Hello Badassfairy! I resonate with a lot of what you shared and am super excited to have found the Inside Community Podcast as a resource for learning the ins and outs of community building. Enjoy!
Hello @badassfairy i am new here and your thread is the first Iām reading.
Iām also nomadic, and currently in Europe though originally from western Canada.
Iāve been committed to learning how to create resilient, connected off grid community for as long as I can remember and have been going down what I call the ladder of layers into the deeply conditioned barriers humans (particularly me) have conditioned into ourselves/myself to survive that keep us/me from creating this that I so adamantly want.
In the last 2.5 years I have been studying/using Possibility Management, with extraordinary results. I am currently part of a 3 month community project using PM, which is an incubator for Gaian community-builders/weavers/visionaries.
The PM online community converges on telegram and there is super empowering stuff happening all over the world.
I love what I see here in your thread so far, especially about the Visioning of what you want to create/be part of. I wrote out a personal Codex and a Codex for the village of my wildest dreams. These documents give me my x info the map, where I am, and my x about where I am orienting.
The project Iām at right now is all about all of this, and about discovering and delivering your non-material value, becoming a precious resource for your community and the wider world. I wonder how close you might be! We are in Czechia til Dec 19.
Love, Nicole
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One of the things I did when I first started considering intentional community seriously is start a little notebook and the first page has my five core values. At that time, back in springtime, I wanted to start a community and find a core group to work with me to do it. Now Iām leaning more toward joining someone elseās core group as a fellow founder because though I have friends who love the idea of intentional community, none of them seem to have the wherewithall that I have to push forward.
That being said I still think my five core values are relevent to any endeavour I move towards, because it made me sit down and think of the most basic basics that matter to me in community.
I donāt think you should decide any of the minutia until you start gathering your core group/founders, because most of that will need to be decided together. But your core values are something that is good to have pre-determined so people will know whether they want to co-create with you.
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I like that. Creating core values together with a group of people one intends to co-create with seems right. It feels good to me. But surely the ideas start solo.
Where are you with this now? Sorry I only saw your message.
So I was able to gather some cofounders, and then realized that buying land collaboratively with others is super risky, and I found out that the first-time homebuyer grants we could qualify for cannot be used collaboratively with other people. So no collaborative land acquisision for us. So my husband and I stepped out of the founders group thusly. What Iām hoping is that they can buy land and we can buy in later, when it can be done in such a fashion that we can use our oppertunities for grants as first-time buyers. Other options for my husband and I would be to buy into a cohousing community on the edge of town, or to buy a modular home in the resident-owned mobile home park nearby, which is a type of intentional community.
This means weāre sort of waiting, we have an appointment with our first-time homebuying counselor next month to see what could happen.
Sorry I donāt have magical news about the right people with all the right resources coming together, lifeās usually not that easy.
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Firstly āeco villagesā do not do those things; i.e. they are not real āeco villageā, they are not commune-reminiscent, you are talking about Ann Arbor or something that is literally just a regular and full-sized house with zero or near-zero āexit of Babylonā.
Secondly if you are starting your own community you can do it by building actual houses, so that each member can have an actual house and each member can work at the right times and be communal at the right times and no one is demanded to work āfrom 6pm to 10pmā or something like that, unless their role is meeting organizer or something like that. If you invite full-scale hippies who donāt mind staying in a small room with 10 people for a week to also live there, then anyone who is okay with that can live in a house together and anyone who is autistic or otherwise doesnāt like it can live in a house alone. Of course you would need for example of you had 10 houses then no more of 2 of them can be used by the people who donāt mind it, because you would make sure the other houses are available for the people who need to live alone. Then you can still develop your garden, your chickens and/or cows, your generators, and other indoor buildings such as a sociable kitchen building or an art project house or a library or a school etc. as desired. The difference is just that no one is forced or āexpectedā to be at any of the communal or socializing buildings at any particular time nor for any particular percentage of their time, except for the people who need to do so for their work such as any car mechanic or whoever is currently putting some seeds and garlic and sweet potatoes in a warehouse etc. Including a community kitchen that everyone can also eat in their own house whenever they prefer to. But in the community kitchen someone can decide to make chili for everyone even if every member at the moment does usually eat alone someone might like to cook something for everyone.
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I think it is important to separate the ideas of eco-village and intentional community. Of course they can be present in the same settlement, but not necessarily. There are intentional communities that have nothing āecoā about them, and there are places that call themselves āeco-villagesā but have nothing communal about them. (at least in the original meaning of community: Munis etymology in Latin | Etymologeek.com)
From your post it sounds to me that you are looking for a place that is both. The way I see it, if a settlement wants to be sustainable and ecological, it is almost inevitable to also be a very strongly bound community of people. Living sustainably or ecologically involves a lot of ācreatingā and ādoingā and very little ābuyingā. Itās very difficult for one person or even one family to be proficient in all the aspects that is required to live sustainably, hence the notion of āā¦it takes a villageā¦ā.
When starting a community, in my opinion STEP 1 should be reviewing the thought of ācreating my OWN communityā. This is just a personal opinion but I think owning a community is kind of an oxymoron. If you live in a community you canāt own it. If you (one person) own it, itās not really a community. I think this is very important to come to terms with what you really want.
STEP 2 would be to create a set of values/main principles/constitution around which you as founder or organizer want to build your life. This will make it much easier to attract those who want to live by the same values, and filter out those who have different value systems. Here is an example for what I mean: Why are we doing this? ā Tranqvillium, a Social Experiment in the Mojave Season 1. 4/1/2023-3/31/2024 and also Who is this for? ā Tranqvillium, a Social Experiment in the Mojave Season 1. 4/1/2023-3/31/2024
STEP 3 is to figure out a very clear and well thought through ENTRY and EXIT process. I think this is extremely important and primary for the overall health and growth of a community. In my experience this is one of the most often asked questions when a new prospective member inquires.
One additional thought is that when designing a community, both in terms of social structure, financial arrangements and the actual physical living accommodations, the most important principle is maintaining a balance between COMMUNALITY and PRIVACY. Our needs in terms of those two things vary by person, and even by time within the life of that same person. If the boundaries of those are well described and balanced, and the individual has the opportunity how much of each he/she needs at any given time, there is a much higher chance of creating a successful cohabitation of people.
Of course these are my very subjective experiences and opinions, I am sure that there are many other probably even better approaches to the same questions. I am looking forward to reading and learning more about this.
I think Iām still figuring that out on top of the thought of starting my own.