Which of these stages are you ready for?
Forming-phase group with location flexibility
- Forming-phase groups may have a goal of a residential community that is immediate or years away.
- You may want to ensure the best fit in personality and values before you together decide on an exact location.
- You may be saving up and searching for the right property.
- In this phase, ICmatch gives you the ability to contact community seekers whose detailed profiles help you identify compatibility. You can promote yourselves as a forming group without a set location, but state general location preferences.
Forming-phase group with location stability
- In this phase, you may have found a property you want to purchase and are actively recruiting in order to increase your financial resources.
- Groups that are searching for members can maintain a group profile to help determine a good fit in values of prospective members.
- In this phase, you may want to list both with IC.org and with ICmatch.org. IC.org puts your forming community on their map, while ICmatch helps you advertise your group, benefit from our outreach work, and identify compatibility.
Established intentional community
- An individual within an established IC may wish to bring in a business partner or life partner.
- An IC may have vacancy for your group to enter as a household unit.
- When a group is seeking membership in an established IC that has residences available, the trade-off is that these may be harder to get into, but they are more likely to be stable over time, with a set culture and rules.
- ICmatch groups that meet their goal to rent or purchase land or residences become an IC. Then post with an IC directory such as the FIC to get on their map.
ICmatch helps people find compatibility for creating close long-term relationships, especially for local in-person groups. It is ideal for forming and maintaining a core leadership team for an intentional community. As a team you may decide to work toward group land purchase, creating a neighborhood resilience circle, or a coliving group that is like a chosen family. You can post a profile to be matched with others based on your response to many categories of questions including the size of community you want, gender identities, religious affiliation, and many lifestyle choices. You can also post a group description. There are many social media sites and other services that have a similar function of creating groups of people with similar interests. The different benefit of ICmatch is that it prompts the sharing of detailed information that can help people more easily identify who shares the same preferences on a variety of indicators that are important if you’re living and working in close partnership with others. Yet it keeps your information private until you decide you are ready to meet. At ICmatch, it’s about the relationships first, and the practical purpose of the group second. ICmatch provides a platform for people to identify compatibility and discuss how they uniquely can create cooperative peer-to-peer arrangements to meet their specific needs. The Start page tells you step by step how you can use the website.