Dear Friend

The Annual Meeting of the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires
will be held on Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 7:00 PM at the First
Congregational Church, 251 Main Street, Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Gar
Alperovitz, the guest speaker for the evening, will speak on "The
Possibility of Profound Change in America."

Gar Alperovitz has had a distinguished career as a historian, political
economist, activist, writer, and government official. He is currently the
Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of
Maryland and is a former Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge University;
Harvard’s Institute of Politics; the Institute for Policy Studies; and a
Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution.

He is the author of the 2006 book "America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our
Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy" and of the more recent "Unjust
Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should
Take It Back." His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, the Nation, and
the Atlantic among other popular and academic publications. He has been
profiled by the New York Times, the Associated Press, People, UPI and Mother
Jones and has been a guest on numerous network TV and cable news programs,
including “Meet the Press,” “Larry King Live,” “The Charlie Rose Show,”
“Cross Fire,” and “the O’Reilly Factor.”

He is one of the initiators of the much watched and discussed Evergreen
Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio. The initiative is inspired by the
Mondragon Cooperatives (http://www.mondragon-corporation.com/ENG.aspx)
started in the Basque region of Spain in the 1950s -- a model of successful
worker ownership of industry. The Cleveland project promises to create
green industry jobs in one of the most depressed neighborhoods of the city
and make owners of workers. Aware that this rebuilding could raise land
prices and lead to gentrification, the project is employing a community land
trust from the start to gather and hold land for and by the community into
the future.
For more information:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,94733,00.html

The central principle motivating the work of a community land trust is that
buildings, homes, barns, fences, gardens, and all things done with or on the
land should be owned by individuals, but the land itself is a limited
community resource that should be owned by the community as a whole. The
Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires owns three parcels of land.
It has 22 sites leased for affordable housing for year round residents, a
site leased as offices to a non profit, and a site leased as an organic
farm. Membership in the Land Trust is $10 or 10 BerkShares per year.

Gar Alperovitz is a leading thinker on strategies for democratic,
community-based economic development. He is also the president of the
National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives and is a founding
principal of the University of Maryland-based Democracy Collaborative, an
international research institution sponsored by leading universities and
citizen organizations.

The annual meeting of the Community Land Trust is open to the public.
Tickets are $5 or 5 BerkShares (www.berkshares.org) at the door. Current
members of the Community Land Trust may attend for free. For more
information, call (413) 528.1737 or visit www.clandtrust.org. The meeting
is co-sponsored by the E. F. Schumacher Society (www.smallisbeautiful.org).

We hope you will join us to welcome Gar Alperovitz to the Berkshires.

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Amelia Holmes, and Kate Poole
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
www.smallisbeautiful.org
www.neweconomicsinstitute.org
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230

Board of Directors: Gar Alperovitz, Jessica Brackman, Neva Goodwin,
Hildegarde Hannum, Eric Harris-Braun, Dan Levinson, Constance Packard, Will
Raap, Gus Speth, Joseph Stanislaw, and Stewart Wallis.