Stewardship Trusts and the Commons: Holding What Must Not Be Sold

From the legal traditions of the stewardship trust and the governed commons, Providence inherits its institutional spine. The trust — a structure in which assets are held and managed for the benefit of others, under a binding duty that the trustees cannot override for their own gain — is the direct ancestor of the nonprofit Foundation that holds the Providence commons in a form that cannot be sold or captured without dismantling the trust itself. And the scholarship on the governed commons, which documented in rigorous detail how communities have successfully managed shared resources for centuries without either privatization or central control, is the empirical foundation for the claim, central to this entire volume, that a commons can be durably and well governed.

This scholarship matters enormously to Providence, because it answers, with evidence rather than hope, the reflexive objection that a commons must inevitably be destroyed by the self-interest of its users. It demonstrated that communities sustain commons precisely when they have clear boundaries, genuine participation in rule-making, graduated accountability, and accessible means of resolving conflict — design principles that Providence's governance directly inherits and attempts to encode.