our mission

The Black Family Land Trust, Inc. provides educational, technical, and financial services to ensure, protect, and preserve landownership for African Americans and other historically under-served landowners. The BFLT currently works primarily in the Southeastern United States, with active projects in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. 

Guiding Principles

• ​We must acknowledge and celebrate the contributions of the African American land ethic which embraces land stewardship; social and economic justice; and the land based community economic development made by People of Color.
• We must ensure that any land held in trust must be responsibly managed to retain all of the land’s sustainable resources, economic potential, environmental, cultural, and other attributes.
• We must affirm that our programmatic actions will be evaluated for long term impacts on future generations.
• We must focus our operations where African American and other historically underserved populations have experienced and continue to experience high rates of land loss.
• We must assure that we have both the short and the long-term organizational capacity to fulfill our program commitments.

our vision

Long term, BFLT envisions a nation where:

• African American families retain ownership of their land, and lost land is returned to Black ownership.
• Land valued by African American communities is protected: productive farms and forests, lands crucial to African American history, culture and heritage, lands that support Black communities economically, and environmentally sensitive land.
• African American families and communities secure and assert the power of citizenship that accrues through land ownership in a democratic society.
• Current and future generations of both urban and rural Blacks are fully engaged in the land retention struggle.
• Education, technical assistance, cooperative ventures and new and existing enterprises enable us to support economically and environmentally sound land stewardship.

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