Yours with Words

Ever since working on my high school newspaper (1965-67), I've wanted to be a journalist. While that has by no means been the only thing I've wanted to be, communication has been one of my enduring passions.

Slowly, over the decades, I've succeeded.

Starting in the 80s I occasionally authored magazine articles about community living. Concurrent with that, I launched a career as a process consultant, which inexorably led to report writing—lots of report writing.

Lost in the Fun House
Then things took a jump in 1992 when I negotiated FIC becoming the publisher of Communities magazine, taking over from Charles Betterton, who had lost the resource base to keep things going. This opportunity opened three doors at once: writer, editor, publisher.

—Over the two-plus decades that FIC has been behind the wheel, I've typically authored 6-8 magazine articles annually. Given that the road to effective writing is pretty much the same one that Lily Tomlin points out as the way you get to Carnegie Hall—practice—this steady work has been enormously beneficial in the development of my craft.

—Having apprenticed at my father's knee as a snob about words and their proper usage, I've also worked the other side of the aisle: editing. Even as far back as the early '90s, a network compatriot wryly gifted me a red pen for my birthday, because, after receiving my mark-ups of his draft white paper, he knew I must go through them faster than a garlic eater consumes breath mints.

—Rarest of all is the chance to be a publisher. While the circulation of Communities has never been above 1600, in our own small way we are a market-maker when it comes to grammar, spelling, and the meaning of words. We get to be ruthless in stamping out the cutesy disease of interior capitalization ("CoHousing" and "EcoVillage" make me want to vomit), expurgating unneeded hyphens ("e-mail," "by-laws," and "non-profit" are so '90s), and arbitrating a non-sexist solution to the need for a third person singular pronoun when gender is unknown (we prefer "they," making the plural do double duty in the same way that we ask "you" to be of service as the singular and plural second person pronoun).

I just eat that stuff up!

Throughout the last decade of the 20th Century and the opening stanza of the 21st, I gradually accreted an increasing number of communication offerings onto my workshop menu. Today my offerings include Conflict, Facilitation, Power Dynamics, Consensus (which comes in two flavors), and Humor (think of it as spumoni).

Blogging a Dead Horse
Then, in 2007, I dipped my toe into the blogosphere. Seven years and 770 entries later, I'm still at it. While I encountered an existential hiccup a few years back—wondering if I'd run out of fresh ideas and fall prey to reheating leftovers—I've been able to put that particular devil behind me. 

I've discovered that all I have to do is pay attention to what's happening around me! Life is never dull for an itinerant community networker who is domiciled in a thriving ecovillage (note the clean spelling), and there is always a new foal or filly gamboling about in the landscape of my life, offering itself up as inspiration for my next blog (think of it as the virtual equivalent of My Friend Flicka). There's really no reason to be anxious about slipping into a morbid fascination with describing dead horses.

Communities as a Pathway to Community

Even though publishing our quarterly magazine steadily loses money (we've finished in the black only twice in 22 years), it's something that FIC holds dear and we're doing everything in our power to keep it in print. The magazine was first launched in 1972, and has established itself as the source for information and inspiration about community living and cooperative culture.

We cover the Intentional Communities Movement in its full breadth: from cohousing to ecovillages; from ashrams to student co-ops; from group houses to agricultural communes.

At its best, Communities chronicles both the triumphs and the heartaches of cooperative living. We take you behind the scenes to examine what challenges people are encountering, and what solutions they are discovering in their day-to-day experiences of living together. 

Cooperative living is messy business and we try to cover it all. We don't sugar coat it, and we let authors disagree about the lessons to be learned. Our editorial mission is not to promulgate a party line; it's to make the lines shorter for getting into the party. If there's one thing we've learned from living in community, it's that we're all in this together and we're only able to do our best work when we listen to everyone's piece of the truth.

How You Can Help
This is where you come in. Nothing would make a more immediate impact on our bottom line than new subscribers. If you do not currently have a subscription, please consider clicking here and signing up. If you are a current subscriber, thank you!—and please consider giving a gift subscription to a friend or loved one. 

The timing couldn't be better! We've recently overhauled our website to offer content either as paper or plastic digital, and all back issues as either available as in-print copies or as digital downloads. We're also offering a completely revised collection of the Best of Communities on 15 different themes, where we've gathered together 15-20 of the best articles we've published on a topic (including Good Meetings; Leadership, Power, and Membership; Elders in Community; Challenges and Lessons of Community; and Cohousing) and created dynamite packets of 55-65 pages each. Buy one or buy them all.

For the truly inspired, we offer a complete back issue set—all 161 of them—for the bargain price of $500.

For those especially moved by what Communities has meant to you and will continue to mean in our collective effort to manifest a more cooperative future, I invite you to consider making an earmarked tax-deductible donation in support of magazine operations. It all counts.

Your support today will help keep our cooperative flame burning brightly—and all of us cooperative authors in print (and off the street).

Happy Birthday, FIC!

Today's a party day!  

I'm in Carrboro NC (at Arcadia Cohousing) for the Fellowship for Intentional Community's spring organizational meetings—marking the 51st time we've gathered together a cadre of community networkers from around the country to discuss what we can do to build more cooperative culture.

Our first meeting was way back in May 1987—as in before email (talk about antediluvian)—at Stelle IL, where Charles Betterton succeeded in attracting about 30 people to explore the possibility of creating a national network focused on intentional community. While Charles didn't continue in a regular FIC role after the first year, that seedling nonetheless survived to become the robust community network we are today. 

It was touching that we received salutations and congratulations from Charles on this occasion of our Silver Anniversary, sent from his home in California. We also received a sweet note from Don Pitzer, who founded of the Communal Studies Association in the '80s and was the Director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana when FIC was headquartered there 1989-92.

While there are only two of us here today who were present at Stelle a quarter century ago—Dan Questenberry (Shannon Farm) and myself, there are many more here in spirit (including my wife, Ma'ikwe, who is too stricken with chronic Lyme to travel right now). She has been active in FIC affairs the last 10 years, and sent homemade blueberry jam in lieu of her corporeal presence. 

The day consisted of a four part harmony:
a) Everyone shared what connection they had with FIC (and when), what it meant to them, and what role community plays in their life today.

1990: Published our first edition of Communities Directory 
1992: Took over as publishers of Communities magazine
1993: Produced the Celebration of Community, a six-day event in Olympia WA
1994: Launched www.ic.org
1997: Produced our first Art of Community weekend
1999: Took over Community Bookshelf from East Wind
2002: Launched store.ic.org
2002: Published Visions of Utopia, Vol I
2004: Offered the online Directory with a searchable database
2005: Expanded FIC's mission to include Creating Community Where You Are
2007: Created wiki.ic.org
2007: Created buzz.ic.org to chronicle media coverage of intentional communities
2009: Published Visions of Utopia, Vol II
2009: Launched an FIC presence on Facebook


b) Next we looked at what FIC has accomplished in 25 years, and explored the environment we're in today:

o  steady decline for print material
o  rise in popularity for video
o  demand for information about community is on the rise
o  hard to distinguish who really knows what they're talking about, especially when one takes into account how hard it is to explain what life in community is like to people who have never experienced it
o  FIC has committed to creating a new office in Missouri as part of Dancing Rabbit's new common house, to be built to the exacting standards of the Living Building Challenge
o  Communities magazine and our family of websites struggle to turn a net profit
o  While there is substantial friendliness, there is minimal collaboration among nonprofits with a core commitment to promoting community
o  There is a rise in interest about sustainability
o  The organized best poised to focus on sustainability—the Ecovillage Network of the Americas—is in disarray
o  There is a rise in formation of Transition Towns—local initiatives focused on preparedness in response to the issues of climate change and peak oil
o  Travel costs have been steadily rising and that trend will continue
o  There is increasing chaos and economic instability
o  There is simultaneously a need to increase local resiliency and a pronounced lack of local roots
o  There is increasing political polarization, and dissatisfaction with the status quo
o  Increased disparity between highest paid and lowest paid
o  There was surprising strength and staying power to the Occupy phenomenon last year

c)  Next, we asked what FIC should be focusing on in the future, and identified these themes in the replies:


—Recruit more people under 40 years old to get involved.
—Create stronger experiential offerings (as opposed to lectures).
—Generate a stronger income flow.
—Hold as goal reaching the point where everyone seeking more information about community would know to contact FIC for assistance.
—Do more with video on our websites.

d) Finally, we enjoyed a Happy Hour commingling with our hosts, which led to dinner and celebratory cakes (one vegan and another gluten free), ushered in with no less than five distinctive renditions of happy birthday songs. The day ended with everyone replete with scrumptious food, merry spirits, and camaraderie.

I can hardly wait for our 50th.

Remembering Al Andersen

I got a call this week that I didn't want to get. Dorothy Andersen called from California to tell me that her husband, Al, had passed away last Sunday. He was 91, and had been in frail health for some time.

I first met Al back in 1991, at the FIC fall organizational meetings at Lama Foundation (San Cristobal NM). It was the first time the Fellowship had met in the Southwest and Al came up from Tucson to check us out.

• • •

Al was 22 years old when Pearl Harbor propelled us in to World War II. As a Conscientious Objector, he sat the war out in a federal prison in Danbury CT. Around 1948, he collaborated with Griscom Morgan (who would later become the Director of Community Service, Inc, now called the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, after Griscom's father) to organize a series of gatherings for communities in the Mid-Atlantic and Ohio Valley regions. The momentum generated by these get-togethers ultimately coalesced into the Fellowship of Intentional Communities. (Note the different preposition from the FIC of today—this first incarnation was oriented toward people already living in community, many of whom were COs who wanted to focus what could be done to eliminate the occasion for war.)

That's right, Al was there when the first FIC was founded. Although the dynamism of FIC 1.0 petered out in the '70s, and none of the bunch involved in that original effort were around for the revitalization spearheaded by Charles Betterton in 1986, it was only natural that Al wanted to find out what the new generation was up to, after we'd poured new wine into his old bottle.

True to his ties to the original FIC, Al wanted to know where the current Fellowship stood on the question of social and economic justice. While he was happy that we were promoting cooperation, that wasn't enough. He wanted FIC to take a stand against injustice and US hegemony in the world—never mind that we were a 501c3 and prohibited from taking active political stands.

Over the nearly two decades that we knew each other, Al and I were in the same room together only half a dozen times, generally at some FIC function. The last time I saw him was almost two years ago, at Friends House, a Quaker-based assisted living facility in Santa Rosa, which is where he spent his final years. He had arranged for me to give a talk about how intentional community can be a response to US imperialism. As it turned out, I went head to head with Barrack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention. I was flattered that a dozen or so folks decided to watch Barrack on tape-delay, and listen live to what I had to say.

Throughout the years, Al and I spoke regularly on the phone. He was always working on one analysis or another about contemporary politics, and it was a treat to hear what issue he was working on. In the last year, his attention became split between the theme of US empire, and the possibility that dis-embodied spirits could actively participate in groups from beyond death. Regarding the latter, I told Al that I work extensively with group energy, yet know nothing about dis-embodied entities. (I asked how the living could feel confident that they were working accurately with the views of the dis-embodied, especially if there was disagreement among the living about what those views were. As far as I know, Al was still puzzling that out when the sand ran out of his hourglass.)

While I'm saddened by the loss of a friend, perhaps he'll now have a decent chance to test out the possibilities as a dis-embodied spirit. It pleases me to think that he might be right. Maybe it will turn out that the limiting factor is not so much getting the dis-embodied to speak, as it is teaching the living how to hear—as far as I'm concerned, the world of the living is under-blessed with good listeners.