Burlington Associates in Community Development , LLC is a national consulting cooperative established in 1993. The firm has assisted nonprofit organizations, municipal governments, and state agencies in twenty-three different states. The cooperative's seven partners operate out of offices in Burlington, VT, Boston, MA, St. Joseph, MN, Portland, OR, and Oakland, CA.
Burlington Associates has worked in a diverse array of inner-city neighborhoods, suburban towns, and rural communities, assisting nonprofit developers of affordable housing, municipal governments, state agencies, and community development financial institutions in 39 different states.
Burlington Associates is the premier provider of technical assistance to community land trusts In the United States. Several partners have been involved with the CLT Movement since the early 1980s. They have helped with the start-up of over 80 CLTs, while assisting many others with organizational development and long-term planning for the stewardship of their portfolios and the sustainability of their operations. The “CLT Resource Center” which Burlington Associates added to its website in 2005 has become the first place to which many practitioners turn when seeking training guides, legal documents, program evaluations, policy research, and other technical information about CLTs. Most of these materials can be downloaded free of charge.
Burlington Associates is guided by a practical philosophy of community development in its selection of clients, its definition of problems, and its assessment of various courses of action. Equitable and sustainable development, according to this philosophy, is made possible by:
- Nurturing a robust "third sector" of private, nonprofit organizations capable of working in concert with government to deliver housing and other essential goods and services
- Ensuring the full participation by populations normally excluded from the political and economic mainstream
- Redistributing the benefits and burdens of growth
- Retaining and recycling scarce subsidies from public and private sources
- Encouraging political self-determination and economic self-sufficiency through community control of land and greater reliance on locally-owned enterprises
- Protecting and preserving fragile environmental resources
