best to build it. This is the moment when design and means and methods are truly reconciled.

Submittals

Subsequent to the scope reviews, the subcontractors provide the Architect and Owner with Submittals. These are the actual shop drawings which detail the fabrication of each component of the building. We reviewed all of these submittals in conjunction with the Architect and provide feedback if any changes are merited. Additionally, we also worked with the Architect to provide Architect’s Supplemental Instructions (ASIs) to the subcontractors. These are design documents in addition to the initial documents, and are meant to provide further clarification and instruction on the fabrication process. These also serve to reflect any modified design intent and direction, subsequent to changes agreed upon in the scope reviews.

Sheet from Steel Submittal

Often Scope reviews and submittals occur in parallel for different trades. We began this process in earnest in late Q4 and it continued well into 2023. Once the initial critical trades have been addressed, it is possible to begin construction while still continuing the work with those trades whose work occurs later in the construction process.

Updates from our second community-owned project with community movement builders

Beyond our role as developers of real estate, we see The Guild playing a critical role in the ecosystem to build movement infrastructure — infrastructure and capacity for grassroots, community-based organizations to acquire and develop land, housing and real estate towards the larger goals of permanent affordability, community stewardship, and democratized, local control of assets.

Our second pilot is to build a mixed-use project with COMMUNITY MOVEMENT BUILDERS (CMB) that will include both deeply affordable housing as well as commercial space for their food cooperatives, youth development and mutual aid programs. ​CMB is a member-based collective of black people building sustainable, self-determining communities through cooperative economic platforms and collective community organizing. The Guild is acting as development partner on the project and our Groundcover fund is providing equity capital for the project as well. Investing in grassroots Black-led development like this project is critical to our mission. At the start of 2022, we helped CMB acquire the site and through the course of the year, we worked on the rezoning, design, and initial proforma for the project.

a new partnership with housing justice league to expand the access to permanently affordable housing in atlanta

Beyond our role as developers of real estate, we see The Guild playing a critical role in the ecosystem to build movement infrastructure — infrastructure and capacity for grassroots, community-based organizations to acquire and develop land, housing and real estate towards the larger goals of permanent affordability, community stewardship, and democratized, local control of assets.

In 2022, we began exploring a partnership with Housing Justice League (HJL) to serve in this role and capacity. HJL works to preserve affordable housing, for just living conditions, to prevent gentrification, and to build community power for an Atlanta-wide housing justice movement. In 2022, we learned of their fight to keep Ms. Juliet, a longtime community member, in her home. After 27 years renting her home, a new landlord ended Ms. Juliet’s lease and refused to accept community-raised funds that would have allowed her to purchase it. Housing Justice League has worked closely with her throughout her journey, advocating for her rights and seeking solutions to ensure she maintains safe, stable housing. Ms. Juliet’s story is one of so many, and so many of those members are in HJLs base now, fighting against the investor takeover of housing in Atlanta.

In the last 2 years, 1 in 3 homes in metro atlanta has been bought by investors. These homes

In 2022, The Guild partnered with Housing Justice League, and the Atlanta Economic Justice Program of the American Friends Service Committee to incubate long-term solutions for Black and working class residents on the frontlines of displacement. This ultimately took the form of the People’s Community Land Trust that launched in 2023.

ecosystem stewarding:

The Georgia Land Project

The Georgia Land Project (GLP) was a grassroots, volunteer coalition of activists formed in 2022 to transition a 105-acre farm and retreat center in central Georgia into regenerative agriculture and reparative economic approaches to stewardship. The project aimed to raise $3 million in grant capital to transition the land to future stewarding organization(s) via a reparations framework while regenerating and healing the soil after decades of extractive practices.

The Guild worked as a Transition Team lead to source philanthropic funds and to identify Black-led organizational partners who could secure ownership of the farm site. The emerging future for the land as envisioned by the Transition Team was to develop a space for Black-led regenerative agriculture, movement building, and community development.

As a result, The Guild identified the National Black

Food & Justice Alliance (NBJFA) who officially secured the land in September 2022 in partnership with Black Organizing for Leadership & Dignity (BOLD). The goal for both organizations is for the farm and retreat center to become the new home for BOLD’s series of organizer training and for NBJFA and its member partners to steward the land. We continue to play this role in the ecosystem of transitioning land from previously extractive systems into regenerative, Black and Indigenous leadership.

sharing our praxis and learnings with academia

For the second year in a row, The Guild engaged with Emanuel Admassu’s Graduate Urban Design Studio at Columbia GSAPP. Selecting Atlanta as the field of study, Emanuel encourages his students to wrestle with the various social, economic, racial, legal, and anthropological systems and vectors which inform our agency, or lack thereof, within and against our built environments. This was the first chance we had to engage with the students in person, and did so over two days as they visited sites of study in Atlanta, including our pilot at 918 Dill Ave. We presented the students with examples of the interconnected challenges that we have faced and continue to do so, in the pursuit of launching this pilot project and the larger Community Stewardship Trust: for example, balancing the tension between permanent affordability of housing, with (community) wealth building. The snippet below is from their class syllabus, and a full report can be found here.

“The hegemony of real estate—systems that value people over property—in order to develop a dynamic catalog of spatio-temporal constructs. Through radical reinterpretations of historical and contemporary interventions where the everyday struggle begins to approach the surreal—or even, the sublime—we aim to liberate urban design from its historical commitment to borderization. We will celebrate undervalued spatial practices that actively dismantle the Cartesian frame of racial capitalism, as a gathering of performances committed to imaging a different world, because the status-quo is untenable. Atlanta After Property reframes the discipline of urban design by reimagining the city of Atlanta in solidarity with contemporary movements of Black liberation, anti-coloniality, and mutuality; working against the ruthless policing, dispossession, and displacement.”

Highlander homecoming

Nestled in the hills of Tennessee, the Highlander Research and Education Center has been a gathering place for education and action, resilience and resistance for activists, civil rights leaders and community organizers since 1932. 2022 marked Highlander’s 90th anniversary year, commemorating nearly a century of work in fostering social justice and building a more equitable future. Zach and Dani had the opportunity to join this year’s Highlander Homecoming, and the motto of the weekend: “There’s A New World Coming,” spoke to the passion and reflection it inspired.

Although neither had ever visited Highlander before, Homecoming was a truly apt moniker. Stepping into the crisp fall air felt like a warm hug, the energy comfortably electric. A reunion of shared goals, memories, and experiences activating collectively to face the challenges ahead. Attendees came from a range of different practices, illustrating how interconnected our respective strategies for freedom really are. The workshops and learning sessions reflected this diversity – from exploring music as a community storytelling tool, to creating theories of change inspired by mycology, to harnessing the power of anger as a means of restoration, it was exciting to soak and share in this mutual exchange of wisdom and earnest praxis. We’re looking forward to our next trip to the mountains – especially the development of the Southern Memory Workers' Institute.

Programming UPDATES

This year, in partnership with Incremental Development Alliance, we launched the first year of the Atlanta Small Scale Development program to support local residents and organizations to develop small-scale real estate projects that provide affordable and accessible housing and commercial spaces for their neighborhoods. Over 35 local residents engaged in training in small-scale development, learned about the different models and strategies to create local real estate that supports communities long-term (versus flipping), project plans and proformas, and met with local developers, city officials, and funders. The program provided space and coaching for residents working on projects that they own and control, such as small multifamily housing, ADUs, neighborhood commercial spaces. We will continue our work with them in 2023 to help bring their small-scale projects to life while applying our focus of housing justice.

In 2020, through the Transformative Development Partnership,

The Guild and TransFormation Alliance set out to create a collaborative network of neighborhood-scale developers of color in the city of Atlanta to provide them with pre-development funding and technical assistance in support of projects in Black and Brown communities. Each member of this cohort successfully used the support, resourcing, and partnerships of the program to navigate both the pandemic and the structural inequity inherent in development to move their projects forward. Overall, $100 K in predevelopment funds were granted to the cohort, which they leveraged 500x totaling over $50 M in capital raised. 180 K sf is in development in BIPOC neighborhoods, totaling 100 affordable housing units, and 15 units for local SMEs supporting 120 jobs. The cohort also engaged 3 national CDFIs, shared challenges and recommendations, and inspired the development of BIPOC-focused products.

This year, we worked on designing an expanded version of that program and in partnership with The Center for Community Progress, The Guild will launch a new TDP cohort in 2023 — expanding to 12 developers and land banks across Georgia. The program will bring together a cohort of 12 Black and Brown developers across the Georgia. The program will provide the cohort with pre-development grants to support their active projects, host convenings that cover key topics, and provide opportunities for knowledge sharing and partnership between the cohort, local land banks, land trusts, and municipalities.

Mutual Aid

In March, a simple inquiry about using the lot we own at the corner of Dill and Sylvan blossomed into a partnership that gave a glimpse into the future we’d like to see. As part of the ongoing mutual aid work of our partners Community Movement Builders (CMB) and EndstateATL (ESA), we jointly launched The People’s Block Party, a regular mutual aid pop-up of personal goods, clothing and pantry items, along with music, games, fellowship and most importantly – a bounce house. Over the next few months this became a site for self-expression, conversation, education and connection.

CMB embodies a practice of building liberated zones – territories where local communities have complete control of their socio-political and economic conditions. Our ongoing partnership with them is to support the buildout of these liberated zones. Mutual aid is a foundational tenet of sustainable self-determination – the people are empowered and resourced to care for themselves and each other. In a city undergoing increasing violence and neglect from the state, our need to strengthen these systems of community care grows more urgent every day.

As stewards of the physical container for these pop-ups, we had to re-imagine and reorient. We reckoned with neighborhood history: how do we incubate giving at a site previously used as a dump? What guard rails are needed to prevent those entrenched patterns from resurfacing, from both within the immediate community and outside it? What do people need to feel safe on both sides of the mutual aid coin? All questions we continue to explore answers for as we prepare to shift into construction mode for 2023.

innovation in economic architecture

In January 2022, The Guild was named a Featured Innovator as part of the Valuing Homes in Black Communities Challenge. The Economic Architecture Project’s Innovation Challenge was a collaboration between Ashoka and the Brookings Institution which sought to highlight innovative projects nationwide with the potential to redesign markets to address the devaluation of homes in Black communities. The Guild was selected for our Groundcover fund & initiative which aims to create community-owned and governed real estate in Black communities by incubating and investing in models such as Community Stewardship Trusts (CST). Specifically, the CST aims to create new models for ownership and real estate development in Black communities.

The Community Stewardship Trust (CST) is a concept developed by The Guild to enable community residents to become investors and incrementally buy back the equity in local properties at below market rate. It is a community wealth building vehicle that provides an entry point for organized, friendly capital to acquire community assets and transfers them into ownership by the community; helping build assets and equity for communities otherwise excluded from wealth-building opportunities.

As a featured Innovator, The Guild was awarded a cash prize and participated in a panel cosponsored by the Economic Architecture Project and the Terner Housing Innovation Labs entitled “(Re)designing the housing market: innovating collective ownership models to expand rental housing.” The panel was moderated by Tony Pickett, of Grounded Solutions Network, and additional panelists included leaders of Trust Neighborhoods, Village of Love and Resistance (Baltimore, MD) and Jane Street Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative (New Orleans, LA).

Press & other media

Is there room for longtime residents in “that new Atlanta”?

Nikishka Iyengar & Genia Billingsley, Atlanta Magazine, 09/14/2022

Building Power, Building Wealth: The Value of Community-Driven Models

Lem White and Keiko Murase, Nonprofit Quarterly, 6/22/2022

fellowships