My Account

Objectives

The land for our village will be owned by Kotare Community Land Trust (KCLT)

The KCLT’s purpose is to develop Kotare Village as a self-reliant community, where we honour the land we hold and respectfully regenerate its ‘Mauri’ (life force) such that it can nourish and sustain its members and those that follow.

Major Objectives include:

  • To establish a legal ‘membership’ base upon which peoples relationships with the Village legal structures are built, including their rights to participate in those structures.
  • To establish the legal structures necessary to perform those tasks required to facilitate the creative and orderly objectives of the village.These to include:
  1. A not for profit land trust, the Kotare Community Land Trust, which has the responsibility of owning the land, directing the long-term development of land and resource use, and being party to leases and license agreements with members and other resource users. This trust will have a company as the sole trustee. The directors of this company (‘trustees’) will be elected representatives as per the constitution of the Trust.
  2. An Incorporated Society Kotare Village Incorporated, which has the responsibility of managing the commons and all the leases and license agreements held by the Land Trust. Membership of the Incorporated Society is gained by a membership fee in association with the lease of a house site.
  3. To create a home for the Koanga Institute, where it can continue with its work, both for the benefit of the village and the wider community.
  4. To form a rural village, within multiple clusters, to settle members, and allow regenerative use and management of the land and its environment.
  5. That all land uses will be regenerative of the land (not merely sustainable) in terms of supporting a mixed ecology of people, cropping, pasture, domesticated animals, forest, wetlands and wildlife.
  6. That the primary use of the land will be to support the material and cultural needs (within a simple lifestyle) of those people living on the land and their environment (food, health, clothing, shelter, energy, knowledge,spiritual sustenance, ‘social glue’, ‘currency’, finance).
  7. That the secondary use of the land will be for sustainable ‘export’ production of goods and services.
  8. To show rationally that the four fundamental processes that drive our ecosystem (the water cycle, the mineral cycle, energy flows, and community dynamics) are respected and used regeneratively for all land uses. This also applies to any ‘imported’ inputs that will be required for long-term sustainability of the productive systems on Kotare Village land.
  9. To employ Permaculture design as one basis for planning and design of managed systems.
  10. To create a process for allowing members (both individually and collectively) to have agreed ‘entitlements’ to leases, licenses and/or rights of occupation, to use land or resources owned by Kotare Village.
  11. To ensure that value paid to the Kotare Village for membership rights, and private assets or value developed on the property, are protected and returned in a fair measure if members decide to relinquish their entitlements.
  12. To develop various plans to assist our purpose, these to included ; a Land Use Concept, a Self Reliance Plan, a Research Plan, and others.

Constitution
The Constitution for the Community Land Trust is not yet complete.  We have been able to get lots of information about the experience of these trusts in the USA and UK which will be useful in finalising ours. One of the recurring themes we’ve found is that CLT’s are very flexible, and are written to suit the individual circumstances. So at present we are in the process of developing a constitution that we think will suit our purpose.