DEVELOPER & STEWARD

A combination of the threads of Johnson’s life-long work center on securing autonomous space for marginalized people. She is establishing the Cultural Land Stewardship (CLS) and is justly co-developing three large scale properties in Kalamazoo. Heightened by her time as a 2021 Rubinger Community Fellow, she is engaged in establishing initiatives like the CLS as a significant solution to retaining cultural and historic sites in locations of rapid, intensified, or systemic cultural, economic, political, and social change. Maintaining cultural, political, and social stability for established communities to strengthen the capacity of current residents and/or owners, enlivens the core of her work. Through the organizations she has founded, she centers just development and/or sustainable healing of the land and buildings where cultural and familial heritage is threatened, while shaping and re-defining the terms of progress. For Johnson, equitable development generates a nexus of autonomy and authenticity to focus on preserving property at the intersection of environmental, historical, cultural, and family urgency.