Multiple sets of hands of diverse skin tones next to each other on a tree trunk under the tree canopy

about

returning land sovereignty to Black and Indigenous communities

vision

A Black hand in front of a backdrop of ferns

To restore right relations between and within people and nature; and thereby create reverberating circles of ecosystem restoration and community healing that return land sovereignty to Black and Indigenous communities.

A Black hand in front of a backdrop of trees

A group of Shelterwood Collective members and guests during a disability justice focused land visit at Shelterwood

In so doing, to enrich the waterways, fill the food baskets, quicken the forests, rematriate laughter, paint a new culture, rewild our hearts, and heal our people, so that we may all be free.

origin story

Shelterwood Collective is the manifestation of co-creators Niko Alexandre and Layel Camargo’s shared dream to develop a land project grounded in the ecological and cultural practices of their ancestors. In 2017, Niko was working in international forest restoration and Layel in climate justice and cultural organizing. They met at a radical farming workshop at Soul Fire Farm, and began dreaming about a climate project centering Black and Indigenous communities tending forests in ways that restore right relations across multi-species kin while also capturing carbon and reducing wildfire risk.

In 2020, amidst the clarifying convergence of a global pandemic and uprisings for Black lives, Niko and Layel secured generous seed funding to manifest their vision. In the summer of 2021, the collective found a place to lay roots, becoming stewards of a 900-acre forest and former church camp on Unceded Kashia and Southern Pomo territory, above what’s now called the Russian River in Sonoma County, California. The forest was degraded and suffered from severe wildfire risk, emblematic of California’s forest conditions and environmental precarity, and was otherwise at risk of being sold to a logging company.

During Shelterwood’s early years of creation, a diverse board grounded our growth in frameworks of Just Transition, Queer and Indigenous land stewardship, Afro-Indigenous food systems, cultural strategy, narrative change and environmental anthropology. Our collective members weave these threads together in practice, living communally on the land, committing to principles of horizontal governance and mutual accountability, and tending to each other’s health and wellbeing as part of an interconnected ecosystem that will expand past the forest edge.