Nuns and Nones project teaches sisters how to create land legacies for justice

April 21, 2022

"Healing relationships, whether that's between people or the Earth, is a core characteristic of women religious."

—Dominican Sr. Quincy Howard, of the Sinsinawa Dominicans, who own a massive campus and 400 acres of prime agricultural real estate in Wisconsin

The Issue:

Many Catholic sisters throughout the United States “now find themselves akin to empty nesters in outsized homes, their estates too big and demanding for their needs.”

The Solution:

Selling? Downsizing? They aren’t the only options.

Thanks to the Nuns and Nones Land Justice Project that is aiming to demonstrate:

The properties belonging to sisters are opportunities for them to reimagine and utilize the future of their land in a creative manner in line with their charism or penchant for climate and racial justice.

Through the Land Justice Project, which concludes its inaugural eight-week course next week (April 28), “sisters have been learning how to create new land legacies that center racial and ecological healing.“ With “land experts, Indigenous leaders, and environmentalists as presenters, the course is also a form of networking to empower participants with resources and relationships as they begin to experiment with their property planning.”

The Land Project is part of the Nuns and Nones organization, which exists to, ‘build bridges between unlikely allies.’

Why Nuns and religious women?

“Because sisters, they believe, are the ideal candidates to revolutionize land access. They have an embodied history of making countercultural choices, of taking risks for a cause, of loving the world into its more just future."

—Sarah Bradley, who leads the Land Justice Project's strategies and partnerships

Brittany Koteles, director of the Nuns and Nones Land Justice Project adds, “Just as sisters have been bringing on more lay leaders and partners into their ministries in response to declining membership, the same can be true about the way they're thinking about their properties."

Also an asset: “They also have structures of collective governance that allow them to make choices on a larger scale than individual landowners, “she added.

Howard of the Sinsinawa Dominicans, in Wisconsin, says, "We are moving into a new paradigm.” The Land Justice Project, ”has given her a new lens to frame her work in her congregation, as well as an appreciation for being flexible while "moving into the unknown."

"Part of our mission is to find a better way to move into the future, to bring about a new creation that involves healing all of these systems ... in a way that is more aligned with the Gospel call."

Filling a gap

For the past five years, “the growing Nuns and Nones movement has brought together Catholic sisters and young spiritual seekers in small-group dialogues throughout the country, bonding over their mutual interest in contemplation, community life and social justice.”

But after spending time listening to sisters," founding members, Bradley and Brittany Koteles, “sensed a gap between where the climate justice movement is heading and the conversations they heard around religious property planning.”

(GSR graphic/Soli Salgado)

"The people who are best positioned to model a healed relationship with the Earth" — Indigenous people and other regenerative stewards — "are oftentimes the least likely to be able to do it because they can't access it…We need to build pathways to land equity, land tenure and land stewardship for those groups of people."

—Brittany Koteles, director of the Nuns and Nones Land Justice Project

Building the bridge

The bridge between the sisters, who were “having conversations about the future of their properties and the local front-line groups regenerating land and creating local climate resilience and pursuing racial healing,” allows for the sisters, who were “largely familiar with the option of conservation easements, for example,” to explore “more collaborative alternatives that are fairly foreign to their communities, such as long-term leases to local farmers or selling below market value.”

"Once that was more apparent, we started hearing [from the sisters], 'This is needed, this is different, this is really energizing,' "

—Brittany Koteles

Photo: GSR graphic/Soli Salgado
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