Storytelling & Culture Keeping

Our roots run deep — and we express them in every form: word, song, film, paint, movement, and more.

At Richmond LAND, we believe culture creates change.
When our people are displaced, our stories, memories, and creative legacy are at risk of erasure.
We use cultural strategy to protect what’s ours and grow our cultural sovereignty — deepening our connection to place and each other.

We develop art, storytelling, and visual media that shift narratives around land and housing in Richmond.
Through creative expression, we build knowledge, bridge generations, and ignite the imagination — because culture moves people before policy ever will.

Public Events & Workshops

Richmond LAND hosts and leads events, workshops, presentations, public demonstrations, and deploys other community activation strategies to increase residents' leadership around neighborhood stabilization and community development efforts. Past offerings include:

• A public screening and discussion with the filmmakers of Decade of Fire

• A workshop on Black Wellness featuring local practitioners

• A site design workshop for the North Richmond Eco Village

Project Overview

Southside Talks is a cross-cultural conversation and storytelling series that focuses on the community of Southside Richmond. This project was launched in January 2021 out of the desire to honor and uplift the stories of home and migration to the Southside of people of color, paying special homage to Black and Latinx communities. The Southside is home to culture, creativity, music, laughter, as well as stories of grief, despair, and tragedy. Within these conversations we touch on defining home and community, all while tackling issues around housing and injustice in Richmond. 

This project consisted of a three part series of conversations that began with a 1:1 conversation with Richmond LAND's Artist in Residence, Ciera “Cici” Jevae, a multi-generational Southside resident. The second round of conversations were cultural group discussions for both Black and Brown community. 

The last round was a collective community dialogue across generations and cultures which was hosted in person at Nichol Park in Richmond. What followed was a FaceBook Live event where we invited the larger community into the conversation as a means to center healing, and build towards collective unity as we name bias, prejudice, and anti-Blackness as it has shown up within our community. 

All of this culminated into Black Out poems, which is a poetry format that takes text from an interview, a book, a description etc. and blacks out words in order to ground the reader in the power of the message. These Black out poems are from virtual and in-person interviews done over the past year rooted in vulnerability, love, truth, and the stories of home-grown Richmond residents. The overarching themes captured in the Black out poems below are: Resilience, Housing Security, Belonging & Diversity, and Roots. 

Point Molate RFP

After a widely contested Point Molate settlement that accelerated the sale of 270 acres of public land along a 1.4 mile stretch of unoccupied shoreline near the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge, the newly convened board of RCDE (Now Richmond LAND) engaged in our first rapid response effort to mobilize homegrown residents' engagement around the future of Point Molate. 

See our early statement on the Equitable Development of Point Molate - Richmond Community-owned Development Enterprise  

Our involvement in the Point Molate fight was an important stance against the erasure of BIPOC participation in land development conversations. Pushing against the idea that the future of Point Molate was either for economic development and housing production or environmental conservation and open space. Instead we created a process for communities of color to discuss, create, and produce their desired outcomes for Point Molate and equitable development more broadly.

Key Results from our Involvement:

• Raising the visibility of homegrown residents of colors participation in the city's half a million dollar community engagement process.

• A parallel engagement process that yielded input from a diverse range of community members and resulted in the published report: Equitable Development of Point Molate that was adopted in the City of Richmond's RFP process.

• A Terms of Commitment document that was championed by city council members during the developers public presentations and used as a template for resident engagement in future community benefit campaigns across the city.

Community Co-Design

Resident Demonstration Projects

The Building Power Fellowship (2019-2021) seeded the ground from which Richmond LAND has grown many of its projects – leveraging a collaborative, co-creative process with Richmond residents, community leaders, and neighborhood mobilizers. We help grow the power of homegrown residents through capacity building to engage and subvert conventional planning, real estate, and development practices to combat displacement and put forward equitable growth of our neighborhoods and built environment. The Fellowship included presentations from experts in the field, skill-building, power-mapping, and orientation to the field and practices of development. We prioritize “learning through doing” as the fellows build out viable project concepts and supporting arts, cultural and community engagement activities

Building Power supports a cohort of Richmond area residents to design, research and bring to life community development and housing project concepts that serve low-income residents of color. The cohort advances, clarifies, and envisions these projects through arts and cultural activities, and events that reflect low-income communities of color’s right to stay and live affordably in West Contra Costa County.

• 2019-2020 Building Power Fellows: Kapris James, Brandy Khansouvong, Alfonso Leon, Princess Robinson, Eduardo “Lalo” Martinez, Jenny Rougeau,  Sary Tatpaporn.

• 2019-2020 Partner Organizations: Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Rich City Rides, Urban Tilth

Program Highlights:

The fellows advanced two viable project concepts rooted in the needs and vision of Richmond residents. The first is the North Richmond Eco Village concept designed to regenerate abandoned land and create sustainable housing for low-income North Richmond stewards. Learn more about how this project is progressing here:

The second project concept from the fellowship is an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) project conceptualized to stabilize and connect Laotian residents. The idea began by looking at how ADU development could help Prevent a Second Displacement of Richmond’s Laotian Community. Richmond LAND will continue to evolve the program by exploring the intersections of affordable housing development, community stabilization, wealth-building of long-term residents, and the strengthening of our communities cross-cultural legacy for the benefit of all Richmond communities. Our goal is to launch the program with one block in Richmond to develop 6-10 units at the same time. This helps anchor the existing community in place, and connects neighbors to each other and to the services that they need. The units will be low-cost rentals for community members in danger of displacement and struggling with housing costs. The project would benefit homeowners by creating a monthly income from the lease of their land. This helps keep the community intact and people close to each other and their resources. This helps keep the community intact and people close to each other and their resources. This project is in line with the city goals in the General Plan, Housing Element, and Health in All Policies to increase housing density, prevent future displacement and increase the health of the residents of the city overall.

The fellows also led several arts & cultural activities. Learn more about that here:

Creating An Equitable Development Toolkit?

The Point Molate Rapid Response effort taught us that while we are shifting our efforts toward community-control through land acquisition, and creation of our own development projects, there must still be a concerted effort to raise awareness and build collective knowledge in our communities about the role residents can play in advocating for their vision of development.

Residents should be engaged in defining what equitable and visionary development means to them.