Search Results for: consensus

Would you be interested in attending a two-day, three-night founder’s meetup event to collaborate with others who are currently planning and/or newly implementing residential intentional community? It would be free as a work trade. (The (r)evolution will not be commoditized.) Each adult would be asked to contribute 1 hour of work to benefit the lodge owner and event planner (suggestions at the end), 1 or 2 hours of help with meal prep or meal clean up, and change bed linens the last morning, before leaving.

Who: 10 IC Founders+Partners

That would add up to between 10 to 20 adults who are planning and/or actively forming a residential intentional community (and their kids, if that makes attending possible), plus lodge owner (a gestalt therapist and former residential community founder), plus ICmatch founder (me). Each founders’ meetup would be a private invitation-only event. This web page is set to not show the content in search results, and it’s not linked to from other ICmatch pages. For those who accept the invitation (even tentatively), I plan to post a 100-word blurb about their project(s). You’re also requested to make an offer and an ask, for the other participants to consider.

What: Sharing Expertise

Each participant will have 50 minutes to share their expertise and project(s). All founders are requested to attend each session. If you don’t think you can learn from one or more participants, then attend so you can contribute and improve that presentation thru discussion.

Where: Marble Lodge in Northwest Colorado

Marble is a remote small town an hour from Glenwood Springs, Colorado. If you travel Amtrak to GWS, I can pick you up and/or arrange carpool with other attendees. At this location, the event could be free. The venue also goes by the former name Beaver Lake Lodge, and the above photo was taken from its deck. We could plan alternate locations regionally for separate events closer to participants. I could then find an ecovillage host who would accept a work-trade to host a founders’ meetup at their site.

Why: Learning and Collaboration

We can learn from and support each other’s work. We are the ones the younger generations are waiting for. Those seeking community who aren’t the best fit for yours could be referred to other founders.

When: A 3-day Weekend Before May 2025

To be decided, based on what works for the majority of those invited. Attempting to accommodate work schedules, I’m looking at long weekends that aren’t major holidays. Other dates that aren’t long weekends could work.

• Veterans Day weekend: November 9–11 (probably too soon, but could work for me)
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day: January 13–15 
• Presidents’ Day: February 17–19 

How: Socialize, Recreate, Learn, Serve, Clean Up

Planning will include as much consensus-based decision making as is practical and helpful.

• Day 1 could be a travel day, hiking or cross-country ski or canoeing if you arrive early enuf, collaborative or individual work project if you arrive early enuf, with a social event that evening. If agreeable to all, let’s make a collaborative dinner. Afterward there could be an invitation to present music, film (no big screens on site), or other creative works in the conference room. Some may choose to end the day with a soak in a large glass-enclosed hot tub.
• Day 2 could be a solid day of 10 back-to-back workshops and presentations (9a-7p) with short bio-breaks in between and meals during presentations.
• Day 3 could be a leisurely brunch, clean-up, early travel home for those who must, 1 or 2 hours of collaborative or individual work project, and more recreation for those who can stay an additional day.

Offers and Asks

Event Planner

Ask: For those who haven’t already, participants would be asked to complete an ICmatch profile and group profile on the Team Up page. The site is only as attractive as the forming communities it links members to. I see this as a win-win strategy.

Offer: In return, I will do an hour of research for each participant to find details on foundations that have aligned funding priorities.

Lastly, see if this might interest you. I think Daniel is great! Stories of Transformation (a pay-what-you-can course)

Lodge-owner

The following help would pay back the lodge owner for hosting the founders’ meetup at no cost.

• There’s a large hot tub four to six times the standard size. It has a leak that could be detected and fixed, but it’s remained lower on the list of repair priorities.
• Someone back me up on this: The broken dusty plastic plants in the solarium have got to go.
• There’s a window that won’t shut. The wood is swollen from moisture it seems.
• There are some outdoor cluttered areas where items could be moved or brought to the dump.
• Lots of unique collectibles could be sold, but owner doesn’t have time or internet skills to do it.
• Owner admits he has too much clutter of valuable materials, large appliances, trailers. Make an offer if there’s something you need.
• One floor needs tiling.

Links and Projects of Founders’ Meetup Attendees

TBA

General Community Agreements

•      Community agreements as per Requirements and Maintenance for Community Membership/Partnership & Committees (1/9/2012)

•      Community members will abide by guidelines of Fiscal Policy (5/15/2012)

•       Decisions are made by creative alignment

•       Use respectful voices and actions (12/28/2011)

•       We support the fourth amendment and the safety of the entire community (12/28/2011)

•     We honor diversity in belief systems, spirituality, and ceremony (12/28/11)

•     We have a commitment to transparency (12/28/2011)

•      Leave all community spaces clean and organized (10/20/2011)

•      When using community-owned items or items lent to you within the community, leave them in as good of shape or better than you received them in

•       Noise ordinance enforced from 10 pm to 8 am (7/10/12)

•       Community members agree to be in communication with all members of the community regarding decisions that affect the whole community before taking action. If a community member is impacted by an action that is taken by another, the community member should be in communication as soon as possible regarding the impact of that action. Ways to communicate to the whole community may be discussion at meeting, text, email, FB messaging, etc. (7/10/2012)

•     Keep promises/community agreements in the timing and way we said we would do them. If for some reason the promise or agreement won’t be able to be done in the timing or way promised, notify person(s) you have the agreement with as soon as you know it’s not happening as planned. (10/20/2011)

•      Be accountable for the problems caused by un-kept promises and take action to get complete with other community member(s) regarding them, especially and including matters that may damage relationships within community. (10/20/2011)

•       Disputes will be handled through mediation. Individuals can choose a mediator who works for both parties. The agreement that gets created through the mediation must receive alignment from the whole community (12/28/2011)

•       Members will communicate to the facilitator if they have new or returning visitors coming to a community meeting, and will post visitor names and their relationship to them on public Facebook group (11/14/11)

•      Community members with friends/family members visiting longer than two weeks must have community alignment. Concerns related to guests in community to be brought up and discussed at community meetings (1/15/2013)

•      Guests remain visitors until completion of community membership process (1/15/2013)

•      Community involvement relinquished upon consistent neglect of community agreements, and with alignment of community (1/9/2012)

Community Membership

To become a member one must:

▪ Agree to abide by any pertinent policies & rules adopted by the community, including the Community Agreements

▪ Attend eight community meetings within six months and contribute to two quarterly workdays

▪ Have 100% creative alignment of community members

▪ Maintain communication with the community at large as to their participation over time

To MAINTAIN membership, members must:

▪ Abide by any pertinent policies & rules adopted by the community, including the Community Agreements

▪ Live in the community, or have active plans being carried out to live in the community.

▪ Attend at least three community meetings per quarter

▪ Attend at least one work day per two quarters (unless otherwise specified)

▪ Attend at least one social gathering yearly

▪ Participate/attend 75% of community meetings yearly. Alternately, a member may participate in 2 hours of community contribution in lieu of each meeting

▪ Receive community alignment to reinstate community membership if member becomes inactive as defined by a. alignment by the community and b. non-participation during a twelve month period. (3/12/2012)

▪ Communicate leave of absences longer than 30 days to the community in advance. Members will be exempted from attendance requirements during their time of absence. This includes seasonal memberships (3/12/2012)

▪ Review notes for any community meetings they do not attend

▪ Agree to give their creative alignment to whatever decisions are made at the community meeting if they do not attend

▪ Communicate non-alignment (regarding decisions made at community meetings when they were absent) with all community members within one week. This includes proposed changes/alternatives

▪ Retain the support of the community as to their membership

Rights & Privileges of a Community Member:

•   Responsible stewardship and usage of community spaces and resources

•   Alignment opportunity on all general community matters and any committee matters for which the member is a committee member

•   Inviting visitors to community meetings, and sponsoring visitors and visitors of returning visitors at community meetings

All community members are also considered community partners (although not all partners all community members *refer to Community Partner section).

Previous relationships/Newborns:

(1/9/2012)

Ex partners of current community members are welcome based on the current community member’s opinion of their ex’s involvement in the community.

Newborns are automatically born into community membership.

Community Partnership

A partner of the community is someone who does not plan to live in the community, but wants to participate with the group.

This includes:

-Individuals planning to live in the community in the future.

-Individuals who want to actively engage in the community, but do not plan to live there.

-Individuals who have a specific contribution to make to the community.

A partner becomes a partner by visiting with the community and having creative alignment from the community. Alignment decisions will be announced at least one month ahead so that everyone can make arrangements to voice whether or not they are aligned. The person seeking partnership will not be in the room for the creative alignment conversation. There will be a person from the community designated to have a conversation with the person seeking partnership after the alignment conversation.

The amount of time visiting will vary from partner to partner, depending on their intended involvement. In most cases, the partner will then have voting rights in community matters, EXCEPT that partners do not have voting rights on fiscal matters (unless they have already made financial contribution to the community). Some partners may not be granted voting rights, if their participation is extremely limited; these partners may have voting rights in committees such as gardening, but not in overall decision-making.

All PARTNERS must:

•   Agree to abide by any pertinent policies & rules adopted by the community

•   Maintain communication with the community at large as to their participation

To maintain Alignment Opportunity rights partners must:

•   Attend at least three community meetings per quarter

•   Attend at least one work day per quarter (unless otherwise specified)

•   Maintain at least one social gathering per quarter

•   Retain the support of the community as to their participation

Rights & Privileges of a Community Partner:

•   Voting on certain matters specific to their areas of participation in community unless otherwise determined

•   Input on design and use of community space (may be limited to certain decisions determined by community members)

•   Inviting visitors to community meetings

All Committees

•       Unless otherwise stated, committees are governed by the same rules as the community (5/15/12)

•       Committees must keep meeting minutes (12/28/11)

•       No committee has authority to make decisions for the community unless the community gives them that authority (12/28/11)

Fiscal Committee

Description:  The Fiscal Committee (FC) shall consist of at least 3 people appointed by the community at large. There shall be a chairperson for the committee, designated by the members of the committee.

The purpose of the FC is to:

    I. Manage the bank account(s) of the community, including keeping up to date bank records, paying bills, and making the general community aware of all fiscal issues.

    II. Make decisions on smaller fiscal matters, issue checks as needed, and make recommendations on larger fiscal matters to the general community.

    III. Protect and ensure the fiscal viability of the general community.

Policies and Procedures:

    I. The FC shall take notes at ALL meetings, including any impromptu meetings held over the phone, through computer chat, etc, thus creating a record of all fiscal decisions made and their outcomes. These notes shall be given to the secretary of the general meeting within 48 hours of said meetings, so that the secretary can include these notes in the minutes/agenda of the next general meeting.

    II. The FC shall appoint a member who will manage the bank account(s) of the community, by using Quicken or other computer software. This person shall make available at each general meeting the balance of these accounts, and bi-annually shall present an overview of income & spending.

    III. The FC can, by meeting in person, over phone, or getting alignment over email, text, or chat, make decisions regarding spending in amounts under $100, assuming funds are available. For spending in excess of $100, the FC can align on recommendations to make to the general community at the next general meeting.

    IV. The FC will manage all bills (utilities, etc) and expenses approved by the general community, and can pay these even if they are in excess of the $100 spending limit. All annual expenses approved by the general community do not need to be re-approved by the general community; however, it is the responsibility of the FC to notify the general community when these expenses are upcoming, preferably 2 weeks before the payments must be made.

    V. The FC will manage, in spreadsheet and/or contract form, the amount of investment into the community made by each member/household, as well as any payments made back to each member/household. This will include rent payments, purchase of ‘pad sites’, expenditures for improvements or projects, “HOA” fees, and any other payments or investments. This information will be kept accurate and up to date at all times, in order to support the individuals and the community in being fiscally responsible.

Community Officer Terms

*Annual shareholders meeting and elections will be the first meeting in July

Officers: (5 year terms, stagger)

President:

Vice-President:

Secretary/Treasurer:

Community Agreements on Shared Spaces

 Yurt

•   Take shoes off when entering

•   No children in yurt without permission of adult

•   No food

•   Close dome when leaving

•   Take garbage when leaving

Hot tubs

•   No children allowed in large tub

•   Observe noise ordinance

•   Shut off jets and close when finished

Chicken Coop

•   Certify kids before giving them access to the coop

•   Keep door secure with bolt in place

•   Only take eggs on your days

•   Rotate purchase of food

Responsibilities of the Meeting Facilitator

•   Be in communication with the previous facilitator about what items are on the agenda and why

•   Email returning visitor questionnaires

•   Create an agenda and post it on Facebook at least one week prior to next meeting, asking for amendments/additions

•   Start meeting on time regardless of attendance/dinner status

•   Facilitate the meeting as follows:

1. Acknowledge members not present or when they will be coming if late and have communicated

2. Briefly introduce new visitors

3. Read or have another member read the community mission statement

4. Follow agenda (see agenda format below), directing and redirecting conversations to stay on topic

5. Be accountable for the reporting of action items and creation of new action list

Limit visitor sharing to one person or couple per meeting. Limit each sharing to 10 minutes. (11/14/12)

Format for Agenda for Community Meetings

1. Announcements/reminders (Upcoming events, including next meeting date/location/facilitator)

2. Business items (things that require a motion & vote, or other actions)

3. Open discussion

• a. Prioritize, with items requiring action handled first
• b. Estimate and assign amount of time for each agenda item, and request for assistance keeping on track of time (3/26/2013)

In the case of alignment conversations for new community members:

If needed (for sensitive matters) a member of the community will be designated during the alignment conversation to have a conversation with the individual seeking membership after the alignment conversation, in situations where 100% alignment does not exist.  In a circumstance where 100% creative alignment is present or where creative alignment is not reached and all present at the meeting agree, the individual(s) seeking membership will be invited back into the room to hear the result of the alignment conversation.

For a wide range of issues, from climate change to fighting corruption, the here and now of our local communities point to solutions to these challenges.…It can be difficult to see the opportunity amid the chaos and fear that abounds, but make no mistake: The next decade will belong to those who can take the bottom-up grassroots energy unleashed by radical connectivity and marry it with effective, engaged leadership to craft stable and responsive institutions….It will belong to those who gaze beyond the chaos. (Mele, 2013, p. 266)

What we need are more people who have the capacity and interest to take on the crises of a deteriorating economy and widening wealth gap. People who understand or are willing to learn how to gather a team and empower them effectively to build and organize a community or facility that could allow residents a better quality of life than they currently have. It’s our job to envision other possibilities. In a dreamer’s world, everyone has a place and a role. Yet our role is to take on gradually only the tasks we can manage.

To help the intentional communities movement approach its potential, we need to incorporate all the wisdom and balance we can. We need to learn from the mistakes of struggling and failed communities of the past. Leaders especially need to commit to share with others the power for all members to hold each other accountable, or they will likely create a dysfunctional culture that may harm more than it heals.

The very people who would make our most noble leaders are often the most likely to have imposter syndrome. You may need a lot of encouragement to take on that role. It may feel much easier to lead as a group of three to five individuals, and group format can have advantages of balancing any extreme tendencies. You’ll need to develop cohesion among yourselves first, both to move forward effectively and to set the groundwork for a culture of support and camaraderie.

Seth Godin (2008), in a free downloadable online book, invites you to lead, responsibly:

• “Not all leadership involves getting in the face of the tribe. It takes just as much effort to successfully get out of the way” (p. 39).
• “Generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish efforts of someone doing it just because she can” (p. 17).
• “Tribes are about faith—about belief in an idea and in a community. And they are grounded in respect and admiration for the leader of the tribe and for the other members as well” (p. 18).
• “True fans are hard to find and precious. Just a few can change everything. What they demand, tho, is generosity and bravery” (p. 29).
• “Consider any vibrant group—political activists, nonprofit volunteers, or brand fanatics. In each case, it’s the microleaders in the trenches and their enthusiastic followers who make the difference, not the honcho who is ostensibly running the group” (p. 38).
• “Are there thousands of reasons why you, of all people, aren’t the right one to lead? Why you don’t have the resources or the authority or the genes or the momentum to lead? Probably. So what? You still get to make the choice” (p. 76)

Leadership is…

• behaviors and skills, which can be learned even tho they come more naturally to some.
• easier for those with an environment of mentoring, effective examples, and network with circles of influence
• easier for those with genetics for high serotonin, high energy, high extroversion, low in some measures related to conscientiousness (they don’t get lost in details but rather persuade others to do the detail-oriented tasks), moderate in agreeableness (not querulous, but willing to take an unpopular stand)

Mike New, a project management consultant with a passion for ecovillages, has noticed three main difficulties that have caused failure of intentional communities: lack of professionalism, lack of funding, and toxic social dynamics (Future Thinkers, 2021, 31:50). Funding is the topic of a different page, but professionalism and social dynamics are discussed below. By lack of professionalism New means unwillingness to incorporate business structure or organizational management principles into the community, so there is a lack of designated responsibility and accountability. By toxic social dynamics, he means avoidance of conflict, and other dysfunctional ways of managing disagreement.

Decision-making

Decision-making can be better with a diversity of input from others who have different strengths and skill sets. People recognize others’ blind spots better than their own. But be aware of possible biases such as groupthink. Set processes can help. Experiment with holocracy’s decision-making model integrative decision-making. You might keep a supermajority vote as a backup decision-making strategy, especially for less consequential decisions, when a consensus-building strategy isn’t helping you move forward. When you feel stuck, seek help from mentors. Read Frisch’s (2008) article “When Teams Can’t Decide.” You will make so many decisions that if you don’t have processes for decisions, it will be easy to fall into immobilization from decision fatigue.

See https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/group-decision-making/

Essentialism

I know one intentional community leader whose fatal flaw is that she can’t resist having her finger in every pie. Much of her brilliance is wasted thru “shiny object syndrome.” The projects that would yield the most return have stagnated because her preference for novelty keeps her spinning her wheels starting new projects that never finish. She uses up her abundant energy and expertise in continually favoring the urgent or the immediate over the most important. Even when she finds others to pass a project over to, her lack of availability for guidance results in projects that have little chance of completion, especially because she makes herself a bottleneck by insisting that others consult with her and “overcommunicate” about all decisions. Principles of essentialism teach that accomplishing what is most important requires that we let go of a lot of less important tasks that take up our time and attention.

Humility Allows Learning

Don’t be daunted if some members decide after a time that it’s no longer workable for them to be on the team. Try to understand what is at the root of their decision. If you accept their stated reason at face value, or simply blame them, you may miss out on your most important learning opportunities. Ego can take you down, and if you’re evidencing it early on, you may build up an amazing organization that deteriorates a decade or two down the road due to leadership issues that were unresolved at the beginning. Leaders who own both their strengths and their weaknesses are respected for their contribution while appreciated for revealing their humanity.

Toxic Workplaces or Groups

One intuitive and empathic type described how he survived his workplace that had the typical bullying tactics of pressure, labeling, exclusion, and domination.

Most of my life I worked for a major corporation. I was just a cog….I went through a lot of being manipulated and pushed by management to do more….I had some supervisors who determined that I wasn’t the right kind of guy to work there….I was threatened with being fired, and when things got really intense like that, it seems like they tend to use peer pressure. Pressure is one of their tools. If they can get the people you work with to judge you harshly and harass you….and during those times I would just sort of shut down and back up. I didn’t even feel like I was in my body. I would just back up and look at the bigger picture, and I would just sit there and stay calm. “Separate yourself from this. These people don’t know what they’re saying. They don’t know how harmful they are,” and I would just back up and step away from it, and somehow over all those years I never got fired. I never lost any wages. I always moved on to better jobs, better places, better supervisors, and everything worked out well. It’s hard to do, but it’s really the only way to survive. Corporate America is brutal, and it’s like a pyramid. The people at the bottom are producing all, doing pretty much all the work….and the same goes for government. (IANDS, 2019, 11:40)

It is critical for intentional communities to not re-create cultures that encourage or tolerate these toxic social dynamics. It unfortunately happens. If you learn to recognize it, you can save yourself a lot of grief, and possibly others.

CEO coach Jerry Colonna (2019) focuses on the leadership in organizations, more than the organizational culture, because he believes the unexamined baggage of a leader will be passed along unintentionally thru the rest of the organization. The organization starts to mirror the idiosyncrasies and dysfunction of the leader. He believes radical self-inquiry and honesty is critical to professional success and healthy relationships.

The idealistic types drawn to social change tend to be helpful, agreeable, and quick to question themselves, while slower to challenge their leaders. Intentional communities can combine the dysfunctions of the workplace cultures with the aspirations and devotion of religious groups.

Avoid Secrets

Transparency in communicating with the group prevents gossip, which can be troublesome because it is frequently exaggerated and offers a one-sided perspective. It’s also helpful to be involved in the larger community, so that they understand from your perspective what you’re about, rather than from rumors. Leadership skills and principles aren’t for manipulation or power over. The most effective leadership will be when your entire leadership team shares the responsibility and power of decision-making. This sets the stage for bringing in others to your community as you find those who are a good fit, and helping them level up. If your goal is to bring others up to your level as soon as they prove themselves trustworthy, there are few secrets you’ll need to keep.

Leadership Style

Here are some principles by which to identify pro-social versus self-serving leadership:

Leadership is…	Group-serving	Self-serving
motivating and coordinating the cooperation of others based on…	identifying strengths and interests	coercion
persuasiveness is based on…	honesty, sincerity	exaggeration
based on a capacity to and willingness to benefit others, which is…	broadly distributed and passed along among members	exclusive to in-groups or distributed in exchange for favors outside of agreed-on protocols
an attractive “occupation” for extroverts who…	value affiliation	value status
driven by…	a vision of a better future	unmet and sometimes unexamined psychological needs
use of others’ vulnerability to…	increase group cohesion and identify areas for growth	take advantage of followers who are (a) too trusting or (b) unable to determine how to avoid harm or tolerate exclusion

It is important to recognize that any leader can have a combination of beneficial and exploitative behaviors. In fact, it seems reasonable that few would exemplify either category exclusively. Imperfect leaders are effective when they have the humility to allow others to point out when they seem to be self-serving. Leaders can share power in a way that curbs their own excesses.

Even tho typically each project has a founder who is the prime motivator, it’s important to institute both policies and norms for shared governance. Without this, leaders can (even unintentionally) take advantage of the empathic nature of others.

Egalitarianism (participatory leadership)

Leadership is best when participatory, for several reasons:

• All of us have faults. If there are no checks on a leader’s power, even the seemingly most engaged and mission-aligned leaders can operate dysfunctionally.
• Too much pressure is placed on the leader, and not enuf responsibility is placed on team members for them to feel invested and add their best work to it.
• The project won’t fall apart if an unexpected occurrence takes the leader out.

The following are popular participatory leadership models that have proven functionality and many descriptions to support their implementation:

• Board meeting roles and protocols are used in many contexts worldwide, including many intentional communities, so this might be a familiar format to start with.
• Holocracy is a proven model that is growing, even in the corporate world. It is suitable for even a small startup team and ideal if there is not one clear leader and the team wants to keep it that way. See https://www.holacracy.org/explore/why-practice-holacracy
• Sociocracy is an excellent and proven model, but it’s designed for representatives of subgroups to meet up to report to main groups. As a startup, you’ll likely be too small for that at first.

Egalitarianism does not necessitate purely consensus-based decisions on all matters. In fact, Christian (2013) insists that decision processes can break down from weariness if meetings are too prolonged. Having a majority vote as a backup, after trying consensus for a set amount of time, can help alleviate decision fatigue.

The following are resources for developing self-organizing systems and participatory leadership:

• Leadermorphosis podcast presents interviews with leaders who are innovating around shared and egalitarian forms of decision-making and profit-sharing
• A consulting firm: https://amara.fi/stories/
• Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations
• Badass democracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYES81Ibj4A
• Loomio is decision-making software and web services designed to assist groups with
  collaborative, consensus-focused processes for proposals and ongoing
  discussions.

Succession Planning

Burja (2020) notes, “A system can be functional in the founding generation, but rapidly dissolve after the founders are gone” (p. 179). As we borrow, restore, and invent governance practices that work for our particular communities, we serve the next generation by recording what works. We do well to borrow, restore, and invent rituals for disseminating this understanding.

Technology is the systematic application of knowledge, achieving goals that would otherwise be impossible. But not all technologies are material. The ability to organize human relationships, actions, and groups in organized and effective ways is itself a specialized form of knowledge called social technology. Like material technologies, people can develop social technologies to facilitate the flourishing of society and its people…. If there are sociological principles that are true in sufficiently large sets of possible conditions, then that knowledge can be reacquired. (Burja, 2020, pp. 174, 179)

How do we make sure our communities are not vulnerable to takeover by those intent on self-serving solutions? How can we protect ourselves from those who would take advantage of our work, to our detriment? We each must answer that ourselves, thru developing our intuition and seeking experienced sources of guidance. If we were to agree on and disseminate a prescription for how to protect ourselves, it would be used against us. Any system of protection could be gamed. You can’t go too far wrong if your intent is consistently for the greatest good; you’ll attract the help you need. But you can put in place protections that enable a balance of power and transmission of values. You have paved the way, are paving the way. Help the newer ones level up. Experienced community leaders would do well to let in new ideas, while new community members would do well to respect the the “tried and true.” Elders are obligated to share power in order to train the next generations.

Further Reading

5 leadership practices: This summary of a mediator’s study of a massive survey of leadership practices is simple and practical. Simple does not equate to easy. These are practices each member of a leadership team can adopt.

References

Christian, D. L. (2013). Busting the myth that consensus with unanimity is
good for communities. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-03-20/busting-the-myth-that-consensus-with-unanimity-is-good-for-communities-part-ii

Domet, S. (2020). A Q&A with collaborative leadership
facilitator Miki Kashtan. https://www.mindful.org/a-qa-with-collaborative-leadership-facilitator-miki-kashtan/

Other references cited in this page are noted here.

Pros and cons of coliving community depend on the particular needs and preferences of community seekers. In general, challenges are similar to those that families, churches, and civic organizations find difficult. Communication and fairness are consistent needs. It is often inconvenient to engage in joint decision making, and new norms need to be learned. For communities who manage to stay together, benefits include better physical health and sense of connection, support with child-raising, friendship, personal growth, cost saving, shared resources, and a social safety net for members.

Challenges of Coliving Communities

Low Staying Power of Common-struggle Communities

Communities often have formed around a need for practical support. Ethnic enclaves in large cities developed from a need that new immigrants have for a shared language and the comfort of a place where they could purchase familiar foods. Like those organically-formed communities, the common struggle of ethnic groups has also prompted formation of intentional communities such as the kibbutzim, which Bang (2007) describes as long-lasting examples of successful development across a whole spectrum of shared versus individual ownership. Reportedly, the kibbutzim have become increasingly individualistic over time, coinciding with a lessened political support for socialism as people became more prosperous.

Alexa Clayis, co-author of The Misfit Economy, writes about the relation of communitarian experimentation in relation to hard times.

Generally, intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than that of most start-ups. Only a handful of communities founded in the U.S. during the 19th century’s ‘golden age of communities’ lasted beyond a century; most folded in a matter of months. This golden age birthed more than 100 experimental communities, with more than 100,000 members in total who, according to the historian Mark Holloway in Heavens on Earth (1951), sought to differentiate themselves from society by creating ‘ideal commonwealths’. The largest surge in communitarian ‘start-ups’ occurred during the 1840s and 1890s, coinciding with periods of economic depression. But it would be a mistake to see intentional communities merely as a knee-jerk response to hard times. In historic terms, a broader discontent with industrial society has led to people flocking to communes, utopias and spiritual settlements, from eco-villages and ‘back to the land’ style settlements designed to create sustainable lifestyles and a stronger relationship to nature, to communities founded with spiritual or idealist visions for transforming human character and creating new blueprints of society. Of course, the ‘cult’ label is never far behind. Many intentional communities have had to fight their own public-relations battles in the wake of negative or sensational publicity. (para. 3-4)

Unfortunately, “common struggle” communities tend to lose their appeal when life gets easier. People don’t feel a need to rely on each other. Worse is when life doesn’t get easier and community starts to degrade. People in the same struggle start to fight over limited resources instead of pulling together for their common good. Others move away in search of better prospects.

Low Staying Power of Marriages

The staying power of cohabiting groups, particularly in the WEIRD world, is low. For example, in the most typical cohabiting group, the family, divorce is high and multi-generational cohabiting is low after children are of adult age. If we can’t even keep couples together, how do we think we’re going to keep more people than two together? Looking at the mechanisms of interaction in a group, when we take out the legal trappings, it is more obvious what happens by default and what can happen with intention. Western society is currently experiencing fewer marriages, and a resurgence of young adults remaining economically dependent for a decade past the age of emancipation (Pew Research Center, 2019). Many have taken the religious aspect of holy matrimony out of cohabitation and parenting, and still find reasons to stay together. The legal and ceremonious aspects have served a purpose in bringing some stability to family bonds, but they also have downsides such as the capacity for controlling and subjugating others who are economically dependent. In a setting in which we cannot dominate but only attract, how can we achieve group cohesion? When we can do so, it can be delightful. With women’s liberation—without legal, economic, and social pressures to stay in an unhappy marriage—couples are challenged to build in staying power by creating a more equitable arrangement. A common cause or conviction can give us the fortitude to stick it out when community life gets challenging, which means we can enjoy the times when community life is most rewarding.

Low Staying Power of Transactional Relationships

We all want the good feels. Some get it thru drugs. It’s unsustainable and usually ends badly. Some get it thru chasing an elusive goal such as money, status, or sexual desirability. If they attain the goal, they realize it doesn’t satisfy them. They raise the bar—striving until they die—or learn to get their good feels some other way. Relationships are transactional and commodified. We have become a culture that relies on paid services. These transactional moments, even when polite or friendly, aren’t the same as family or neighbors helping out, forming lasting bonds. They are based on the reciprocity of financial transactions rather than reciprocity of trust and care. Our mainstream culture no longer pushes us into interactions that help us experience non-transactional relationships. A growing number have no regular church participation. We can choose not to maintain or create a family. Many believe that only fleeting pleasures are possible and that relationships—especially by having children—aren’t worth the trouble. Especially for those with a past of uncomfortable or abusive relationships, it’s easy to fall into apathy and cynicism.

Resource: Book summaries https://blas.com/the-art-of-community/  & https://blas.com/linked/

Benefits of Coliving Communities

Belonging as a Physical Health Enhancer

It isn’t the survival of the fittest; it’s the survival of the nurtured. —Louis Cozolino, attachment therapist

Every model of what puts you at risk for psychological illness, early death, it’s all about connection. It’s not only connection, but there’s no model of well being that doesn’t include relationships, meaningful connection with others as a pillar, so it’s certainly to our own detriment that we lose those communities and don’t take the time to invest and value. I think the literature is really clear on it. How can we set ourselves up with lifestyles that are more conducive to that I think is something that we’re not yet at a collective level of motivation around. (Kellerman, 2023, 18:13)

Camaraderie in Cause-based Communities

I, back then tho, was much less concerned with governance and more interested in the day-to-day being with everyone and living out my young adulthood as part of a grand adventure….We were recent fugitives from the ‘60s so, structure did not come naturally to us….As for our large-scale decision making, at first it was all pretty consensual, but…. over time some individuals emerged as the true long term leaders….We back then were good at broader things like maintaining an extraordinary low level of violence in a group that large. We were good at recognizing and growing positive sparks in each other. We started out being really serious with each other and over time developed a vast and sophisticated collective sense of humor that lasts to this day….300 people and I know every one of them by their first name….We shared like nothing I ever saw before or since. (JohnCoate, 2018, para. 1, 2, 6, 7)

While the above may be enuf reason for some to experiment with coliving community, staying power appears to depend on members having a higher purpose than their own well being and comfort. A joint mission that gives us a reason to put up with some inconveniences, and gives us trust that others are willing to do the same for us. For the majority of people, it simply seems easier and gives more freedom currently to go solo and purchase the goods and services you need. For the majority of people, it seems easier and smarter to rely on money capital than social capital. The alternative is to go thru the learning process of how to get along, compromising, and putting up with inconveniences for a shared purpose. Sebastian Junger, bestselling author of several titles including Tribe, War, and Freedom, and winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for reporting, states this about group cohesion:

There’s something about not living for yourself any longer that’s enormously liberating….I spent a lot of time in combat with American soldiers actually, and I think one of the things that drew these guys to war, often after a bad deployment, a lot of them sort of missed it, and I think what drew them was the loss of the experience of losing the primacy of yourself as the most important thing in your life. You lose that when you’re in a platoon. I mean you really have to think in terms of the group, and you first might imagine that that’s a loss. It’s actually, you gain by doing that. The focus on the self can be enormously tormenting and make people incredibly anxious. Like it’s not a good place to go. (Ferriss, 2021, 22:57)

Benefits for Families Living in Community

There are strong benefits to nuclear families living in groups that share resources and have social bonds including trust (Belic, 2011). Community can increase child safety and well-being, providing attention and meaningful responsibilities, which can prevent or alleviate addiction to internet-based pop culture trivia. With the high rates of divorce, it’s obvious that it’s hard to adapt to and commit to even one other person, so we’d expect the difficulty to be compounded trying to live with several. Yet there are also protective factors in community. Financial stress is one of the top two most challenging issues for couples (Pew Research Center, 2019), and coliving can help with that. In addition, having others to talk over challenges with, especially when done jointly as an informal mediation, can help alleviate daily misunderstandings and the emotional distance that can develop as a result. For single parents, living in a community of connected people means that there are readily available and invested father figures, mother figures, and for single children, there are likely to be other children around. Coliving community can result in less helicopter parenting, as there are others keeping track of who is coming and going. In a larger community of trust and support, children can experience more freedom and creative unstructured play outdoors.

A single mother reported her experience of escaping isolation by living currently and for the past 12 years in a cohousing community of 20 families, with an enclosed courtyard of common space in the middle of apartments on all sides:

When I moved in here, I was newly divorced with two little children. I didn’t have work, so I was kind of isolated.…I had to find this place, and I found it. It was a miracle I found it. We live 20 families together…[children speaking] It’s like a big family. I have friends in the school and I have friends at home…..It’s nice to have grown-ups who are always looking out for us. If I’ve hurt myself down in the hall, then someone always comes running….[mother continues] I like these elderly people living here, because they are kind of grandmother and grandfather for my children. I feel they love my children as much as I do….It saved me, kind of, to find it, because I needed to be surrounded by other grownups, not only my own very small children. (Belic, 2011, 39:12)

This mother reported that the community eats together nearly every evening. Each family cooks once or twice a month for 40 or 50 people, which takes 4 or 5 hours each time. She compared that with the 2 hours daily it would take to cook and clean up after a single-family meal. Also, children 14 or older take their turn as a small group to prepare community dinners. She continued by describing the time it frees up:

Everybody is talking about stress. And the families with small children have stress because they come home from work, they have to buy, they have to cook. And when I come home and I’ve had my shower, and then I have two or three hours for my children. (Belic, 2011, 42:40)

More Happiness in Community

Mia Mingus expresses the longing many of us feel:

Because on the one hand, it’s true, I don’t belong anywhere, like many of you also probably feel. And on good days, it can feel like a slow, dull, throbbing ache, while other days, it can feel acutely, excruciatingly unbearable. Belonging can be a hard thing to believe in. It can be a hard thing to believe you deserve. It can be a hard thing to be able to even feel.

A millennial interviewer from the School for Ecocentric Evolution & Design Strategies says the following:

What have we been missing, being in this world of separation?…What do we gain by finding community again?  (18:52)….It feels really good and natural to have a group of friends that you really like and some of whom you love who feel like brothers and sisters…and you can count on them….Some communities have that. (SEEDS, 2019, 21:20)

Ed Diener, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois, states a similar finding:

We studied some of the happiest people and we found without exception that all of them had close supportive family and friends. That didn’t mean that they loved everybody or you know they got along with everybody, but what it meant was every one of them had close family and friends. (Belic, 2011, 27:52)

Journalist and news anchor Dan Harris spoke of his realizations about an increased level of social connection:

My happiness level went through the roof from regular social engagement. And this actually speaks to a huge issue in our culture, which is the lack of prioritization of social connection, which has led to a pandemic that predated the current pandemic, which was the pandemic of loneliness, which is a major contributing factor—from the evidence I’ve seen—to depression, anxiety, drug abuse, suicide. You know, there are many contributing factors here from the way we live, you know, the way our societies are structured, the myth of individualism where we think we could do everything alone, social media, which is further sort of taking us out of, you know, seeing each other in person. And I think this is a gigantic social issue. And on an individual level, to be practical about it for your listeners, I think being deliberate about cultivating interpersonal relationships will pay unbelievable dividends….one incredibly powerful one is just having good relationships. It’s just right there in our evolution. We evolved to be social creatures. This is how we survived. And yet we have, as the great writer Johann Hari has written, we’re the first generation to voluntarily dissolve the tribe, but we need the tribe. (Ferris, 2020, 1:17:52)

Not everyone is lucky enough to have had functional sane and supportive family numbers. Some come to community hoping for the respect and acceptance they didn’t get from their families. Some call this a chosen family. When kindness and connection has been inconsistently experienced, it is more likely to be seen as more valuable. Yet, when in-person connection has been missing, some aren’t aware of the potential enjoyment it could bring; many have learned to value physical comforts and the supposed admiration or even envy of others, as commercial marketing and social media have increasingly promoted an online idealized image. Community is the opposite. People close to you see the warts and all, and you see theirs. You may feel more vulnerable, but you also can feel truly seen. My teen, after living in community, said the following:

When you need a hug, there’s always someone close by to give one. People closer than friends are always there. You don’t have to have all your interaction through social media. You get to be around people who see the world the way you do. (“J.” M. Castaneda, 2020, personal communication)

Marissa King, a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, states the following:

Our relationships are necessary, but it’s also where joy comes from. In many ways, I would argue, even the purpose of living. It’s being a part of great community. And that humaneness is what it’s all about.” (Gervais, 2021, para. 2)

Community as a Path for Self-development

It’s easy to be a holy man on top of a mountain. —from The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

“The idea that a group supports the individuals within it towards greater self development is in itself a strong community binding factor” (Bang, 2007, p. 163). To last, a group must be willing to tolerate the discomfort and uncertainty that will surely arise. After a honeymoon phase when new members may be on their best behavior, tensions will surface, and this is a growth opportunity. If they don’t surface, then it likely is because one is brow-beaten or in an unhealthy self-imposed subservience. One intentional community founder and decade-long member, Miriam Martineau, spoke of how challenging it is to achieve a balance where individuality and commonality are balanced effectively:

We both had the sense that the way into the future is through collectives learning, how to collaborate and evolve together….We have seen versions where there’s a very strong sense of the collective, but if you would speak to the individuals it felt like there had been a loss of the individual….There’d been a bowing down to a dogma or a teacher or teaching or a religious path for example….We visited a lot of communities….There’s also communities where the individuals are very strong, quite empowered and sovereign and living their life, but they’re struggling hugely to have a sense of togetherness, down to simple things like they would say, “we try to have a weekly meditation together; we do it, but no one ever shows up.”…Our sense was always there’s a third way….We have experienced it as a state. We think it’s possible and very necessary as a  stage….that we’re working to help create it, and that is this deep sense of coherence amongst people and shared intention and shared values and a shared path, but there is no loss whatsoever in the sovereignty of each individual. If anything the uniqueness of each person is even uplifted and encouraged….and one of the keys that we did discover ourselves…is that in our experience the only way to get that third way is actually thru spiritual growth and maturation in your intrapersonal discernment, in your knowing who you are, where are you coming from in any moment. (Future Thinkers, 2021, February 11, 10:58)

Finding the right community won’t fix an individual any more than finding the right significant other. We each need to do our own inner work, tho others can assist in healing, hinder healing, or traumatize us. Seeking healing probably isn’t the best reason to join a community, but if this is your path, go in with a resolve to learn about yourself from the mirror living with others provides. To keep from becoming obnoxious, we need to be open to others’ feedback. To keep from becoming dysfunctional in our own approach to living, it helps to have others who see our biases and who are willing to tell us their perspective. Also, when joining an established community, keep contact with at least one support person outside the community who can help you maintain a wider perspective. When a whole group has a different view, it can make an incoming individual question their assumptions, which can be healthy, or question their boundaries, leaving them vulnerable to unfair treatment. On the flip side, Christian (2003) warns that taking on members that have more emotional, physical, and/or economic needs than the community can adequately support can be disastrous, even to the point of breaking up the community.

We can let community and consensus-based decision-making compensate for our bias. In community we help each other get past our weaknesses and maximize our strengths. We don’t have to become perfectly balanced as individuals because we help balance each other. When everyone else can see our problematic patterns, but we can’t see the extent to which we are blocking ourselves, they may wait until a time we seem open, then ask if we want feedback. We sometimes need skilled facilitation of group processes to reach the group’s potential for emotional benefits. See our list of group circle processes including decision making, trust building, and problem solving. In order to help others, we need to be able to tolerate the discomfort of knowing about their pain.

Successful people, some say, hang around other successful people and are happy. Yet might these comfortable people be ignoring the pain of society and in fact remain in denial about injustice and disrespect that most of us contribute to either directly or indirectly? Communities do well to talk to each other about harmful behavior, which we are all capable of, remembering that when we’re judging others, it is often a result of seeing something in them that we don’t like about ourselves. It is best to discuss the behavior without labeling someone with a character attribute. Even if someone habitually acts a certain way, across domains, we should leave the clinical diagnosis to professionals, unless we have enuf rapport that we can give and take these observations. If we’ve been treated badly, after we get over feeling angry, we can feel regret for their condition while making sure we protect ourselves by setting boundaries. As individuals we need to practice humility and self reflection. Reportedly Ram Dass quipped, “If you think you’re so enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.”

Learning Not to Give up on Others

Even with a common cause, we give up on each other too soon if we haven’t been taught how to communicate compassionately with each other, nor how to forgive while maintaining appropriate self-protection. It is important to have boundaries, and to be able to leave when we need to. At the same time, if we can learn to tolerate more emotional discomfort than we have been taught to, more vulnerability and uncertainty, then we have a chance to mend the inevitable rifts and insults.

If we have enough insight to get thru our anger and sadness, to take a break but not impulsively quit when it gets hard, to give a partnership another chance without being coerced, then we can get to the point when real breakthrus can happen. We all have blind spots. A coliving community is sometimes able to shine a light on those, preferably in a gentle way, and balance the extremes of each member. Thus our differences become strengths instead of weaknesses.

Brene Brown (2017) found that people who experience a greater amount of contentment and enjoyment tend to have a belief that people are doing the best they can, and that the majority of people are redeemable. There are few people who are so hardened against others—or so biologically compromised—that they can’t be reached. Belic (2011) shows that some get satisfaction even from a one-sided relationship, such as interacting with artists thru their art, authors thru their words, or serving people one doesn’t interact with directly.

Community’s Practical Functionality and Quality of Life

Risk mitigation. In the United States, where an individualist approach has been favored over an increased social safety net, those who are without close trusted others must either accept risks or pay for every kind of insurance and service. Yet without a mutual reliance on family or close friends, even their legal will or final directive about what kind of medical care they do or don’t want at the end of life may not be honored, because the documents may not be available at the time they are needed. The documents would need to be delivered to the medical staff by people who care enough to keep track of them and provide it. We all at some point may need an advocate who we cannot pay, not a transactional relationship, but one of trust. Emotional bonds to known persons have been most trusted for ages. Establishing this trust takes time and commitment. It is also important to set up written agreements so that we don’t make assumptions that differ from others’ willingness to help. These don’t need to be and probably can’t be legally binding, but the effort helps clarify expectations.

Shared resources. These can benefit our individual economic well-being, for example thru rideshares, tool renting, shared subscriptions and services. We can share spaces and equipment such as in shared kitchens, libraries, playgrounds, gyms, workshop, and creative space. Many intentional communities have leveled up their governance practices and personal maturity to implement effective sharing. We can learn from them.

There’s a way in which we’re very rich. For example we have this pond with a wood burning sauna right beside it. And we have these wonderful Sunday evenings. And I have access to a wood shop and I can build whatever I want with an unlimited supply of Oakwood, which there’s no way I’ve had that out there. I give yoga classes. Other people can take my yoga classes for free you know. It’s just part of living here, so we have this quality of life. We’re able to offer different experiences and benefits to people that you just can’t do on an individual basis. If you look at the income we make collectively and individually, it’s nothing close to what a middle class typical person makes. And the reason we’re able to live this lifestyle you know, basically a middle class lifestyle, very comfortable, using a lot less money, is again because of this radical sharing that we do. So that frees up a lot more energy to provide other kinds of quality of life services and experiences. (Transition Bus, 2016, 11:10)

Another communitarian, with four decades at an income-sharing intentional community and farm,  speaks of overcoming inherited inequality:

This comes out of a cultural background where we venerate property rights. It’s kind of like you got a golden ticket, and the other person doesn’t. I think we have to … figure out how to share resources rather than just own them. And community already does something; we’re gonna need to do more. We’re going to face more and more resource pressure as time goes by. More people, we’re not making more land. …we’re running out of oil. It’s like we’re going to figure out ways like how do we share equitably…. So let’s start now. … there’s more we can do than we’ve done so far, is the point I’m trying to make, and so one of the pieces here with respect to membership is talk about … the advantages to us of incorporating or being open to incorporating member renters as fully as we possibly can. It is for everybody’s benefit. (Shaub, 2022, 01:07:15)

A millennial interviewer from the School for Ecocentric Evolution & Design Strategies says the following:

I try to communicate the necessity of community….A lot of people think it’s this new age hippie thing….I see it as fundamentally necessary for us to go thru this collective shift so we don’t destroy the planet—and ourselves in the process. (SEEDS, 2019, 18:52)

Safety. Another benefit is a throw-back to small town lifestyles, where many don’t feel they need to lock their doors. You’re more likely not to have your purse or wallet stolen if you forget and leave it unattended for a moment. There’s a built-in neighborhood watch. There’s likely to be someone to assist quickly in emergencies.

The reasons many of us don’t live in communities anymore are varied. For one, many of us don’t seem to have the option to, but if we do look around and notice the options, or listen to others who have lived in community, we would find reasons such as those in the following list. There are hassles and there are benefits in both lifestyles. These are what I see as the trade-offs.

	positives	negatives
Career choice	The family or friend businesses take you in or locals offer connections to work opportunities	Cronyism, not meritocratic; outside you make friends and new associates in a field of your choice, not for limited work options you have connections thru
Location	You are accepted and trusted (or not)  based on reputation of generations	If your family members haven’t behaved well, you may suffer from that stigma
Finances	You may have tools, skillsets, or land to inherit	You may be prevented from taking risks, obliged to play it safe based on family consensus or community resources
Leisure	Close connection with others may obligate the to see your hardship in a way that prompts the to help, rather than spend on their own enjoyment	Close connection with others may obligate you to see hardship of others in a way that prompts you to help, rather than spend on your own enjoyment
Travel & adventure	Childhood and later adulthood may be good times to be settled in a place where you are known and will be looked after	In young adulthood you may see it as harder and less financially rewarding to live a place-based life, hard to rely on others, less likely to find a culture fit without moving
Habits and schedules	There are traditions and agreed on seasonal tasks and requirements that usually have some benefits	There may be less freedom to completely devise your own lifestyle, so novelty seekers may feel stifled
Orderliness	Working together becomes chaotic without rules and expectations, so predictable, often rigid systems & rules develop to facilitate cooperation	Rules are hard to change; creative types that want to try new systems to adapt to changing needs have an immense challenge to gain buy-in
Interests and talents	If less resources are devoted to new interests, at least there are local skillsets and tutors to help you develop	If wealthy, you may have access to try out and master new talents & interests through university or trying out different employment or entrepreneurship
Projects	Get help with projects important to you	You reciprocate to help others with projects important to them; this might be fun sometimes, but takes time
Health	Loneliness is epidemic; there are substantial health benefits to  maintaining close social ties that last	Pressure of others’ expectations can be overwhelming for some, especially if pressured into a subservient position
Aesthetics (music, design, & art)	A place over time develops a predictable style that pervades and can result in a sense of charm	Creative types may feel stifled; the young often have distaste for styles of the past and prefer to invent new styles
Children	Children have often more sense of freedom in a community, because adults trust that they are safe as they roam among the community. They develop social skills as they engage in unstructured play among a group of peers that is often of mixed ages. They have real work that makes them not only feel important but actually makes an important contribution.	Community upbringing prepares them for many aspects of life, but not as much for the narrow achievements that will be valued on a college application or resume. Their leadership opportunities, tho likely more formative, aren’t expressible as “attended leadership camp.”
Learning of  children & self	Children can be spared many mistakes as they learn from observation as much as experience.	Available schooling may not be ideal or the option you’d choose
Social life	Social interaction is built in. No one is lonely in a well-functioning community, tho there will be formal or informal hierarchies. Community rules and elders/leaders, if functioning well, prevent serious abuses or unwarranted ostracism.	Too many meetings; the fewer rules, the more meetings are needed to make specific decisions for a unique situation
Reputation	Once others know you, expectations can pressure you to stay the same, especially to behave well; people will find out about bad behavior, so you won’t get scammed by others	Within community there is no anonymity to try out new ways of being, to change your name or other aspects of identity, to escape your past and start over
Emotional or spiritual development	With time-tested traditions, or at least new traditions created with much deliberation, you learn from others	Its easy to find equanimity alone; easier to find it with a selected few; a great challenge to maintain it in a group

ICmatch.org is intended to help you find your compatible people then talk thru the topics above to make agreements or compromise for the best possible compatibility.

Intentional Community as a Political Solution

The nation is too large a scale from which to make detailed policy that works for everyone. All of us who think we know the way the nation should be, we should find 10 to 100 people who believe similarly, and try that out. We will in that way find where we were correct and where we were wrong.

How to be subversive without notice, to be seen as a harmless fringe artistic or non-profit project? ICmatch.org is designed to foster how community can give grass-roots support to artists who are the truth-tellers and changemakers, and some of that support, even for those who don’t have funds to spare, is by providing home, so more of us don’t have to spend all our time working trivial jobs just to pay rent.

Creating the Good Society

Rather than isolate individual communities in sterile social laboratories, I want to begin looking at intentional communities as bearers of ideas, ideas that have as their intention to create positive change in the wider society. We are running a relay, and hopefully any sense of success will entail the handing on of the baton of social change, rather than trying to run the whole race singlehanded. (Bang, 2007, p. 152)

What we do know is that we in the WEIRD world need to give up our privilege to create a more equitable environment. “One way of measuring the quality of a society is by seeing how their weakest members are treated. By treating them well, we create a higher quality, something which benefits all the members of that society” (Bang, 2007, p. 106). In the following quotation, an intentional community member states how sharing brings perspective.

I think when we work in the community we realize that, you know my life is pretty good as it is, and I have something to give to somebody who maybe doesn’t have something that I have, and I think that makes people switch from sort of focusing on “what don’t I have” to “what do I have that I can share?” and that’s a very powerful thing. (Belic, 2011, 43:37)

The beginning sections of this book covered evidence that western society is now functioning on a shaky economic system that can’t last. To weather a severe economic crisis, we are going to do better in groups where there is trust and a variety of practical skills. Bang (2007), in describing his intentional community, says we don’t have to choose between focusing on the individual or on the betterment of society.

I identified two main trends, overlapping each other. One trend or impulse consisted of working with villagers in social therapy….The other trend consisted of creating an alternative society. Sometimes they conflicted or one tended to over shadow the other….In fact Camphill gives us the possibility of doing both at the same time, and this is one of the features that gives the Camphill movement such strength and vigor. There are plenty of alternative communities around where people can realize new forms of fellowship without having to come in contact with the mentally handicapped. And there are many institutions based on anthroposophy where coworkers can go home to their nuclear families at the end of an 8-hour work day and live otherwise perfectly normal lives….When in perfect balance, this gives the Camphill tradition a robustness that has carried it through over 60 years and into over 20 countries throughout the world. It combines ‘doing good work’ with ‘building a bright future.’  (p. 177)

Religions have a long tradition of trying to create the good society by way of intentional communities.

To consider the meaning of religious communities, we must consider their history, the meaning of membership, and the means by which the communal life is negotiated. Therefore, three primary meanings of the term religious communities should be considered: religious communities as religious orders, intentional religious communities, and organizations as religious communities. (Religious communities, 2019, para. 5)

References

Religious communities. (2019). Contemporary American religion. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/legal-and-political-magazines/religious-communities

Remainder of references accessible here.

“Moving to more local ways of approaching industry, commerce, agriculture, and government offers a future full of possibility—a bright future, one fully within our grasp (p. 260)….We need the End of Big to bring us back to our communities, to our neighbors—that’s how we’ll remake the world and build a better future” (Mele, 2013, p. 266).

photo by Anna Shvets

As a quiet response to the growing crisis, there is an uptick in the movement toward intentional communities. There’s a surge of interest in hobby farms. Put those interests together, with any amount of effort toward sustainability, and you have the makings for an ecovillage. Ecovillages are a type of intentional community with a core purpose of promotion and practice of ecological sustainability and resource sharing. Miki Kashtan’s (2018) quote exemplifies the ethos behind the movement:

The so-called tragedy of the commons is one of the most condensed embodiments of patriarchal thinking, and has been refuted by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. We are designed by evolution to engage collaboratively with each other and nature, to care for life. We have forgotten, and we can restore this capacity. Permaculture is just one of many untold developments that pave the way forward into a collaborative future that encompasses nonhuman life. (sec. 7)

Two millennial podcasters, a husband and wife team, report a madly enthusiastic response from their  listeners about the couple’s plans—now with funders and a land purchase deal—to create an ecovillage.

It feels like this is going to be a new way that everyone is going to want to live in the future when they see these things work…there is already this movement bubbling up with people trying to build these things all over the world and we get contacted every day by people who are…trying to start something similar in other places around the world. And I think we’re just at the beginning of this, some people have called it a regenissance, like a renaissance of regenerative villages.…I don’t think it’s possible for just one of these villages to, you know, create the global change. It has to be this network. It has to be this, you know, people trying it in different permutations all over the world. (Future Thinkers, 2021, 35:48)

Resources: Nelson (2018) describes the development of four successful and longstanding ecovillages, in a chapter available online (see the references section). GreenUnfolding.com has good general information about existing ecovillages, as does the Global Ecovillage Network’s website.

Ecovillages as Secular Community-building

What ecovillages are doing is revolutionary from a social science perspective. As a subset of intentional communities, they are trying to isolate the benefits of small community interactions from the religiosity and top-down governance hierarchy that has traditionally accompanied intentional communities. This can allow for wider dissemination of useful principles and practices for group governance, especially to the growing number of nones, those who claim no religious affiliation (26% in the U.S.; Pew Research Center, 2019). Those who have no spiritual or religious affiliation, but do see the value of community life, can explore and practice how to get along, and how to use diversity as a strength rather than considering it a liability.

Regarding the previous section Beware of Cults, ecovillages have more components than simple co-housing that could lead to cultish characteristics. Altho they tend to be open to a variety of beliefs outside their core ecological focus, many ecovillages have a culture that embraces non-denominational spirituality. Many casually practice Native American traditions such as smudging, along with use of self-designed equinox or solstice celebrations with Pagan-related mother-goddess imagery. Ecovillages would do well to be up front about the extent to which members will be expected to participate in practices that involve ceremony, and the consequences of non-participation. Similarly, expectations about the sharing of personal information should be clear, so potential members can evaluate whether it is a good fit. Further, most are founded by a group that includes a charismatic leader who has a clear vision for a different sub-culture. Even tho many groups claim to have shared governance structure, this should be carefully assessed. Members without an ability to withdraw their contributed resources are likely to have only as much decision-making power as they are gifted. Further, the focus on group self-sufficiency could be used to encourage primarily interaction within the group. 

Ecovillages as an Alternative to Concentrated Political Power

All intentional communities are counter-culture to some extent, especially in the United States where individualism where the prevailing norm culture is absence of community. Brown (2020) states that culturally and politically “our death certificate’s going to say ‘death by rugged individualism.’ It’s like there is like this mythology that we don’t need each other, when neurobiologically we’re hardwired to be together” (31:07). Free of obligations, we find ourselves also free of the relationships that make life meaningful. Communitarians see the limitations of the socially untethered life.

Ecovillages are a political solution that starts at a small scale but can happen anywhere and everywhere. As a peaceful revolution that minds its own business and operates within the law, it can accomplish a social and economic overhaul without a bloody revolution.

Organizations are more powerful than individuals. You leverage your power to withstand corporate and government control when you join with likeminded people to preserve personal freedoms. Since we aren’t advocating doing so by a standoff with the national guard, we aren’t a threat. We can quietly carry out our business of protecting the vulnerable and ourselves. Ecovillages are uniquely capable of managing without the outside provisions and thus without outside governance, if they master self-governance. 

Allow me a moment of idealism: What if small independent communities became the prevailing governance model, with peace treaties between them? Small group governance can substantially reduce the worst of human tendencies, when they happen on a small scale, easily observable. We are more vulnerable to the effects of corruption and bribery when we know about them only after the officials have absconded to a foreign location, along with their offshore bank accounts. Transparency, whether it comes from online monitoring or from small scale direct observation and experience, is effective to hold institutions accountable. Transparency is a given in a community. Whether it comes out as gossip or thru intentional group work, there isn’t much we can keep hidden for long.

Rural Ecovillages

We covered the small farm efficient resource use and attention to the local. The principles of permaculture take these both to a new level. Not just the area’s climate is taken into account, but the individual plot of land is studied for a year before the farm structures are planned out. The principles of permaculture are now a solid curriculum. Leaders of the movement are working toward standardizing the curriculum and accrediting the locations that teach it. It is an antidote to globalization of the economy.

Some ecovillages have worked with a local municipality to have multiple zonings applied to their land, such as permissions for a number of houses, an educational facility, a farm, a business (such as a CSA), a non-profit (such as serving a vulnerable population), and even some acreage for green burial (which can also qualify for tax deductions as conserved land and wildlife habitat). A way to get around the zoning requirements, if needed, would be to partner with not-too-distant nonprofits and businesses to have the official addresses of the different entities located elsewhere.

Urban Ecovillages

A few ecovillages do exist in city neighborhoods. Some describe themselves as an agrihood. Use of biochar to increase the fertility of small gardens, and rooftop water harvesting, has the promise to transform city container gardens and suburban lawns to at least supplement your food. Like solar-panels on individual rooftops, it could be the most efficient and fair solution to food production. This could be your city balcony space. If you multiply that growing space by adding to the number of people sharing the house, the average suburban lawn space is much more generous. Some are discovering how much they can grow in their yards, balconies, windows, and rooftops.

Altho grains were an important crop to grow civilizations, it isn’t necessary that they be the staple food products currently. Potatoes and other tubers, for example, are easy to grow in a container, given the right conditions. There’s a movement and many resources for window gardening. It may not be the most impactful use of your time tho.

If you love the inner city where you don’t have even a yard, there are ways to get closer to Ecovillage ethos. Be vegan; that’s a good start. Be minimalist. Collect kitchen sink water for balcony container gardens. Use plumbing fixtures that direct hand wash water into the toilet tank to recycle grey water. Be a consistent member of a community. Use rooftop water catchment for gardens. Grow rooftop and vertical gardens. Increase the soil fertility and water retention (see biocharnow.com). Change ordinances to allow backyard chickens. Got an ant or other bug problem? Stop poisoning insects, even inside. There are chicken diapers. Let the bug-eaters come inside to get a meal.

Deffeyes (2005) noted almost 2 decades ago that issues such as climate change, the peaking of global oil production, and the rapid growth in wealth disparities were being discussed as precursors to an apocalyptic end to cities. To adapt, he says we need a full range of policy approaches that take these issues seriously, but without sending out alarm signals that will turn people and politicians away. A positive sustainability agenda is needed to show how cities can be restructured and, at the same time, better opportunities created for people.

Resources: The film Brooklyn Farmer documents a successful garden/farm on rooftops, delivering to local restaurants. They have to make at least $3 per square foot per season to keep the business going. Shafie (2018) in Toronto, estimates $5 per square foot for installing open-air rooftop farms.

Living With Fewer Conveniences

We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares. We increase our possessions only to the enlargement of our anxieties. —Anna Brackett

“True change comes about when our desire for freedom is bigger than our desire for convenience and comfort” (Geersten, as cited in Sounds True, 2021, 33:22). The voluntary simplicity or minimalist movement is an important one, helping us recognize that a new lamp or another pair of shoes isn’t going to change our life, or even make us feel better for more than 5 minutes. If you carry your poop in a bucket, yes, there will be people, even friends and family, who may look down on you for it. Take a note from Micheal Gervais that FOPO (fear of people’s opinions) is worth getting over. It feels important to be a jetsetter using the latest technology and mingling with high-net-worth crowds. In the end it’s not all that. The ancient wisdom still holds: “Better a handful with quietness than both hands full, together with toil and grasping for the wind” (New King James Version, n.d., Ecclesiastes 4:6). It’s not difficult to imagine the following two lifestyles, and sometimes it’s only those who obtain the latter who realize they unthinkingly gave up the former. While attending university, I sometimes lived with or near families or friend groups who spent frequent time together eating, conversing, and in one family of immigrants, dancing was a regular part of the weekend evenings. In contrast, I lived at one time with a sibling’s family in a historic mansion in which everyone preferred to be on their electronic devices in their own rooms, and when they were in the same room, often were arguing or were quietly aware of long-standing unresolved tension between others. Having attained an external standard of success—of having convenient packaged health-fad foods, paid housekeepers and gardeners, frequent vacations, and a constant influx of new possessions—is it that there was too little of a shared purpose or challenge to strengthen emotional connections?

Safety Without Paranoia

A note to idealists: keep a high fence. You may want to proceed from a motive of trust and inclusion. That is an important motive, but can only be supported long-term boundaries. Protect your people and resources. Hire a security guard if located in a dangerous area. The guard can double as a community liaison, talking to passers-by and caring for plants at the perimeter. Hang large signs describing your project and mission, or rumors may brand you falsely. Serve in the community to create alliances. Host an open house and tour quarterly. Advertise needed in-kind donations. Partner with an existing nonprofit to donate your surplus and use their tax benefits for both grants and donations.

Surviving Economic Downturns

The right use of our privilege is to make life better for those less privileged. At the same time, we leave a harmful situation and create safety for ourselves. The majority may see that we have corrupt systems of business and government, with the systemic dysfunctions having seeped also into higher education and philanthropic institutions. Yet the majority of well-intentioned wealthy people don’t see any way to leave those systems without losing any wealth they have created. The majority of those who are making ends meet might risk becoming homeless if they both knew of and refused to participate in any form of exploitation. We must build up the courage to leave while we still have a small window of opportunity to create alternatives, bubbles of economic self-sufficiency built up while the scaffolding of the larger unsustainable system remains. We remain connected while we level up our skills in a different lifestyle and demonstrate to others what is possible. By keeping as much distance as we can from systems complicit in exploitations, we can live without blame.

As societal and business institutions devolve or dissolve, those who react and blame each other create a dangerous situation. Both right and left of the political spectrum fear the loss of what they value and believe they must defend liberty, as the other side would not. Both sides feel misunderstood. We can function as peacemakers by seeking to understand more than seeking to be understood, by listening more than defending a position. We must relinquish control over the outcome. We become comfortable with uncertainty while willing to live a simple life, like monks in our commitment to peaceful cooperation. The ethical stance of this lifestyle is that if all were to live it, none would be exploited and all would have basic physical needs met. Dispersion into these separate village units can reunite us into a shared respect for human solidarity, but it can also lead to disunion if we allow fear-based thinking to dominate in our group. Our stance is what will determine the outcome. We must maintain respect for other’s styles of leadership and possibly take in temporarily the refugees from failing villages. We can help other villages to revise what isn’t working then hopefully re-start and thrive within their prior location. This is what humans have always done. This is the work of culture building. Refugees from war-torn nations may not find total acceptance of their traditions, but they may land in a context where the women learn they have rights, where rule of law prevails, where an honest living can be made without exploiting others.

This is the plan, we need to get some self sufficiency infrastructure set up before supply chains break down and we face hunger, crime, and social disintegration of institutional authority. It’s not that I’m ideologically pro-institution, but institutions are currently the way we organize into peaceful societies. Those who dislike institutions should help the larger society to prepare, rather than only build personal bugout shelters, because unless they are operating a self-sufficient small farm, they will eventually run out of or be robbed of provisions, as Ferfal describes during the collapse of the Argentine economy. But most people don’t want to be convinced that global warming, peak oil, and increasing wealth disparity could cause national or global crisis. A better tactic is to discuss neighborhood disaster planning, and municipalities may even have grants for this. Church leaders and local group leaders of all types could be invited to join or at least to disseminate information. Discuss effective food storage and rotation. Create community and backyard gardens. Backyard chickens could be fed the food scraps from a group of houses. Get with your neighbors and learn how to make decisions thru consensus. We need to involve teens and make it fun (see fractioNation.US/termiNation).

References

See References page.

This page lists the references used for a collection of writings titled Intentional Communities as Culture Change Agents.

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Our current economy based on competition works most effectively in a context of scarcity, which is enhanced when we distrust each other and look to the market to meet all needs. While the globalized market may have brought abundance to many, it has also created great wealth inequality and ecological crisis. To many current thinkers, finding a way forward includes re-creating community on a local level. The intentional community movement is a crucial part of this cultural evolution.

Political Revolution Versus Cultural Evolution

“Culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live, and the rest of us copy them.” —David Brooks (54:50)

Few are going to believe that humanity is going to somehow this time embrace the perennial philosophy and create world peace, or an equitable society. Perhaps the main reason communism hasn’t yet worked for any national government that tried central planning is because of Gall’s law. It states: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. To the extent that democratic socialism has worked in various nations, it has worked because it taps into hardwired elements of human nature. We have reciprocity norms, a market economy, family. These are based on basic human drives, not culture. We keep trying to game human nature to work together on a large scale by pushing culture in one direction or another, or thru technology. What if the most freedom and abundance, or any type of human flourishing, can be found in groups no larger than the Dunbar number? In this small of group, the basic hardwired elements of human nature function fairly well and are balanced. That gamification to push culture in a certain direction is what we call politics. What if we refused to keep trying to gain power over others thru such games? That would mean we would have to tolerate that some group somewhere that had practices we consider abominable, that we believed brainwashed its children, the only influence we could hold over them was thru persuasion or withholding trade, never thru force. You may counter that we need defenses because other groups will develop weapons and take over, thru some ideology like manifest destiny if not outright plunder. Maybe this could only work after economic collapse. Maybe this could only work without nation-states. Maybe this could only work with increased levels of self-awareness to the point we might call moral virtue, when we have collectively realized thru our social experiment in the extravagant wealth of the western world—while chasing after happiness in power, status, and ease—what the Roman empower knew: “I have been everything, and nothing is worth anything.” Maybe this could only work with the widespread acceptance of a new mythology that connects to the old, which asserts—as do spiritualists, mediums, and near death experiencers from every religion or non-religion—that we are all connected thru karmic law.

In “a short story about what happened to the U.S. economy since the end of World War II,” Housel (2021), writes:

The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, and the rise of Donald Trump each represents a group shouting, “Stop the ride. I want off….I’m going to fight for something totally different, because this—whatever it is—isn’t working.” Take that mentality and raise it to the power of Facebook, Instagram, and cable news—where people are more keenly aware of how other people live than ever before…. And the era of “We need something radically new, right now, whatever it is” may stick around. (sec. 10)

Rana Foroohar is a columnist at The Financial Times, and the author of several books on the economy including Makers and Takers and Don’t Be Evil. Her view is that a decade-plus of loose monetary policy has been the economic equivalent of a “sugar high,” which kept the prices of stocks, housing and other assets going up, even as the fundamentals of the economy have been eroding. This “everything bubble,” as she calls it, was bound to burst, and she thinks it’s happening right now.

They call it the dual circulation economy, but basically it’s about producing local for locals. I think we’re moving to a much more localized regionalized world … and I think in that world you have to change the paradigm, because you cannot surf the wave of financialization and globalization anymore, because the paradigm is shifted. So you have to create some more income-led growth at home. (New York Times, 2022, 56:38)

Sowell (2008) makes a cogent argument that some of the outcry about wealth inequality and wage stagnation in North America is based on misleading use of statistical data. Be that as it may, there is certainly room for improvement in our overall lifestyles. For all we have gained in physical comfort, convenience, and individual choice within modern city-based lives, there is widespread loss of some of the prized values of traditional land-based cultures, such as physical health, natural beauty of surroundings, and a sense of loyalty and care within a community. This is not to say those benefits cannot be found in modern life, but rather they are benefits that were inherent to traditional lifestyles, and now must be deliberately cultivated. It is likely they are available to far fewer people within the modern context. Yet this isn’t a call to revert to some idyllic past. It’s one among many efforts to envision how to merge the benefits of land-based and city-based cultures, with awareness of the potential downsides of each.

Values Eroded by Business-as-usual

Freedom. Schmachtenberger (2020) asks an essential question: “How do we take all the technological capacity and start to use it for something that is not trying to have power over but to have strength to not be deformed by other power? (24:56). The U.S. national founders attempted to build into law the best protection against tyranny, with limited success. There were and are clever workarounds to concentrate power and wealth. We need governance, but we don’t like who is doing it—increasingly a government for the corporations, by the corporations, and of the corporations. You’ll notice we are dependent on them, and many of us are part of them. Bang (2007) writes, “Freedom can be defined as the ability to choose to live in a system which one feels comfortable or satisfied with” (p. 163). Gilman believes that choice is increasingly present as the “dominator functions” are breaking down and “self-organized consensual collaboration” will increasingly become the norm. “Choice destroys the power of coercion. You can’t have a violence-enforced hierarchy when people can choose to walk away” (Context Institute, 2014, 14:45). The connectivity that led to Arab Spring could over and over again shake off institutional control, yet it has no corresponding capacity to maintain order and safety. We have an opportunity to develop commitment to and a vision for an ultra local sovereignty that respects the local sovereignty of all other groups. We need to recognize that currently, although in many nations, families and individuals appear to have many choices, economically many experience their lives as wage slaves. Few own their physical property outright at the same time as having enuf wealth to ensure they can protect, maintain, and pay taxes in order to keep it. Many feel their prosperity is fragile and based on tradeoffs they are increasingly unwilling to make, tradeoffs that erode a sense of freedom. The trade-offs can be reconsidered and renegotiated. The anti-establishment factions at the extreme feel that no one should have power over anyone else, or at least that no one should have power over them personally. But that’s not taking into account the reality of human nature. There are always tradeoffs, because if we are “free” to maraud and plunder, even if we would not do so, so are others free, who would do so, and we are therefore not safe without some arrangement of enforced regulation. Supposedly in our prehistoric state of non-governance, primate groups had leaders. Historical records suggest that over time we formed larger and larger groups until ultimately we arrived at the government and corporate bureaucracies that rule us now, because we get something out of the orderliness. It’s convenient and safer. I find in some anarchist writing a naïve assumption that all the non-ruling people have a nature that would prevent themselves from becoming oppressors in any manner. I don’t see evidence for that. Neither did Solzhenitsyn, who wrote after nearly a decade of political imprisonment, . Take it from an Argentine that documented his nation’s economic collapse two decades ago, “With the social degradation that follows an economic collapse comes depravation of many kinds” (para. 3). Writing of child abduction, sex trafficking, and organ harvesting, he says, “these things only get worse during economic down turns” (Aguirre, 2011, para. 1). Being in groups with enforced laws prevents more abuses than would a reliance on individual self-restraint. Of course there are times that the rule enforcers are among the worst of the abusers. It takes courage and constant vigilance to support the best actors and call out the worst. That’s a better strategy than denouncing all hierarchy.

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.” –Bob Marley

Equal opportunity. People differ in strength, intelligence, and adaptiveness. We simply aren’t equal from the start, and we aren’t all angels who naturally afford others more opportunity based on an apparently undeserved disadvantage. Some insist this lack of natural goodness should be made up for by legislation, yet the unintended consequences of affording non-angelic others the power of this legislation may outstrip the desired benefits. Arguably, such trials in this vein as have been conducted haven’t been satisfactory. My proposition is that we find ways of promoting equal opportunity that do not depend on such fallible assumptions and means as have been promoted by either side of the political divide. Neither party will enact policies that can adequately solve a cultural problem without creating equal or possibly worse problems.

What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. –Barbara Kingsolver

Independence. It isn’t surprising that most who are wealthy enuf to do so, prefer to live independently or as a nuclear family. That way we can distance ourselves from most other peoples’ problems and the consequences of their decisions. We avoid the hassles of others being involved with our problems and decisions. Yet we all live interconnected lives. We’ve traded our former reliance on a small group interdependence for current reliance on a global network by which—at a comfortable distance from others—we find employment to make transactions that meet each other’s needs for food, shelter, and clothing, as well as our wants. While we call that independence, aside from the homesteaders in the Alaskan wilderness, we in the WEIRD world are physically dependent on a vast network of producers and supply chains. Brown (2017) describes biological research on human interdependence: as members of a social species, we don’t derive strength from our rugged individualism, but rather from our collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together. Our evolved capacities support interdependence over independence. Our highest individual capacity is not to become autonomous and solitary; it’s to become someone others can depend on. We’re a social species, wired for belonging.

Talhelm, in comparing collectivist cultures, notes the upsides in individualistic cultures: (a) the social and legal freedom to leave relationships we don’t find fulfilling, and (b) communication tends to work a lot better, in large part due to norms allowing us to confront conflict directly. He notes the downside of individualism can be a lack of concern for those we don’t know and to whom we have no personal connection.

Individualist and collectivist cultures have different strategies for how to seek support in times of need, similar to the political polarities.

• The preference of the socially conservative is to rely on neighbors, churches, and family members to help one of their own in a time of need. Tending to live in small towns and rural areas, they are more likely to live at a distance from institutions that administer public programs, so support from those small groups makes more sense.
• The preference of the socially liberal is to enact government-led programs and legislation to benefit populations most in need. Tending to live in cities and suburbs, they are more likely to live at a distance from their families and less likely to know their neighbors, so support from the large group (i.e., government administrated) makes more sense.

The socially liberal perspective, at least in cities, has won out. Alvin Toffler’s (1970) Future Shock explains why. In the WEIRD world, people feel compelled to change residences for work opportunities. Our post industrial society is a transient culture where products are disposable and interchangeable, and human relationships have become more temporary.

Self-sufficiency. It’s about taking responsibility. It’s about giving up the illusion that someone else is going to take care of us for the long term, whether it’s the government, a spouse, a church, parents. We can gain some sense of sovereignty in our lives when we become someone that we and maybe others can rely on, rather than looking for someone that we can rely on to be stronger than ourselves. Yet people who say they want to be self-sufficient may not recognize the degree to which they were and are supported by the infrastructure they were born into. No one is self-sufficient except the loincloth man who lives alone in a national park, sleeps in a cave, and lives off what he hunts (Sincero, 2013). Certainly he is independent, as long as he stays away from the authorities who would fine him for poaching. Few want that extreme of independence. Self-reliance could be understood to mean we are givers as much or more than we are takers. We are so tired of the takers, whether we believe the story of the right or of the left, about who the biggest takers are. To move on, can we agree both stories have some degree of validity? We need to get out from under the thumb of both.

There are people who are dependent upon this social system which is killing the planet. I mean that’s–part of the problem is that just like any good abusive situation, we have been made dependent upon the very system that’s exploiting us, and part of the reason that we don’t fight back more is because if your experience is that your water comes from a tap and that your food comes from the grocery store…you will fight to the death to defend that system that brings you your food and water, because your life depends on it. And similarly…if your experience is that your water comes from a river and that your food comes from a land base, you will fight to the death to defend that, because your life depends on it. But we have all been so made dependent on this system. (Jensen, 2011, 36:04)

Justice. There is much less accountability in our global economic system, because roles in business and politics have changeable actors, and effects are hard to trace to the cause. Who did what, when, and to whom is often unpunishable by the time we sort it out. There is lack of accountability when exploitation can be hidden from end consumers. I hope that our preference for modern life is based on ignorance of how our comforts come at the cost of others’ discomfort. The capacity to deny and to maintain that unfairness is what constitutes privilege. Power inequity created a system that has some elements of meritocracy, but pushes many into disadvantage where their equivalent effort, skill, and talent affords them lesser outcomes. In a competitive framework, we rely on others’ sense of fair play and some level of transparency; that sense of fair play is increasingly lacking. In a competitive economic framework, willingness to exploit often makes the difference between wealth and just getting by.

Sovereignty. What we want more than self-sufficiency is sovereignty, defined most simply as a self-governing state. Nationalists want sovereignty, not to be ruled by the United Nations and/or an evil cabal of billionaire conspirators. Yet within our sovereign nation, we may feel unaligned with leaders’ choices and powerless to make any difference. Some want stronger state’s rights, yet they might not want to give up their freedom of interstate travel nor a national military. What is the ideal level of group sovereignty that is even possible? What are the trade-offs we make, funding a powerful military to protect us so our nation remains sovereign, then fearing domination by our own government?

Those who speak of sovereignty feel a need to extricate ourselves from involvement with people who take without our permission, either legally or illegally. There’s not so much difference between the pickpocket, the government that prints money to inflate its spending power while deflating ours, and the bankers who gave themselves bonuses while shifting onto taxpayers the burden of the crashed real estate market. Let them fend for themselves. The only way for us to avoid being exploited is to extract ourselves from a system in which we are also exploiters. If you haven’t noticed that yet, you will.

Mutualism. Group self-sufficiency could also be called mutualism or interdependency with a chosen few. Social ties of family and community are strained by our current needs to prioritize work or career preparation over (a) time with family and friends and over (b) remaining in a community and near extended family. Organized high-trust groups will naturally be more powerful than individuals. To avoid being overpowered or exploited by other groups (e.g., corporations, governments), we need to either join them or group up ourselves. We can group up as egalitarian not hierarchical structures, maintaining inner and outer sovereignty. We can unite in purpose and principle, not by fear of a dominant force or of being outside the access to necessities.

Let’s give up the political, religious, and ideological battles that no one will ever win. Let’s start working on some principles we can agree on, some ground-level changes that, if everyone made them, all would be relatively free to associate with those like themselves, and all would be constrained to a similar degree. All who work, or legitimately couldn’t, would be fed. We should stop fussing and fighting, then take what freedom and power we do have and use it to our best advantage in practical ways. It’s an idea that is already prototyped and successful in many cases: form small communities, develop trust, support each other, govern each other gently, and develop as much group self-sufficiency as possible. For you, this may not be the best or the only useful way forward. It is a way forward that is available to people with limited resources. I believe it is the most enjoyable and humane way forward.

Assumptions About Cultural Evolution

In academic research, there’s often a section that states the presuppositions or “assumptions” that the author starts from. The purpose is to make explicit the underlying assumptions on which the hypotheses or questions are based, and even implicitly, the values of the researcher. Here are some of the assumptions that this writing is based on.

• Incrementalism—the idea that we are slowly progressing toward a better future—is flawed. The standard optimistic narrative of the establishment (see a nutshell version by Kurzgesagt, 2018) is a flawed and simplistic argument that fails to take into account ecological destruction, economic instability created by increasing wealth disparity, and that quality of life is not adequately measured by a material “standard of living” or the stand-in metric GDP. We can’t without painful consequence remain passive or support “business as usual.”
• We are beginning to recognize that technology creates as many problems as it solves (Vogels et al., 2020). We’ll use the tools we have, but we won’t expect technology to save us.
• Guilt hasn’t been the change agent that many hoped it would be. This book is not a repackaging of convincing research to emphasize problems in order to motivate voters and protestors. We’re burned out on that, because it hasn’t seemed to have done enuf to stop or reverse our course toward the devastation of everything we love.
• Many of us feel compassion fatigue. We need proposed solutions to be fun and appealing, so solution-based movements can grow and flourish.
• We need realistic tangible solutions that can be implemented by people with average resources and a lot of heart. Grass roots energy can tap into under-utilized private and institutional resources.
• Change will be more effective as we retract effort from trying to convince the establishment to change and focus on building up new and existing structures of sustainability, including small farms, intentional communities, and ecovillages. We can’t convince people to quit driving and buying, and simply cutting back consumption isn’t enuf. Build the better alternatives. People need to see that other lifestyle options are available.
• Nonviolence and nonrivalry is the best or only way toward long-term sustainable betterment of the human condition. This includes refusal to participate in injustice.
• Tho we do not ignore injustice, the blame game erodes social cohesion and perpetuates dysfunction. We do better to seek where to heal and build, rather than where to accuse and fight.

The following subsections discuss additional assumptions. What’s not an assumption, because it remains to be decided by each person for themselves, is whether the lifestyles on offer within modern society are inferior in overall quality of life, to those of traditional cooperative village societies. What’s not an assumption—because it depends on many factors unique to location—is whether global ecological and economic sustainability can be developed and maintained with the coexistence of megacities.

Corruption is Unsolvable by Government

“Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.” —Audre Lorde

1. Increasing wealth disparity. The U.S. government, under either prominent party, won’t resolve the problem of increasing concentration of power and wealth, because the current version of capitalism has become the mechanism for that concentration.
2. Corrupt power structures. If Einstein was correct that no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it, then our economy won’t be saved by the democratic government of either side. Profitable industries—if legal or linked to legal industries for money laundering—have powerful lobbies that pay off politicians to promote their desired legislation. These practices are entrenched in the United States, because the duopoly prevents outsiders and controls even the idealistic or iconoclast leaders who become insiders. We are now in a plutocracy.
3. Perverse incentive structures. As long as there remain economic incentives to exploit, even with the threat of harsh penalties, exploitations will not end. The current economic model disproportionately benefits the wealthy, so they are invested in business-as-usual, promoting harsher penalties to seemingly address criminality, but without implementing any solutions that are workable for the long term. Their solutions are punitive rather than preventive.
4. Information channels that distract and entertain. Click bait largely ignores the injustices experienced by the most powerless, except for an occasional story that can cause a shock to draw fleeting attention. Many don’t want to know about or think about these topics, and the victims often cannot advocate effectively for themselves, so injustices only briefly make their way to our awareness, sometimes long enuf to prompt us to send money to a charity. The blame game keeps our attention away from the foundational causes of abuse and exploitation.
5. Diversion of resources. For the majority now, there is too little time to do volunteer work when basic needs for food, housing, and medical care are barely affordable even in a dual-earner household. We simply hope that non-profits are doing something to help the most vulnerable. We increasingly recognize that philanthropy exists to lessen the symptoms of corrupt systems, often as a PR move that deflects our motivation to demand systemic change.

Organ harvesting is a thriving black market industry in which one organ can cost $200,000 or more (Wagner, 2014). Child sex trafficking numbers are unknown, but still practiced in the United States. Illegal arms trade remains rampant, by which terrorism, genocide, and oppressive governance are perpetrated. While illegal deforestation brings in “$51–$152 billion annually, the illegal timber industry simultaneously threatens the world’s forests and steals from local communities that rely on forests for food, health, and wealth” (U.S. Agency for International Development, n.d., para. 1). Creating single-use plastics is an $22 billion industry. These products are then illegally dumped or end up thru leachate in groundwater, releasing carcinogens and endocrine disruptors into the environment, killing marine life, and reducing male fertility (Rehman et al., 2018). The challenges numbered above explain why we don’t we have the political will to devote more resources to ending these crimes. Whatever political views you have, most of these we can agree should end; we simply emphasize different downsides and potential effectiveness of the various proposed solutions. These are already illegal, so we don’t need a legal solution. We need far more resources devoted to tracking down perpetrators and remediating the effects. It is up to us to make a start, to create containers, organizations that can receive the funding and use it effectively. Past victims and others who do pay attention these crimes—and work tirelessly—most often lack the resources and training to do work on the scale it needs to be done. Those focused on resolving these exploitations often experience burnout and poverty. They need more support.  

A Fragile Peace and Prosperity Achieved Thru Exploitation

Capitalism’s success. Capitalism does what its proponents want it to: it creates plentiful goods and services for those who can afford them. Many of its proponents were and are well-intentioned. It allows for consistent comforts that in pre-industrial times were available only to royalty. Capitalism also rewards hard work and a growth mindset, motivates innovation, and demands a high degree of cooperation. Mariana Mazzucato, in “Why we need a mission-driven economy,” explains how businesses would resolve entrenched problems if policy motivated people to act in the best interest of the whole. Incrementalism can work, if policies are changed to not provide perverse incentive structures that increase the wealth divide.

Capitalism’s failure. It also has a dark side. Currently it does provide perverse incentive structures, and with politicians beholden to their campaign donors, it doesn’t appear this is likely to change. We’ve been fuming about it for decades (sometimes over false defamations, such as the email of Warren Buffet supposedly speaking out about congress giving itself a separate health care package from what other civil servants get). Many of the major problems we face now are the direct result of the last generation’s solutions to human problems. We are becoming more aware of the downsides of capitalism: externalizing the pollution created by our demand for convenience of disposable products, market demands created by advertising that plays on our insecurities and competitiveness, an increasing income inequality that creates pressure for us each to cater to the wealthiest customers and clients we can manage to attract, and lack of time for the unpaid work that nurtures connection and community well being. Some believe that it’s not the form of government but the ethics of both the governed and the governing, that make for an ethical society. While there is some truth to that, the fact is we have to start where we are, with the human nature and culture as currently expressed. What I have against under-regulated capitalism is that in its current practice, it economically rewards the worst in human nature: greed, false advertising, self-absorption, cutthroat competition, and a zero-sum perspective that encourages hoarding of wealth. The ideology is that the needs of the poor and/or powerless should be met by volunteers or whoever can make money from meeting those needs. As a result, the helping professions—public school teaching, social work, clergy—are among the lowest paid compared to professions with similar training requirements. Similarly, lawyers who are public defenders and doctors or psychotherapists who choose to serve low-income populations will be paid less.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century argued that the world is returning to an economy dominated by inherited wealth, brazenly influencing policy to the advantage of the 1%, and threatening to create an oligarchy. His assertions match those of the occupy movement that “capitalism isn’t working.” He shows how and why (a) income inequality as measured by the income of the top 1% in several countries has increased in the past several decades; (b) inequality is not a side effect, but a feature of capitalism; and that (c) without reform democratic order will be jeopardized. Altho he believes rising inequality can only be ended through state interventionism, he does not believe there is political will within governments to do so.

It may seem bleak, but we can work within these constraints to create a better world, without having to convince others to overhaul the national political and economic systems. Fortunately, transparency and quality information—available within our current context—may be a better protection than government regulation of commerce. Speaking against specific instances of corruption will get us further than bashing capitalism.

I asked my friend…former executive director of Food First if the people of India would be better off if the global economy disappeared tomorrow and she said “of course.” And some of the examples she gave is our former granaries of India that are now exporting dog food and tulips to Europe. So our people who are starving to death right now, because where they used to get their food is now making cash crops. (Jensen, 2011, 40:47)

Amorelli et al. (2021) is dedicated to exposing the unrealistic energy and climate change technology-based solutions that will waste billions on corporate handouts framed as “market-based mechanisms.” These short sighted plans distract us from real solutions that would serve our most urgent needs.

Resources: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/23/leaked-un-report-warns-accelerating-climate-devastation

Overview of Marx’s conflict theory: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conflict-theory.asp

Global consumerism. Because the enjoyment of having a new handbag, a new car, a new house fades quickly, all our consumption doesn’t even satisfy us, but advertisers keep convincing people that it buying will solve their problems and make them happy. It seems most of us now recognize that a consumer-based economy dependent on constant growth is unsustainable on a finite planet, but we don’t know how to transition. Nor do we have a consensus for what we could or want to transition to.

The global economy has become a casino, and we’re all potential losers. One major casualty is our jobs are just taken over. Relocation to lower wage countries threaten the livelihood of virtually all of us: accountants, assembly workers, even CEOs, and when we retire it gets no better. As we’ve seen recently, pension funds are at the mercy of uncontrolled speculation. It’s not just in the west that livelihoods are under threat. (Local Futures, 2021, 22:36)

Fragile democracy. We’re going to agree that we need something better than the plutocracy the United States has become. What we ultimately need is possibly unlike any current form of national government we’ve yet seen, but it’s likely useless to debate what that should be. Any structure of government could be equally bad if those in the most powerful positions are unwise and unethical; conversely any structure of government could be equally good with wise and ethical leaders. Given the tendencies of human nature that exist in all of us, including those in government, to allow a way to curtail abuses of power, I tend to agree for now with Winston Churchill’s quip, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried” (McCoubrey, 2017, para. 5).

I have long since thrown in the towel on the Democratic and Republican parties because they are really a front group for the 1%, for predatory banks, fossil fuel giants, and war profiteers. –Jill Stein

The so-called free market. A free market is important. The United States does not qualify as having a free market, because of legislators paid to pass laws written by corporate sponsors that disadvantage smaller competitors (O’Dell & Penzenstadler, 2019). This helps drive the increasing wealth inequality. About 47% of U.S. citizens trust the government (ODEC, 2020).

It’s widely believed that whatever the social and environmental costs, globalization is unstoppable. It’s seen as an inevitable almost natural process driven by free markets and the so-called efficiencies of scale enjoyed by bigger businesses. If there’s one thing that political parties from the left to the right seem to agree on today it is the power and value of the free market, but the irony is that the majority of really polluting things that happened today would not exist within a genuine free market. Nuclear power couldn’t exist for example without massive state support, but there are billions and billions of dollars being poured into continuing business as usual, whether that’s subsidizing fossil fuels, whether that’s subsidizing huge monocultures, whether it’s giving corporate welfare to some of the already largest and most powerful corporations around. It’ll be impossible to maintain the current global economy as it is today without enormous support from governments around the world, and we’re about as far away from a free market as it’s possible to be. Support for big business comes not only in the form of subsidies but through the increasing deregulation of trade and finance under the auspices of such bodies as the World Trade Organization. The global level regulations are being increasingly stripped away, with the effect that transnational corporations and banks are free to operate across the entire planet. Meanwhile at the national level is ever more red tape and bureaucracy. This places an unfair disproportionate burden on small and medium sized businesses, and every year hundreds of thousands of them are going out of business. It’s basically a system which criminalizes the small producer and processor and deregulates the giant business. The leverage of international financial agreements and the world trade agreements levers people often against their will into a bugger thy neighbor dog-eat-dog global commodity market in which speculation is king, and real people in local communities are an afterthot. (Local Futures, 2021, 26:58)

Hidden exploitation. Profiting from exploitation, even to a small and normal degree, is unacceptable to some of us. Even if we do our utmost to keep our carbon footprint small and make contentious purchases, when we follow the supply chain back further, we have to admit we in the western world are all disproportionately benefiting from cheap labor of migrants and other nations, as we are externalizing the damage of pollution to wildlife or marginalized people.

Former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, agreed with Naomi Klein’s assessment of how big business and politics use global disasters for their own ends, and “a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries” (“The Shock Doctrine,” 2021, para. 14). Others criticize her failure to recognize “the necessary role of entrepreneurial capitalism in overcoming the inherent tendency of any established social system to lapse into stagnation” (para. 16).

Dependence. The economy isn’t set up to allow or encourage anyone to be self-sufficient in the sense of existing outside the economic pyramid. “The consumer culture that globalization promotes is increasingly urban” (Local Futures, 2021, 17:50). Only those who can purchase a multi-product farm outright and keep paying taxes on it could get close to self-sufficient. Self-sufficient farmers are marginalized, like the unpaid or low-paid work of caring, because they don’t contribute much to GDP.

GDP. After showing a string of American politicians stating the importance of GDP growth, Local Futures (2021) states: “It’s as if every problem we have can be solved by increasing GDP….poverty is the problem, more economic growth is the answer. Unemployment is the problem, more economic growth is the answer. Environmental decline is the problem, more economic growth is the answer” (30:20). “GDP is a good measure of economic activity, of money changing hands but a poor measure of progress or well-being. It lumps desirable expenditures (e.g., spending on food, entertainment, or investment in education) with undesirable expenditures (e.g., the costs of war, crime, pollution, and family breakdown)” (O’Neill et al., 2010, p. 13). Money changing hands enriches government, so those decision-makers are not motivated to revise their definition of progress.

The Current Economic Model Will Not Provide Enuf for Equitable Survival

Population growth and scarcity-driven conflict. If your solution is to preach the virtues of abstinence, pass out condoms, or provide midwives worldwide with copper IUDs that cost a few cents and last 10 years, more power to you. At the same time, the population will continue to grow. The U.N. Population Division expects world population, at 7.8 billion in 2020, to level out at or soon after the end of the 21st Century at 10.9 billion. Some estimates are 9 billion by 2050. With finite resources, it will take concerted effort to maintain civility and work toward equity. Ecologists warn, “There is mounting evidence that when populations are large and growing fast, they can be the sparks for both internal and international conflicts that lead to war….greater competition for an ever-dwindling resource pool” (Bradshaw et al., 2021, para. 9, 19). Brooks writes of the U.S. conflict in the middle east:

In this war, it appeared, there were no places of safety, and there could be no such thing as neutrality. This war would spare no one. This, I was discovering, is the nature of war: it abhors a vacuum. It expands until everything and everyone is subsumed by it. It resists all efforts at categorisation and containment. We keep trying to lock it into a box, but war keeps breaking out again. (Brooks, 2016, p. 33)

The western world creates enuf food and life necessities currently, but the monetary incentive structure requires some degree of scarcity to foster competition and incentive to produce. This ensures that even with the work of non-profits or government to redirect resources, little will go to those who need and cannot afford them. For example, crops without high enuf prices will not be harvested. Resources are hoarded. An intentional community member comments:

There seem to be a lot of people who have more than they need. You read about these people are buying houses for silly money in London and never live in them, and I think the founders of Braziers and my grandparents were right. This consumerism isn’t sustainable. (Braziers Park Channel, 2018, 13:13)

Pushed into urban life. The world population is increasingly becoming more urban. It behooves us to find a way forward that minimizes slums. There’s a TEDtalk that shows rural slums as virtually identical to city slums. It celebrates cities as having the potential to raise people from poverty (Brand, 2006). Altho some do make a successful transition from rural to city life, the idea that most are better off in urban than rural poverty is misguided, because it does not trace the problem of slums and poverty back to the root cause. The talk starts with a few slides of picturesque abandoned traditional villages in various nations as evidence that people are moving to cities, but there is not comment on the idea that those villages represent a lifestyle that could or should be preserved. While some leave their villages seeking better opportunities, it is also the case that policies favoring big agribusiness, exploitative lending and marketing, and sometimes climate change have created impossible circumstances for small farming villages worldwide. “In the less industrialized parts of the world, finding and holding onto a job is becoming increasingly difficult. The first victims are small farmers” (Local Futures, 2021, 23:13). Local Futures states the following:

Removing of people on land is the root of all unemployment. It is at the root of the creation of slums and the rural urban migration. [In a translation of an Indian language, a man states] ‘I don’t want to be a beggar. If I could have my land back, I’d go back to my main business, farming.’ Making people disposable in terms of working with the land is creating probably the biggest human crisis….100,000 Indian farmers have been driven to suicide. (24:00)

Such a thing as ending unemployment would never occur to Washington politicians because their corporate backers depend on the threat of unemployment to keep wages down. –Jill Stein

If your work is to upgrade cities, do it. Also recognize you won’t have a complete answer until you find a way to grow more food in cities and/or transport food sustainably from sustainable agribusinesses. Some have started a solution with rooftop gardens.

False metrics of progress. Establishment liberals and conservatives believe the doctrine that globalization is helping to alleviate poverty (Hickel, 2019). We may see statistics by the well-meaning Hans Rosling (2020) that define increased foreign earning in U.S. dollars as a reduction in poverty, but it is a false metric. Globalization provides them some products they want, but it is stripping village communities of their self sufficiency and food security. It is creating short-term westernization for a few and long term deprivation for many.

I haven’t been able to track down what writer quipped that the definition of GDP is the rate at which natural resources are converted to trash. Similarly, wasteful transport of food increases the apparent GDP, without creating any real value.

We often hear about efficiencies of scale, but actually the truth is what we’ve developed today is a system that could not be more wasteful. We have tuna fish caught on the East Coast of America flown to Japan, processed, flown back to America and sold to consumers. We have English apples flown to South Africa to be waxed, flown back again to be sold to consumers. The whole process involves incredible quantities of waste. A series of treaties, new ones almost every year, promote economic growth through international trade. As a consequence, countries today routinely import and export nearly identical quantities of identical products…. all of this at a time when rising CO2 emissions are threatening our very survival. (Local Futures, 2021, 21:21)

Booth (2020), a CEO in e-commerce and technology for 20 years, points out that the main driver of business growth today is easy credit, which is being created at a pace at which we will never be able to pay it back. Government policies still in use were set at a time when labor and capital were linked, an industrial era that counted on growth and inflation. He argues that these policies now incentivize inefficiency, and warns that on this course our world will become profoundly more polarized and unsafe.

Inefficiency and waste. This expected population growth is why some insist that we need cities and industrial farming, but this reasoning is misinformed, or is a pitch to get subsidies from governments.

At first glance high density urban living might appear to reduce per capita use of resources, but this is only true when compared with life in the suburbs. Compared to more genuinely decentralized living patterns [e.g., traditional small villages], urbanization is extremely resource intensive. This is particularly clear in the global south. The moment a person moves into the city the energy use shoots up, the water use shoots up. The infrastructure to run a city per capita is much bigger than the infrastructure to produce a high quality of life in a village. When hundreds of millions of rural people are pulled into cities, the food they once grew themselves must now be grown for them on giant chemical intensive farms. All this food must then be brought into the cities on roads purpose built to accommodate larger and larger trucks. Providing water involves enormous dams and man-made reservoirs. Energy production means huge centralized power plants, coal and uranium mines, and thousands of miles of transmission lines. Meanwhile much of the waste that is produced including countless tons of potentially valuable compost, must be trucked out of the city to be treated buried, or incinerated, or dumped at sea. The end result is that urban dwellers typically consume significantly more non renewable resources than their land based relatives. (Local Futures, 2021, 17:52)

Poor health. U.S. food production systems provide an abundance of poor quality food (Rhodale Institute, 2019, para. 22). This has led to a world with the seeming paradox of both hunger and obesity (cite percentages globally). Poor quality low-cost food contributes to obesity, now considered epidemic (cite). The hormones and antibiotics given to livestock contribute to human obesity (cite).

Unsustainable agribusiness. Our current agricultural production and transportation methods are unsustainable (Food Revolution Network, 2018), including inhumane factory farms. Large scale farming is said to make use of efficiencies of scale (Haspel, 2014), but that is true only for human labor savings, which passes on cost savings to both the agribusiness and end consumer. This analysis, Haspel admits, relies on the externalization of the cost of pollution, which can be substantial with nitrogen pollution of lakes and bays where it promotes algae blooms and destroys fish habitat. Pollution is also from intensive use of fossil-fuel-powered machinery. The Rhodale Institute (2019) states, “Agriculture accounts directly for 11-13% of greenhouse emissions and indirectly for another 12%.6. With our climate increasingly unsteady, we can’t afford to continue with current methods that erode soil and pollute the environment” (para. 6). Possibly the biggest argument against big agribusiness is that if we lose the pollinators, in part because of constant widespread pesticide use (cite), it won’t have been a good tradeoff to have excess of cheap food in the short term and too little food in the long term. In addition, with loss of localized food production, long transport increases waste. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (2019) states that one third of the food we produce globally is wasted. Holt-Giménez (2018), former executive director of Food First, explains this is a natural result of a food system that is financialized and speculative. Farmers produce a commodity, and those without access to the market risk starvation and death. He concludes that the answer to hunger cannot be resolved within capitalist markets. The answer must be something structurally unique. Secure access tenure, to water land, Local and indigenous knowledge systems, systems of exchange are accessible, fair, profitable, such as community supported agriculture (CSAs).

References

References include several direct links to videos.

During this process, let your core values and vision statement be a continual guide. As described in the template for these documents, the core values tell why, the vision statement tells what you want to bring about in the future, and the mission statement should tell who, how, and where. In an analogy to architecture, an initial sketch depicts the view as it would be to the human eye. That is like the vision. The mission is like the “plan drawing” or blueprint, which is based on exact measurements and location details. When writing the mission of your intentional community, put in details such as key numbers. Describe what you’re actually going to be doing. While in the visioning process it may help to retreat to a location with few distractions, for mission writing it may help to be able to look up details that might make a difference in your decisions.

The following steps are suggestions for how you might discuss your mission. It would be helpful to get a friend to facilitate the meeting, so that the group coordinator can fully participate in the discussion. The steps are simple, so it wouldn’t take a formally trained group facilitator to guide a small group in these steps. These steps are similar to the steps for creating the vision statement. It’s a group process that could be completed over several meetings.

Prepare for meetings.

A helpful first step is to make sure the values, vision statement, and compatibility-determining worksheet are accessible for all to refer to as you work on the mission statement. Sorting out the profile question topics might look like this:

• Vision statement: larger categories for IC types (what), intentional community types (what), service-based IC (what), type of service (what)
• Mission statement: population to serve (who), proportion of vulnerable residents (who), residential proximity (how), ownership types (how), population density (where)

Review group’s prior work about preferences.

Possibly in advance of the mission-drafting meeting, make sure these feel inspiring and relevant to your founder’s team. Make a list of the concerns if there are still some who are on the fence about continuing as part of the founder’s group. It’s possible that these concerns could be resolved during the mission-writing. There may be some who, how, and where elements that can be adapted to make a less-than-ideal vision into an attractive option.

Decide on what order to discuss choices.

Combine discussion topics where it makes sense. For example, it probably makes sense to combine the following:

• (if service-based) what vulnerable population to serve, how many of them, what proportion of residents are needed aside from vulnerable population (you might have already decided or started discussing this while creating the vision statement)
• residential proximity (you might keep a more than one option open, so that you can consider more of what is on the market at the time you are ready to rent or purchase)
• ownership types (you might choose to manage this in stages, first renting a small space while you learn and explore grant funding, then purchasing when possible and when the just-right property is available)
• population density (you might keep several options open, so that you can consider more of what is on the market at the time you are ready to rent or purchase)

Choices most important to your group on the whole should be discussed first, because you don’t want to string along members who are not willing to continue if they don’t agree with their most important choice.

There isn’t a completely fair or easy way to go about this. The compatibility-determining worksheet tries to bring some fairness with the concept of giving each member a certain number of votes that they can spread out or cluster according to what they value most. You could use this strategy to determine which of the following choices the group members care about most: population to serve (if service-based), proportion of vulnerable residents (even if not service-based, you may want to reserve an opportunity to accommodate friends and family members in a time of need), residential proximity, ownership types, population density. You might write these choices, then let members put their circled initials next to the items of most importance to them. You might need to keep each other honest about this. A member shouldn’t put all their votes on one topic, then raise a paramount objection about other’s consensus related to a different topic. You might agree that one can’t raise a paramount objection if they don’t have at least one vote assigned to a choice.

Discuss choices in break-out groups.

Repeat this discussion step for each choice. For the choice under discussion, write the options related to that choice in large text on a few papers and place them in separate locations in the meeting space. Allow members to break into small groups based on which they would like to discuss. If anyone is alone with their option, they can bring their option to whatever other group they feel is most related or next most of interest to them. Ask the small groups to come to an agreement or compromise if possible. A facilitator could check in with the groups to determine when this is mostly finished, or you could set a time limit, depending on whether breakout groups are small or large. It could help to ask breakout groups to start the discussion by giving everyone a chance to state what they decided. Ask each group to pick a spokesperson to summarize their discussion for the group. To close out this circle, ask the spokesperson to state their summary, in a set time, such as 45 seconds (research shows this is about the average time people will stay focused on one topic without their minds wandering).

Discuss details if you plan a service-based IC.

For your convenience, here are some of the profile questions and the options offered. Service-based ICs not only offer valuable social benefit, they may qualify for grant funding. It’s worth considering whether even a small portion of your membership could be reserved for populations that are substantially disadvantaged. Some of them may be friends or relatives of members, who may be motivated to take on much of the extra work.

Population to Serve

You might serve one of the following vulnerable populations, or serve members who have two or three of these attributes combined:

• Animal rescue
• Physical disability
• Learning disability
• Low income families with children
• Low income 2SLGBTQIA+
• Low income ethnic minority
• Refugee resettlement
• Low income elderly
• Low income with high medical risk
• Chronically homeless
• Mild to moderate mental illness
• Mental illness involving delusion or dementia
• Addiction recovery
• Escaped from sex trafficking
• Runaway or homeless minors
• Aged out foster teens
• In-system foster kids
• Gang-involved youth
• Ex convicts

Number of vulnerable residents

You might choose an IC comprised completely of a vulnerable population or families with a member in that population, which could include yourself. Alternatively, your service plans may require support from professionals that are less represented in the population you serve, who could live and work within the IC or participate as non-residential employees.

Vulnerable population as a proportion of residents:

• A minority
• About half
• A majority
• All

Allow a pause.

At this point, it’s important not to rush to decide on the best option. If your meeting time is limited, you might plan to hold the remainder of the discussion online and in a final meeting. You might introduce the next step to give some ideas for what members could do in preparation. Alternatively, you could move on to the next steps, but don’t consider them the final decisions.

Debate the merits and explore options as a group.

Debate the merits and explore options. It may help to invite group members to be an advocate for their favored options if they feel strongly about it. Others can contact that advocate if they want to discuss that option between meetings. Any member can research options and make a case for their preferences in the next meeting. Members can also propose options not on the list.

Invite everyone to keep notes as you proceed, because these could be used later as part of the mission statement.

Consider questions in group discussion.

• What are the best examples of our preferred ownership type being successful for ICs?
• Are there examples of this ownership type being successful in our chosen area?
• Which of our group’s preferred ownership types could be combined? (e.g., rent-to-own [lease with option to purchase], group owns shares of corporation and all of us, as well as others, rent from the corporation)
• How could this IC type make use of the group’s financial or property assets?  

This next set of questions is for a service-oriented IC. If you are not considering a service-oriented IC, skip this, but you might keep it in mind as an option for a later stage of development. Adding a service-oriented mission even as a small part of your overall mission can bring many opportunities for collaboration, promotion, and funding.

• What are the trade-offs between meeting the needs of the vulnerable population we wish to serve and the group member’s needs?
• If there are several vulnerable populations we would like to serve, which are most in need? (This will take some research.)
• If there are several vulnerable populations we would like to serve, which would we be most capable to serve?
• For the vulnerable population we wish to serve, which “residential proximity” option would make the most sense? (e.g., roommates, house mates, separate units with common areas and shared resources), shared land with some shared buildings, neighborhood mutual aid project or “cooperative housing cluster” with shared resources)
• Would non-vulnerable residents need to have a less privileged type of “residential proximity” living situation so that we could afford to offer the service?
• How could this IC type make use of the larger network of communities around it?
• How could this IC type make use of the group’s knowledge and experience?  
• How could this IC type benefit from the resources of communities around it?
• Is this IC type needed in our chosen area more than other types? If so, why?

Compromise and negotiate.

It’s likely you will still need to use your agreed-on governance and decision-making procedures to resolve differences. The elements of the mission seem easier to adapt or pivot, while keeping the same values and vision. For example with an ecovillage, your purpose doesn’t necessarily change whether you’re (a) non-profit or a co-owned corporation, or (b) whether you’re rural or using urban rooftops for gardening. If you’re a business or service-oriented non-profit, you could expand or shift your client base probably without too much disruption.  

Some members may not love all of the choices the group has made, but they may still want to continue, while investigating other groups. It may be that only when the rest of the group is deciding on a particular property that they will decide to commit or separate from the group. You might lose out on a potentially valuable contributor if you insist that everyone commit early on.

Decide on one population or a combination.

After discussing the questions above, your group might at this point use your chosen decision-making process to focus on one or two option combinations. Depending on how consensus-based your decision-making process is, it will be important to understand if some members are dissenting to the decision still. Without pressuring them, it’s important to understand whether or not they are willing to move forward with group toward the current combination of choices. If not, you might invite them to continue to attend meetings, in case they still would like to contribute or might come to see benefits in the current choices. You might explore how the choices could be adapted to meet some of the core values of the dissenting member(s).

Say respectful goodbyes.

If the majority are excited about one combination of choices and others are clearly not, you might hold a goodbye ceremony for those who are sure they don’t want to move forward with the plan, but only if the dissenting member(s) are interested in participating in the goodbye. As much as possible, keep the door open for future collaborations, unless the dissenting members feel too opposed to the chosen direction. Keep in mind the potential to re-involve the leaving members if the group later changes direction.

Write some first drafts.

This can be homework or worked on during a meeting. Timing it next to a break could work well, to allow for variation in the time that different members will want to spend in this exercise.

• Based on the vision statement, and notes from the group answers from the questions listed above, have each member write a draft of a mission statement.
• Invite those who prefer to contribute but not write, to form one or more groups. In a meeting setting, point to a location for those to meet. 

State the mission in the present tense.

Here’s a template to use for the mission statement:

We are a [rural, urban, peri-urban…] [ownership structure] [ecovillage, vanlife travelers coalition…] joined for the purpose of [major focus of what you do for livelihood or service, type of resource sharing [be specific if you wish, or purpose bigger than yourself, such as your shared values]. We provide [name the service or a product from your business venture, ceremony or practice of a spiritual or religious tradition, and/or a shared leisure pursuit] to the [target market].

If you don’t all have a strong shared leisure pursuit, then leave that out. Here are a couple of examples:

• We are a peri-urban land-sharing ecovillage providing families with a school that matches our values of hands-on student-directed learning. We operate a CSA to serve a neighboring town, host an annual seed share event, and offer youth summer camps that include outdoor recreation at a nearby lake.

• We are a nomadic cooperative business supported by a vanlife travelers coalition, joined for the purpose of creating a livelihood based on teaching paragliding and wind surfing. We also offer ecstatic dance workshops in a variety of locations.

Evaluate and merge the drafts.

As a group, combine bits of each contribution to come up with a statement all prefer or can live with. Characteristics to check for include the following:

• It needs to be practical and express what activities are done on a daily basis.
• Aim for a word count that takes less than two minutes to share, about 300.
• Some recommend not to finalize the wording as a group, but leave that to the best writer in the group.
• You can decide to refine it later. You can write it into the legal founding documents eventually.

Iterate when needed.

You may come back to this document as your group proceeds through creating the other templates of the group. It shouldn’t be seen as a failure to do a re-write. It is definitely better to rework the community in idea phase rather than rework it after people have moved to live with or near each other, substantially committing to a plan in a way that might have required disruption and sacrifice.

Share your statement online.

Link your googledoc (or other location for document sharing) to your ICmatch group description on the Team Up page. This way potential members get a better sense of what your group is becoming. Also, your work could inspire others going thru their own mission-writing process.

Visioning can be a fun and energizing process. It’s a creative process that doesn’t necessarily have an established sequence. If your group is small, consider taking a retreat or a camping trip together to ensure you have one focus and a lot of together-time to mull over ideas, even as you’re working on simple activities such as meal preparation, or while exploring the area.

The following steps are suggestions for how you might discuss your vision for intentional community. It would be helpful to get a friend to facilitate the meeting, so that the group coordinator can fully participate in the discussion. The steps are simple, so it wouldn’t take a formally trained group facilitator to guide a small group in these steps. These steps are similar to the steps for creating the mission statement. It’s a group process that could be completed over several meetings.

Prepare for meeting.

It will help to have the printed list of the document titled Determining Compatibility of Group Members if group members have already weighed in. As you work on the visioning process, try to remind each other not to get too much into “the weeds,” which will come next when you define the mission. Sorting out the profile question topics might look like this:

• Vision statement: larger categories for IC types (what), intentional community types (what), service-based IC (what), type of service (what)
• Mission statement: population to serve (who), proportion of vulnerable residents (who), residential proximity (how), ownership types (how), population density (where)

Discuss preferred IC types.

You may have already started this step, as suggested on the Values, Vision, Mission page. If you haven’t yet looked at overlap in group members’ IC types, write out the IC types that any member wants to bring up for group consideration. Group members could write their name or a tally mark next to the IC types they prefer. Alternatively, if the group is large, it may be more workable to allow each member a set number of votes. They can use all their votes on one type if they choose. If a few clearly preferred ICs don’t emerge from this process, each member could be given a number of additional votes with an instruction to place them only on one or more IC types they didn’t choose on the first tally marking.

Consider a service-based IC.

As described in the community types page, some intentional communities are based around housing a vulnerable and underserved segment of society. While you may feel it is too much of a stretch for your group’s resources, consider the possibilities of grant funding (especially if you become a non-profit), charging for some caring services as a business, and/or offsetting the IC expenses if the served population can assist in the community’s paid or unpaid work. You can combine a for-profit and non-profit within your community. You might plan for one or more of the following ways to serve:

• Short term residence (shelter)
• Long term residence (shelter)
• Potentially permanent residence
• (add-on) schooling or vocational training
• (add-on) support services possibly including paid work opportunities
• Provides housing while attending external college or vocational training

While this discussion is about a general type of service, you might save for later the details of who and how many to serve. If it seems important to discuss that in your visioning process, jump over to the mission statement writing process to see where we’ve listed options for you, which are also in the profile questions. Go to the section “Discuss details if you plan a service-based IC.”

Evaluate based on group’s core values.

A next step in your vision for your IC is to discuss which of the IC types would best exemplify your group’s core values.

For the IC types that had the most votes, you might write the IC type large on a few papers and place them in separate locations in the meeting space. Allow members to break into small groups based on which they would like to discuss. If anyone is alone with an IC type, they can bring their IC type to whatever other group they feel is related or of interest to them. Ask the small groups to discuss how the group values can be put into action within their IC type. A facilitator could check in with the groups to determine when this is mostly finished, or you could set a time limit, depending on whether breakout groups are small or large. It could help to ask breakout groups to start the discussion by giving everyone a chance to state what they see of value in this IC type. Ask each group to pick a spokesperson to summarize their discussion for the group. To close out this circle, ask the spokesperson to state their summary, in a set time, such as 45 seconds (research shows this is about the average time people will stay focused on one topic without their minds wandering).

Allow a pause.

At this point, it’s important not to rush to make a choice. If your meeting time is limited after you’ve gone thru the first two steps, you might plan to resume the discussion at the next meeting. You might introduce the next step to give some ideas for what members could do in preparation. Alternatively, you could move on to the next steps, but don’t consider them the final decisions. Rather, this could be one round in which one IC type wins out, but leaving room for another IC type to be a challenger in the next meeting.

Debate the merits and explore options as a group.

It may help to invite group members to be an advocate for their favored IC type if they feel strongly about it. Others can contact that advocate if they want to discuss that option between meetings. Any member can research options and make a case for their preferences in the next meeting. Members can also propose a form of community that is not on the IC types list.

Combination types could be workable, such as in the following examples:

• If one of you is only interested in vanlife and others are interested in a stable location, this could work if the van dwellers have a role that is filled periodically as they stop in to regroup.
• The Camphill Community has many locations of the type “housing or shelter for a vulnerable group.” They house as long-term residents people whose intellectual capacity is inadequate to care for themselves independently, but with assistance they have a candle-making business that helps support the community. The community also houses volunteers who live there and assist.
• Sahale is an ecovillage and a retreat center operated by the residents. They host retreats and workshops in addition to events such as weddings, among meadows, orchards, and gardens.

Invite everyone to keep notes as you proceed, because their assertions about the merit of one IC type could be used later as part of the vision or mission statement.

Consider questions in group discussion.

• How could this IC type meet the group member’s needs?
• How could this IC type benefit the larger network of communities around it?
• How could this IC type make use of the group’s assets?  
• How could this IC type benefit from the assets of communities around it?
• Is this IC type needed in our chosen area more than other types? If so, why?
• What are the best examples of this IC type being successful?
• Are there examples of this IC type being successful in our chosen area?
• Which of our group’s preferred IC types could be combined?
• If we don’t come to a clear consensus on one preferred IC type, is it feasible to operate as separate communities sharing some resources?
• If it’s best to focus all our effort on one IC type, is there another type we might reserve as a backup plan in case our efforts don’t result in the expected benefits?

Compromise and negotiate.

Depending on how consensus-based your decision-making process is, it will be important to understand if some members are dissenting to the decision still. Without pressuring them, it’s important to understand whether or not they are willing to move forward with group toward the chosen IC type. If not, you might invite them to continue to attend meetings, in case they still would like to contribute or might come to see benefits in the chosen IC type. You might explore how the chosen IC type could meet some of the core values of the dissenting member(s).

Decide on one IC type or a combination.

After discussing the options using the above suggestions, your group might at this point use your chosen decision-making process to focus on one or two IC types. If there is enuf similarity in the IC types, you might choose to move forward keeping both options as future possibilities. However, this might be more complicated than choosing one or deciding on a combination of types.

Say respectful goodbyes.

If the majority are excited about one IC type and others are clearly not, you might hold a goodbye ceremony for those who are sure they don’t want to move forward with the plan, but only if the dissenting member(s) are interested in participating in the goodbye. As much as possible, keep the door open for future collaborations, unless the dissenting members feel too opposed to the chosen direction. Keep in mind the potential to re-involve the leaving members if the group later changes direction.

Write some first drafts.

This can be homework or worked on during a meeting. Timing it next to a break could work well, to allow for variation in the time that different members will want to spend in this exercise.

• Based on the core values list from a previous exercise, and notes from the group answers from the questions listed above, have each member write a draft of a vision statement.
• A helpful prompt could be as follows: What’s the purpose? What do we want to bring about in the future (big picture goal)?
• Invite those who prefer to contribute but not write, to form one or more groups. In a meeting setting, point to a location for those to meet.
• Choose impactful words that are memorable and relevant to your team. 
• It can contain metaphor.

State the vision in the future tense.

• A two or three year vision is often a useful and realistic start, far enuf out to get beyond present-day problems but not so far that you won’t get there in your lifetime. If you are planning a new community, a good focus point for your visioning is to envision the point at which your group has legal contracts completed, purchased the property and moved comfortably onto it, and has group agreements in place. This could be conceptualized as the point at which the outside world would recognize it as an established group, not a plan.

Evaluate and merge the drafts.

As a group, combine bits of each contribution to come up with a statement all prefer or can live with. Characteristics to check for include the following:

• It needs to inspire the founder’s team and express the core values.
• It balances high aspiration and achievability.
• It doesn’t go into details that should be written in the mission statement instead.
• Aim for a word count that takes less than two minutes to share, about 300.
• What is the lasting impact your IC will have for members, others served (customers or a vulnerable population you choose to serve), and the larger community? Why does that matter?”
• It’s nearly impossible to be precise and detailed at the same time. Develop a one-line vision statement and build out a “vision description” that details each part of the statement. It could be a series of bullet points, or full paragraphs like a manifesto.
• Some recommend not to finalize the wording as a group, but leave that to the best writer in the group.
• Your vision may need to be written somewhat differently for different audiences, such as your founder’s team, prospective members, and funding institutions. You might use the different contributions of members for these different purposes.
• You can decide to refine it later. You can write it into the legal founding documents eventually.

Iterate when needed.

You may come back to this document as your group proceeds through creating the mission statement and the other templates of the group. It shouldn’t be seen as a failure to do a re-write. It is definitely better to rework the community in idea phase rather than rework it after people have moved to live with or near each other, substantially committing to a plan in a way that might have required disruption and sacrifice.

Share your statement online.

Link your googledoc (or other location for document sharing) to your ICmatch group description on the Team Up page. This way potential members get a better sense of what your group is becoming. Also, your work could inspire others going thru their own visioning process.

The following is a definition by Sky Blue, who was introduced early on to intentional communities by parents who had met in one. Sky lived in seven different ICs over the last 27 years. They were formerly Executive Director and are currently on the Board of the Foundation for Intentional Community. The following is quoted with permission from a presentation:

While it can be easiest to think of an intentional community as a place, at their core, intentional communities are about relationships of sharing. People sharing space, sharing resources, sharing purpose, sharing lives….Intentional communities come in all shapes and sizes. They usually have some kind of organizational structure, a membership system, and something that defines what it’s all about, the intention that makes it an intentional community….And living with others with a sense of shared purpose satisfies our basic human need for meaning. (Slide 5)

Sky and their consulting partner Avi Kruley came up with the following criteria for intentional community:

• Residence: People choosing to live together
• Rationale: A commonly understood intention or purpose of the community
• Responsibilities: Cooperative governance and management
• Resources: Collectivized economies based on mutual support
• Relationships: A sense of connection and social interactions that build culture (slide 7)

To clarify, collectivized economies can take the form of shared resources such as vehicles, tools, insurance, or a business partnership. It does not necessarily mean income sharing, though some intentional communities do partly or fully share income. Let’s dig into each of these points.

Residence

People choosing to live together could look very different from one community to another, but there are three main configurations:

• separate houses (or vans/RVs) on the same plot of land
• separate self-contained apartments within a building
• share a livingroom, laundry, and kitchen with separate bedrooms or external sleeping spaces

Rationale

A commonly understood intention or purpose of the community could vary widely. The community types page describes a number of these purposes, falling into the following general categories:

affordable housing
family-focused
nomadic or time-flexible stays
shared cultural values
self-sufficiency & sustainability
care and social safety net
community as a work team

Responsibilities

Cooperative governance and management can range from anarchy, to full consensus, to an autocracy, as long as everyone is in agreement with the system and able to work together. Read about options in the governance guidelines page.

Resources

Collectivized economies based on mutual support also have a wide range. This could range from sharing only the land parcel to full income sharing.

Relationships

A sense of connection and social interactions that build culture are also concepts that can vary widely. Connection can come from shared values, shared identity, or simply friendship. Social interactions that build culture can be work and/or leisure. Members might run a small farm together and a community supported agriculture (CSA) business. Members might work at different types of jobs on or off site but participate in the same art form such as theater or dance. They may share one or more favorite sports or leisure activities.