What is the Land Justice Gathering?

The Land Justice Gathering is a meeting of people working on intersecting land justice issues from across the UK. 

We are aiming to build a broad and vibrant movement to change the land system. We want to build a just movement with diverse leadership, whilst also working towards strategic collective action. This national event has been running now for 3 years and has focused on movement building for people working on land reform and reparations, racial justice, abolition, climate justice, housing justice, conservation and environmental justice, international solidarity, and collective ownership models. 

The land justice gathering is a space for connection, learning to trust each other, strategising and collaborating across difference, for learning and sharing. It is a place to find belonging and home, and to build coalitions. It is a space to restore and repair, make connection with land where it has been lost, and to hear many histories and stories of land injustice. It is a place to understand what land justice means to us, our ancestors, in words and in practice. 

To move at the pace of trust we have so far curated an invite list so that we gather people from different parts of the movement, particularly those that are less visible in dominant society or who are bringing challenge to the direction of the movement. So that this becomes an equitable space, we have been careful to make sure that people who are generally less represented in movement spaces can come and participate and don’t feel so outnumbered. We would like to create a movement where people from different social, economic and cultural positions can take leadership. We still have some way to go.  

We now organise collectively, with open working groups around programming and facilitation and care and accountability, with Shared Assets coordinating the logistics and the working groups. 

If you have ideas of who to invite, or would like to be part of a working group to organise, please contact christabel@sharedassets.org.uk. We have some funds for participation in working groups if they are needed, as we would like it to be possible for people who have barriers to resources, including time, to also be enabled to get involved. 

‍What has happened so far?

We started off smaller in 2022, and with the gathering hosted and convened by Shared Assets. We brought the themes of how to build a collaborative movement, narratives of land justice, and resourcing a movement as a whole. The second year, in 2023, was much bigger, where we tried to dig into the common issues of the movement, and work out what coalitions might look and feel like - there was a challenge to doing this before trust had really been built, and the gathering took a turn towards unearthing the deeply embedded colonial origins of land injustice and how this plays out today. There was a need to pause and think again about how we organise: across the tension between getting on with the collaboration, and creating the relationships and understanding of common values which are foundational to organising. 

Last year, we had workshops on Planet Repairs and bringing a reparative framework to the local organising we do, a workshop on Palestine from the Jewish land movement in the UK, and some image theatre exploring how we get our movement from being disparate to one defined by collective liberation. We collectively came up with values for the movement - you can see a working statement here. We also had to get our hands in the soil and take walks outside making friends with plants, feeling the need to move our bodies as well as putting our minds to movement building!

This year we continue to organise more collectively, and have defined the purpose according to the direction we can see forming from previous years, with an intentional move towards collective action and strategic planning. You can find more info on gatherings past and present, here.

‍What is the purpose of this year’s gathering?

Moving on from last years, this year aims to:

‍1 ✨ Continue to build relationships and trust with one another including: breaking the silos and meeting people from different parts of the movement and connecting with people doing similar things 

2 ✨ Move from values into actions by define tangible aims of the movement in the current context 

3 ✨ Organise as a land justice movement including through movement strategy and developing accountable collective organising structures

4 ✨ Connect with the land, with one another and have fun whilst we are at the gathering

‍Get involved 

To submit a suggestion for a session, activity or caucus space please take a look at the values of the land justice movement, and think about how your session relates to the four objectives above. If you have an idea, at any stage, whether you want to facilitate or not ***please submit the proposal here*** The programming group can support you to develop the idea or find people to run it.

Where will the gathering be?

This year’s gathering will be at the Beeches in the Hope Valley, Derbyshire. 

The venue is just coming into its own, having been until recently a residence for Quakers and now being taken on by people wanting to move the venue into more community use. There are three indoor rooms of capacity between 20 and 30, a kitchen and approximately 30 beds inside. There will be an outdoor marquee which can accommodate 60+ people. There is  camping opposite the house, and some space to park up in live-in vehicles. There is a garden, and a small woodland. The house is fully wheelchair accessible and the camping field/marquee can be adapted to be. In dry weather the woodland is also wheelchair accessible.  

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