We want to hear from you!
What made you want to join an intentional community in the first place? What kind of things interest you? Where are your growing edges around building your knowledge, skills, and wisdom around living in community with others?
Could you take a few minutes to participate in our programs survey for 2024? Your responses will be so helpful to us! We would really appreciate your help here. Thanks all!
Hello! I’d love to learn more about founding documents, and certainly more from Laird as I can’t take his 2 year long facilitation class since I live in Thailand…
Hi @eleonore.king!
We love Laird, he is one of the best! We hope to have some new structures in place for next year to host courses and events that work for everyone’s schedule.
Could you explain a bit more what you mean by founding documents?
Thank you for your feedback!
Yeah, Laird Schaub is great! I’ve heard some great podcast episodes of him, he was the guest on season 1 episode 9, which you can listen to on ic.org if you haven’t already done so. He also was on the Tell Me More About Cohousing podcast back in season one I think, that was the first place I found out about him and one can look that up online and listen to it also. Some ideas for in the meantime while you wait for a chance to take his class.
Thanks for answering 
What I mean is all the documents to draft - from vision and values to by laws, operating procedures, financial, membership etc - I’d love to see a bunch of examples because I keep getting I’m missing stuff…
Hello @eleonore.king. Nice to emeet you here. Laird is wanting to offer his course to folks in AUS and NZ too which share lots of daylight hours with where you are. I suggest emailing him or me if you’d like to be connected to him.
@eleonore.king Thanks for the feedback. Would you be interested in participating in our programs survey? Your responses would be so helpful! Thank you 
Here it is:
I’d like to learn Sociocracy via FIC.
I see that you have a form on this topic for anyone who registers on this website. I don’t know if people are filling out the form, but you’re not getting many replies here.
Does FIC use Sociocracy at all? Since a lot of intentional communities seem to use it, I imagine that FIC is familiar with it.
Sociocracy recommends forming circles of people within and outside of any organization, so outsiders can have some influence too and insiders can better influence outsiders cooperatively.
I imagine social justice is one of the main purposes of intentional community and I think Sociocracy is likely the most effective route to achieve that.
I’m eager for the world to achieve social justice and freedom for all.
I think Sociocracy can help us put our heads together regularly, which could help FIC be more effective and help generate more productive discussion on this forum or other means of communication with the public and membership.
The Inside Community podcast did an informative episode about sociocracy with Ted Rau (spelling?). He teaches the sociocracy for all course, he’s a great resource for learning.
How to form and maintain strong deep community without land ownership.
Thanks @lkindr , FIC is familiar with Sociocracy - in fact, one of our previous courses was in such high demand that we decided to make it evergreen. It’s a pre-recorded course so you can watch it in your own time. You can find it here if you are interested! Sociocracy for Communities | Foundation for Intentional Community 🎓️
We’ve also covered quite a few social justice issues ranging from placemaking and rematriation to microaggressions and understanding diversity related harm. They were in the form of events (usually 2 hour workshops/webinars). Depending on availability of the instructors, we could potentially work with them to create courses from these topics.
That is partly why we are sending out the survey because we are really interested in diving deeper into many of these topics and want to know if there are specific topics people want to learn more about. If you have some time to complete the survey, we’d be really appreciative! And thank you if you already have And thank you for participating in this discussion with us!
Thanks @RionaAndLogan, you nailed it. Ted Rau is one of the best Sociocracy resources around!
The episode is here if anyone is interested in listening!
Hi @KyraLavenderDove , thanks for your response. I’m curious if your interests lie in placemaking and place justice, as well as rematriation, in which case here is a great resource for you: What is Rematriation? - The Sogorea Te Land Trust
Or if you mean more like developing this sense of community without physically living in community?
I mean that communal living extends beyond the demographic that can afford even a fraction of property ownership. I want to learn more about rematriation, landback, caravan, and alternative community structures.
Thanks @eleonore.king. Perhaps a “Policies” and/or “Legal” tag in our Member Library would be helpful?
@KyraLavenderDove I learned about Kift recently, which is creating communities of mobile and tiny houses and wonder if it is useful to you… https://www.kift.com/
Thanks for the link to the FIC sociocracy video. I listened to about half of it so far.
You should have left a link to the Survey too, because I can’t find it easily.
On the Start Page it says to go here How to post feedback to the forum to give feedback for suggestions to improve the forum. Someone gave feedback there in 2022, but their suggestion seems to have been ignored. So it appears that the Feedback page is useless. I suggest removing it and the reference to it on the Start Page or fixing the Feedback glitch.
The feedback I actually wanted to give is for the FIC forum authorities to use sociocracy by forming an inner circle and then inviting readers to form an outer circle, so we readers can learn and use sociocracy along with FIC or its forum authorities.
Can you all do that for everyone’s benefit, please?