New Communities was a 5,700-acre (23 km2) land trust and farm collective owned and operated by approximately a dozen black farmers from 1969 to 1985.
Working with such collective farm activists as Robert Swann and Shimon Gottschalk, several black leaders in Albany, Georgia, patterned the form of the organization after legal documents used by the Jewish National Fund in Israel.
According to the findings of federal arbitrators in 2009, unlike similar requests from area farmers that were white, New Communities' application for an emergency loan from the United States Department of Agriculture for an irrigation system was denied with no clear explanation.
[7] In the aftermath of the Pigford v. Glickman class-action discrimination lawsuit, in 2009 New Communities received the largest of thousands of compensation awards from the USDA.
Lewis found the department's actions discriminatory, awarding the former land holders $12.8 million, of about $1 billion paid out to more than 13,300 black farmers as of July 2010[update]).