Land Reform School — Bay Area Winter 2024–25
The Urban Role in Processes of Agrarian Transformation
Building popular power for land reform — connecting urban tenant struggles and rural farmworker movements across the Bay Area.
Co-hosted by Radical Agroecology Dinner and Discussion (RADD)
This winter school is about more than understanding land issues — it's about building the organized capacity to win. We focus on concrete strategies for developing popular, working class power to transform who controls land and how it is used.
We particularly invite folks in the greater Bay Area who work with, or are interested in, intersections of land and liberation. Please try and commit to the whole course.
Let's build out an organized network for land reform in our region and beyond!
The role of urban-rural networks to effectively advance a land reform proposal and build the political alliances necessary for victory.
Historical and contemporary politics of land in the Bay Area, CA, and USA — understanding how power has shaped land distribution.
Urban applications of agrarian land struggle for tenant rights to the city — connecting housing and land justice movements.
Concrete steps to foment community organization for land reform and build sustained movement infrastructure.
First Wednesdays
6:00 – 9:00 PM
@ Gill Tract Community Farm
December 3 – March 4
Reading groups & field trips alternate between main sessions for deeper study.
Each session includes a communal meal hosted by RADD, featuring food grown with care for the land and people. Breaking bread together is fundamental to building the trust and solidarity necessary for transformative organizing.
This winter school is grounded in the understanding that land reform is fundamentally about class struggle and the redistribution of power. We reject approaches that treat land as merely an environmental or cultural issue while ignoring the economic and political forces that concentrate ownership.
Politics is Strategic Terrain: Politics is not a bad word but "the struggle over who decides how we live" — the very terrain where our future will be won or lost. We must engage politically with strategic clarity, not moral appeals alone.
Organization Over Romanticism: The success of Global South agrarian movements stems from organizational precision and clarity, not cultural factors. We need serious strategic thinking about capacity-building, political education, and infrastructure development.
From Defensive to Offensive: We do not need to remain on the defensive but can claim our right to determine history. Even amid fascist attacks, people are ready for struggle — we must offer a clear path forward.
Urban-Rural Unity is Essential: Land reform cannot be won by rural movements alone, nor can housing justice be won by urban movements alone. The working class must unite across the city-countryside divide to break landlord and corporate power.
Build for the Long Term: We're not building a study group — we're building sustained organizing infrastructure. This means committing to ongoing political education, concrete mutual aid projects, and accountability to working class communities.
The separation of city and countryside serves ruling class interests. When urban tenants and rural farmworkers fight separately, landlords and agribusiness win. But when we recognize our common enemy — those who profit from concentrated land ownership — we can build the united power necessary for transformation.
This winter school develops our capacity to build these connections concretely: matching urban food cooperatives with rural producers, connecting tenant unions with farmworker organizations, creating networks of mutual support between city and countryside. Theory must become practice.
Click any session to expand the curriculum details. Field trips and reading groups between sessions.
We'll explore historical examples from the Global South where popular movements successfully won land redistribution, examining the organizational capacity and political strategies that made victory possible.
In-depth exploration of specific land reform case studies. We'll analyze how movements built the power necessary to win, what obstacles they faced, and what lessons we can apply to California. This deeper study session connects historical examples to our contemporary organizing challenges.
This session grounds our analysis in the material reality of the Bay Area, connecting historical processes to present-day organizing opportunities. We'll examine both the forces concentrating land ownership and the growing movements resisting displacement.
We'll visit sites that illustrate the land struggles and histories we're studying — places where working people are organizing for their right to stay, farm, or return. This experiential learning connects theory to the physical landscape of our region and introduces us to ongoing organizing efforts we can support or join.
We examine how struggles for housing justice in cities and struggles for land access in the countryside are part of the same fight against concentrated land ownership. Urban workers need affordable housing; rural workers need land to farm. Both need to break the power of landlords and land speculators. This session develops our understanding of the political alliances necessary to win comprehensive land reform.
An experiential learning opportunity to witness urban-rural connections firsthand and understand the strategic importance of these alliances. We'll meet organizers building these bridges and learn from their successes and challenges.
The winter school doesn't end here — it's the beginning of an organized network. We'll discuss ongoing initiatives: Bay Area organizing sessions, vendor-matching programs with student cooperatives, engineering brigades with struggling agricultural producers, and fundraising for landless workers' trusts. This is about building the infrastructure for a long-term movement.
DJ'd by the Machete DJ Collective
Celebrate our learning and build community through music, food, and collective joy! Movement building isn't just meetings — it's creating the relationships and culture that sustain us through long struggles. Dance with us as we commit to the fight ahead.
This in-person political education program brings together organizers, farmers, students, and land defenders from across the Bay Area and beyond. Includes communal dinner at every session.
Gill Tract Community Farm
Albany, CA
First Wednesdays
6:00 – 9:00 PM
December 3, 2024
January 7, 2025
February 4, 2025
March 4, 2025
Radical agroecology dinner
Reading materials
Field trips between sessions
This winter school is organized by the Plurinational Land Reform in CA Working Group, which emerged from our 2025 Summer School that brought together 105+ organizers across California. We're not just studying land reform — we're building concrete organizing infrastructure.
Our work is grounded in the principle that we do not need to remain on the defensive but can claim our right to determine history — building popular, working class power to win a dignified life for us all: a right to work, land, housing, and food.