Puget Sound Sage’s Community Real Estate Stewardship Team (CREST) is a nine-month long learning circle, designed to support and train grassroots organizations led by and for low-income communities and communities of color in pursuing community driven development, land stewardship, and strategies for long-term affordability.

Our experience over the last ten years has found that the most effective ways to mitigate displacement, and reverse its impacts, is through community-driven development and local stewardship of land.  Sage defines community-driven development as locally-led organizations and institutions – with strong community accountability – owning land and developing projects that respond to, and reflect, the unique needs of their community.  Community-driven development leverages existing assets and resiliency strategies to stabilize the housing, business, and cultural institutions that are essential to a thriving community.

Over 9 monthly sessions, the Community Real Estate Stewardship Team (CREST) cohort will collectively learn about displacement, the regional impact to our communities, and what community-driven development models have been successful in stabilizing low-income communities and communities of color. We hope that participants will walk away with increased relationships, knowledge about how to do accountable community-driven development themselves, as well as identify the systems change needed for a community-driven development strategy to achieve a scale that ensures gentrification won’t sweep away whole communities.

Since the program's launch in the summer of 2019, leaders from organizations across the region have met monthly to deepen their knowledge of the models of community land ownership, gained clarity of how development happens, and how to finance and fundraise for their projects.

The CREST fellows have heard from some of the region’s most exciting development projects- El Centro de la Raza and Chief Seattle Club – and from people who are creating places for this all to happen, City of Seattle Office of Housing, the Equitable Development Initiative, and Ostara Group.

CREST Cohort Members:

Access the CREST Curriculum:

We are pleased to offer our CREST curriculum for those who want to deepen their understanding of community stewardship of land. These resources are intended for community-based groups, tenant associations, land-owners, funders, and others who are committed to Black-, Indigenous-, and people of color-led land stewardship and community power building for permanently removing land from the speculative market. 

For each session we include a slide presentation and slide notes, hand-outs or training materials, and other resources, including term sheets, examples, and supporting research. The Learning Activities are located in the PowerPoint Slides unless otherwise noted or linked. 

Feel free to use this curriculum in your community, but we ask that you credit Puget Sound Sage for content we create. If you’d like to share with us, we would love to hear how you are using the curriculum! If you have any questions about this program or the curriculum, please reach out to howard@pugetsoundsage.org 

TraeAnna Holiday, CREST cohort member from Africatown Seattle:

"I am so honored to be a part of what Puget Sound Sage is doing in this city. They brought together 20 organizations who may not have known each other, and together we are taking progressive models that are happening across the nation to reform and develop our spaces, have ownership in our spaces, create and rebuild our communities, and reclaim what has been taken from us. I represent Africatown Seattle, and if you know of what the Central District has gone through - it has suffered a great deal of gentrification, inequity and displacement. Africatown is working hard on the ground to develop buildings that are bringing our communities back.

For me, this is very personal. My family was displaced in 2003 and my parents had to buy a home in Federal Way. I have never known of Federal Way before. I grew up in the Central area, and it was all I knew for my whole life. It was so heartbreaking to my mother for us to have to move. We are one family, but displacement has affected so many more. This is why I’m so excited to be a part of this cohort. With the work of Puget Sound Sage, I am learning more on how to do this in a progressive way, ensure that we keep affordability for our communities and for our people, and to come back to spaces that we grew up in that we know and love.”