The protection of environmentally vital ecosystems can stop biodiversity loss and promote sustainable development. Long-term protection depends on supporting local communities worldwide with deep, intergenerational knowledge of how to care for their biocultural heritage. Their vast understanding of right relationships with biodiversity and sustainability leads to major outcomes in habitat conservation, economic vitality, cultural vibrancy, renewable energy, and climate change preparedness.
Cultural wisdom.
Global impact.
Our rural communities have been excluded from access to the expertise needed to negotiate complex transactions that protect the places they’ve long cared for from environmental destruction. Expertise in real estate acquisitions is critical to increasing legacy ownership. This work can happen alongside the desire to enhance local control for community-held title recognition.
Unlocking the full scale of global conservation and sustainable development impact depends on building culturally-rooted communities’ capacity to secure land. This potential can be realized quickly by bringing together real estate experts to acquire at-risk areas in a trusted and timely manner.
The Urgency
A well-capitalized, community-led organization is essential to compete in the marketplace on behalf of those seeking to reclaim their homelands. As national governments reevaluate land ownership across millions of acres, the opportunity to shift degrees of ownership to the care of local stewards is both urgent and globally consequential.
What We Do
The Global Land Restoration Fund (GLRF) provides funding, transaction facilitation, and training to restore right relationships between people and place. GLRF partners with local communities and organizations to support the permanent acquisition of their homelands.
Strategic Guidance and Transaction Facilitation
We use real estate and capital strategy expertise to help acquire at-risk lands. With decades of experience, we navigate complex transactions to protect vulnerable biocultural areas and advance community-led sustainable development.
Dynamic and Adaptive Access to Funding
We provide capital for Land Back projects through a flexible Hybrid Revolving Fund, ensuring communities can secure land at the speed of opportunity.
Agile By Design
We support new generations of skilled experts in community-based acquisition of land ownership.
Education and Capacity Building
We support new generations of skilled experts in community-based acquisition of land ownership.
How We Do It
Backing community wisdom with the tools to secure land and legacy.
Reconnecting Lands and Lifeways
Like many of the native and local communities we serve, we have a deep understanding that land is what feeds all of us. Therefore, we approach land conservation with a focus on building deep relationships with the communities we serve to reconnect Indigenous Peoples to ancestral landscapes in ways that restore the healthy, resilient, and reciprocal relationships that sustain our cities, towns, and rural communities.
These interdependent relationships ensure that biosphere, culture, and responsible economic development are built on a new legacy of trust and collective responsibility.
Modern Answers for Historical Issues
We recognize the realities of the ongoing impacts from colonialism, and the barriers these impacts present to the successful restoration of landscapes.
We develop modern solutions to historical issues by securing ownership to the lands that can sustain local communities and Indigenous peoples. Through ownership, communities can practice traditional forest management to reduce the threat of wildfires, reverse the loss of biodiverse habitats, and cultivate investments into self-determined development by marginalized populations.
Hybrid Revolving Fund
Being able to act quickly to opportunities to acquire at-risk lands is essential. GLRF utilizes ready capital via a revolving fund that can be rapidly deployed to be competitive in the real estate market. This fund has the flexibility to be replenished via reimbursable public or private grants as well as the capacity to, when it is essential for success, provide the Indigenous community grant funds directly. The goal in every case is to ensure that our Indigenous partners have the means to acquire the land as well as an enhanced ability to act on their own behalf for future land back transactions.
Bridging Diverse Knowledge
Our Board of Directors is multigenerational, and is composed of Indigenous and community leaders to ensure that we live up to our responsibilities to the local communities of the landscapes we are working to protect and conserve.
Teaching the Next Generation of Conservationists
GLRF recognizes that our responsibility to restore right ownership of land also comes with the obligation to ensure that those that come after us have the skills necessary to carry on our important mission. GLRF works in partnership with the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) at the University of Michigan to teach graduate students the multiplicity of disciplines needed to work within Indigenous communities to assist them in reacquiring their lands and waters.