.

About that time Bob Swann had begun to lose faith in the ability of direct action alone (i.e., protest) to engender solutions to war, poverty and injustice. Swann was corresponding with Griscom Morgan of Community Services, Inc. on the question of thorough-going alternatives to the land tenure and money-moving patterns dominant in the Western world.

Luitweiler got involved in this dialogue and drafted a paper on 'land reform in America.' In embryo, his paper set forth the now popular thesis that the American peace and freedom movements were in essentially the same position as liberation movements in the Third World, and that protest could never be sufficient without alternative institutions developed from the grassroots up in total independence of the status quo. Further, Luitweiler had some ideas of ways grassroots institutions in the U. could creatively interact with those in the Third World to the furthering of land reform in both.

Then in late '65 Ralph Borsodi returned from several years in India with a remarkable plan. Theory seemed about to blossom into practice on a grand scale. Borsodi had gotten together with Jayaprakash Narayan and together they'd cooked up the best idea any of us had heard for a long time.

Back then in 1965 over ten thousand Indian vjllages had already reconstituted themselves as gramdan cooperatives. These villages often lacked adequate financing to make gramdan more than tokenism. They needed credit for planting loans which would not depend on the local landlord-moneylenders. There were Sarva Seva Sangh development workers in every village who could supervise the necessary small crop loans if only a source of funds were available.

Borsodi at that time had already matured his theory of a non-inflationary currency to be called the Constant. He proposed to Narayan that Constants be issued as debentures in the U.S. and Europe to attract investments from socially-motivated people who in addition sought a hedge against inflation. Likewise, at the Indian end, the loans to farmers and villages were to be non-inflationary, calculated not in rupees but in Constants. The project was to be vast enough to support itself by arbitraging commodities, thus avoiding any significant portion of its assets remaining in national currencies long enough to suffer from inflation.

Around this Narayan-Borsodi brainstorm, Bob Swann incorporated the International Independence Institute in 1966. Unfortunately, the plan never materialized. The Government of India had gotten wind of it and viewed the proposed Constant currency as a threat to the rupee. Narayan received word from the Indian government that if he introduced the Constant into India his funding for Sarva Seva Sangh would be discontinued. (India too had its War on Poverty in those days.)

Swann lowered his sights and persevered. The American South had many of the same problems as an 'underdeveloped' country.

BREAKTHROUGH

He organized a half dozen key black Southern ruralists to accompany him to Israel for first hand research. A 5800 acre farm near Albany, Georgia was for sale for $1,080,000 and Swann offered to raise the money if the black leaders wished to make it a model land trust for expropriated sharecroppers. While in Israel with Swann, the black leaders decided to proceed, following the moshav rather than kibbutz model of land settlement. Unlike a kibbutz, a moshav is only partially a cooperative. Families live in individual homes with 5 acres more or less for their private use, the rest of the land being farmed jointly. Thus from the ashes of the Albany Movement was born New Communities, Inc. of Georgia.

From that time to this, the I.I.I. files show over 50 community land trusts formed, and the actual number is estimated as at least twice as many. Most of these rejected the rigidity of the land trust legal requirements in their states and instead incorporated as non-profit corporations.

With Trust in the Hills, Inc., chartered as a West Virginia profit corporation in January 1975, a trace of direct action sentiment has reemerged after years of mooting. One of the trust's clauses, as you'll see below in the By-laws, calls for us to get together and consider civil disobedience in the event any tract of trust land is threatened by damage from strip-mining, timber cutting, or other non-ecologic exploitation. The threat needn't be aimed at trust land specifically. If, say, strip mining is contemplated up-creek from a trust tract, we would meet to consider direct action to nip the idea in the bud. We'd consider sitting in front of bulldozers or haul trucks, picketing offices of the stripping company, and hopefully new approaches with more novelty, as yet uninvented. We wouldn't engage in sabotage, however, as some have lately in Kentucky.

At Trust in the Hills' first annual meeting in April, '75, six tracts of land were donated to the trust and then leased back by it to their residents. Donated land would be accepted also, as by the gramdan movement in India, in cases where the doners did not intend to reside on the land. The trust would try to locate persons interested in leasing such land, so long as their intent was to live on the place, not just visit it occasionally.

We put a lot of thought into the By-laws of Trust in the Hills, trying to design them from the viewpoint of lease-holders, not of trustees. (Albeit the trustees are simply one representative from each lease-hold.)

Finally, although Trust in the Hills is a profit corporation, you'll see that our By-laws make us non-profit. This was we have fewer annual forms to file than if we were chartered as non-profit. We can't file with the Internal Revenue System for tax-exempt status now, but maybe we'll outlive the federal government. Who knows?