Our Mission

Empower. Inspire. Connect.

Idlewild has largely been studied as a failed project. Common narratives suggest it was a place that was created out of the grace of white folks to give middle-class black people the chance to own land, then when segregation ended black people themselves saw Idlewild as irrelevant and abandoned it. 

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While we do not doubt that there were (and are) folks here with that mentality we also know that there were many more that had something more radical in mind. 

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We believe that Idlewild should be preserved as a living example of the black radical tradition. Our mission then is to assist in the preservation of Idlewild through mutual aid, black ecological design, legacy building, and archiving. We are working with individual families who are invested in participating in our services that over time will transform Idlewild into a living museum (the first dedicated to black rest), artist colony, food forest, and cooperative artisan mecca.