How Intentional Communities May Save the World

At the end of last month I had an opportunity to give a talk at Carleton College in Northfield MN. I'm an alumnus there and was on campus as a guest speaker for a freshmen course on Utopias. The philosophy professor who brought me in offered me a chance to give a talk during the noon hour that would be open to all students. I accepted, and today's blog is the essence of my presentation, Sept 29.

Fifty years ago this fall I had just arrived on campus as a Carleton freshman. Those were days of foment and change. Among other things, they were the last days of in loco parentis. My first year men were allowed on women’s dorm floors from 2-4 pm on Tuesday; women had reciprocal privileges on Thursday afternoons. The door was supposed to be open at least six inches and three feet were supposed to be on the floor at all times. By the time I was a senior I was a resident assistant on a coed dorm floor. All efforts by the college to keep men and women physically separated from their animal urges were abandoned.

During my tenure, students were not allowed to have cars, everyone lived on campus, and the winters were long and cold—this was back before climate change, and Al Gore had not yet invented the internet. 

Having been raised in the Father-Knows-Best Republican suburbs of Chicago, campus life brought me face to face with a number of potent realities for the first time, including institutional racism and the early days of feminism. There were riots on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention. Vietnam was raging. Kent State happened in 1970. That same spring I got arrested protesting at a draft induction center in St Paul—along with scores of my fellow students and the college chaplain. I received a lottery number and prepared to apply for a CO status if I got drafted after graduation. 

Cooperation as the Obverse of Competition 
In the classroom, I took an introduction to sociology course in which I learned that cooperation is the opposite of competition. While that caught my attention right away, I had no idea how central that revelation was to become in my life. Bookmark that insight. I’ll come back to it later.

I loved my Carleton years, where I experienced a combination of stimulation and support that fostered both inquiry and personal growth.

When I graduated (1971) I wanted to make a difference in the world, and took a job with the federal government in DC, to see if that was the right stage on which to apply myself—in the belly of the beast. Working for the US Dept of Transportation, one day I met the person who was the secretary of the administrative assistant for the Assistant Secretary for Administration. When I simultaneously realized both how funny that was and that I knew what it meant, it occurred to me that I might have been in Washington too long.

So, at the advanced age of 23, I retired from the M-F 9-5 world—which, incidentally, I never returned to—and rebooted my post-college life, beginning with a different question: instead of "what would I do?" I asked "who do I want to do it with?" I was beginning to understand the primacy of relationships in the pursuit of happiness. I wanted the milieu I tasted at Carleton but I didn’t want to go back to school to get it. It was at that point that I stumbled onto the arcane world of intentional community: groups of people living together on the basis of explicit common values. This, I thought, might be what I was looking for. And it was. Not as an escape from mainstream society, but as a base of operations.

I was part of two couples (three of whom were Carls) who founded Sandhill Farm in 1974. Located in the rural, northeast corner of Missouri, we pooled our income and dedicated ourselves to organic food production, land stewardship, and right livelihood. I lived there happily for 40 years.

In 1979 I became restless with an exclusive focus on Sandhill, and started looking beyond the property lines to expand my locus of attention. While I considered community living to be a political act (not escapism), I wanted to expand my field of operations. With that in mind I got involved in community networking, promoting dialog and collaboration among sister communities. At first I did this via Sandhill joining the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (in 1980) and my serving as a delegate. Seven years later I helped start the Fellowship for Intentional Community, a clearinghouse of information about communities of all stripes with a special emphasis on North America. 

Also in 1987 I launched a career as a process consultant working with cooperative groups, helping them to successfully weather internal tensions and to develop effective structures. Although I no longer live at Sandhill (I left in 2014), I continue my consulting work and in the last three decades I’ve stepped into the fire to work with more than 100 groups across the continent. Over time I’ve become an expert in cooperative group dynamics. 

Why Does This Matter? 
The world of intentional community is small and not widely known. FIC figures there are roughly 100,000 people in the US who live in some form of self-identified intentional community—groups who willingly wear that label. In a country of 325 million that’s less than 0.03%. While the number of communities is growing, it's statistically insignificant. Do I think it’s the wave of the future? No. It’s too radical. So what’s the point? 

If you ask people if they have as much community in their life as they want—without defining what community means—I figure you might get 100 million people saying they’d like more than they have. There are that many who will tell you that they experienced a greater sense of neighborhood and belonging when they grew up than they have today. That’s three orders of magnitude larger. Now we're talking impact. What does intentional community have to offer those 100 million people?

Let’s go back to that point I made earlier about cooperation being the opposite of competition. 

I Versus We 
In any society there is a dynamic tension between how much individuals are acculturated to identify with self, and how much with society (or neighborhood, village, or tribe). When you take a step back and examine contemporary US culture from an anthropological perspective, I think you can make the case that there has never been a time in human history when the focus on the individual was more ascendant. 

In a competitive culture—which is unquestionably what we have in the US—the "I" focus is constantly being reinforced. So what? Consider what happens when you're in a conversation and you agree with half of what someone says and disagree with the other half.

For almost everyone, their first response is "But… " Even though you could just as legitimately start by acknowledging the partial agreement, that's rarely what happens—because our cultural imperative is to identify how we are unique, or at least distinct from others. When we agree, we don't establish differentiation.

This tendency has a profound impact on the atmosphere in which the conversation proceeds. If the  competitive environment prevails, you're essentially hoping that a fair fight will produce the best result—the strongest ideas will survive. If however you reverse this, and start by acknowledging the common ground, you can establish a cooperative container, where everyone is on the same team and differences can be encouraged for their potential of offering hybrid vigor. This may sound like a simple trick, but it's radically different.

In competition, there is a tug-of-war, where different views are in ridden into battle to see which prevails. In cooperation, everyone is in the same boat trying to successfully navigate a stream of different ideas. While the currents may be treacherous, and there may be different ideas about the best course, the people are trying to pull together.

One way to understand the impulse to experiment with intentional community is a desire to purposely shift one's location on the I—we spectrum more toward the "we" end. The trade-off is you get better connection and support, in exchange for relinquishing some control and autonomy. When people report that they want more community in their life, they are, in effect, saying that they’re jonesing for a greater sense of belonging. 

Now let’s look at two main ways that intentional community is pioneering critical work that addresses current societal challenges: 

I. Resource consumption 
There are about 7.5 billion in the world today and that number is rising. By any sane measure we are running out of resources and it is flat impossible for all the people in the world to consume resources at the current US rate. Should we just thank our lucky stars and hope to hold on, or try to do something equitable about it? I prefer the latter.

One of the ways that intentional communities are important to the wider society is that they are R&D centers for radical sharing. What if we challenge the notion that quality of life equates with throughput and acquisition material goods—the concept that the person who has the most stuff when they die wins? I realize it sounds fairly shallow when I state it that crudely, yet that’s how most people live their lives.

Here are four leverage points on how to shift this that are being actively modeled by intentional community:

A. Economies of scale
There is a lot that can be done to minimize drudgery and liberate time. If seven households living near each other agreed that they’d each cook one night a week for all seven, think how much time that would free up! It does not take anywhere near seven times as long to cook for seven times as many people. Yet mostly households cook alone every night. While cooking for only your own household gives you maximum control over menu, who wants to cook and clean up every night if there was a non-exploitative way to slash that by 80 percent? Even doing this just some of the time could make a big difference.

When I lived at Sandhill (where meals were prepared for members every night) it turned out that it was my turn to cook about once a week. Not only was that more efficient, but I truly enjoyed cooking at that frequency. If I had to do it every night, however, it would suck the air out of my happy balloon.

B. No prostitution
What value would you place on an integrated life, where work, school, home, and place of worship are in one location, aligned with your values? There’s a constant psychic drain that people experience when a core aspect of their life is out of alignment with what they believe in, yet almost everyone suffers from this to some degree. Think how common it is for people to either dislike what they do to earn a living, or are unhappy with where they live—or are happy with both but accept a brutal commute as the price to have them.

While it's not easy to quantify this cost, it’s expensive. To what extent do you think a person's long-term health is impacted adversely by having major aspects of their life unaligned with core values? I think it's pretty damn big.

C. Substituting access for ownership

The essential model our society offers for achieving success is ownership. But is that actually necessary? Isn't access to things a reasonable substitute for ownership? How many of us need to own our own lawnmower, table saw, or extension ladder? How about your own car? 

I lived for a couple years at Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage of about 45 adults that is trying to showcase the possibilities for living a high-quality life on drastically fewer resources. In line with that mission members agree to not operate private vehicles. Instead, the community runs a car co-op to meet members' needs. With some sophisticated scheduling and a willingness to share rides with others, they have been able to provide a vehicle to meet 98 percent of members needs to go to a certain town on a certain day with a fleet of three cars and a pickup.

Think about that. Their ratio of adults to vehicles is greater than 10:1. By way of contrast, in 2015, the ratio of licensed drivers to licensed vehicles in the US was 218 million to 263 million, a ratio of 5:6. What's wrong with this picture? It's apparent that the overwhelming majority of people in this country blandly accept that they "need" their own car (some apparently "need" two!), even though it sits idle the vast majority of the time. This represents an incredibly wasteful investment for the sake of convenience.

What could be freed up if you weren't chasing the dollars needed to buy, operate, service, insure, and house your own private car(s)? If Dancing Rabbit adults were operating vehicles at the US average they'd have a fleet of 54. That catches people's attention.

To be sure, sharing resources means there are some additional challenges. For one, there can be scheduling issues, when two or more people want to use a jointly owned asset at the same time. You have come up with a reasonable and fair way to settle who gets to use a thing when there is more demand than availability.

For two, there can be tension around how common assets are maintained. When everyone owns thing, there can be a tendency for no one to maintain it. Tragedy of the commons. Even if maintenance expectations are clearly spelled out, it's likely that people will vary significantly in how diligently they apply themselves to those standards of care—the end result of which is someone can discover at 4:30 am that the community car they've been assigned does not have enough gas in it to make it to the train station 60 miles away (which actually happened to me once).

So there are definitely kinks to work out. Yet, in return, there are 50 fewer cars on the road. Not a bad trade.

D. Redefining security in terms of relationships

Until the advent of cities—a relatively modern human phenomenon—humans mainly aggregated in tribes or villages. In that context, your fellow humans would be there for you in time of need. Security was not about bank accounts or insurance; it was about relationships.

In community, people are trying to recreate this safety net of relationships. The pool needs to be large enough that you can be reasonably secure from too many needing support at the same time, or from the burden of care falling too heavily on the shoulders of too few (strength in numbers), yet not so large that people don't know one another, and the interpersonal bonds are too dilute.

This is a huge lever in that it allows people to release the need to accumulate assets against the potentials of old age or compromised health. Think how freeing this could be! If you needed fewer dollars to make your life work, it would give you a wider choice of employment, because you could trade off lower compensation in exchange for a better values match.

II. Problem solving 
Now let’s go back to the I—we spectrum, and the strong tendency in contemporary culture to focus first on disagreement—on how we are different from others. This has a profound impact on how people solve problems.

In the mainstream culture people work to aggregate enough power (or enough votes) to win. In cooperative culture, the strategy is to make sure that there’s a legitimate opportunity for all voices to be heard and then to collectively labor to find the solution that best balances the factors and interests: no one goes forward until all go forward. In the former we come to meetings hoping to change other people’s minds (so that our idea will prevail). In the latter we come to meetings hoping that our minds will be changed (because the ideas of others may enhance our thinking, from which the whole will benefit).

And it’s more than that. Think about how dehumanizing and stultifying it is that the wider culture operates as if all human input can be neatly translated into ideation, allowing little or no room for emotional and intuitive input—which are parts of our birthright as a species. Much of my group consulting requires me to work constructively with conflict, where emotional reactivity is a central component. We have little facility with this in the wider culture and we desperately need a vocabulary and orientation that allows us to welcome passion and spirit into our work.

The power of these differences can hardly be more compelling when one contemplates the current incivility and polarization in current politics, where polemics and vilification have replaced dialog and mutual respect. Greater competition is not the answer. Neither is a President who is knee-jerk counter puncher. We need a paradigm shift.

Intentional communities are important to contemporary society—not because they will become a dominant lifestyle—but because they are the R&D centers where we are unlearning competitive conditioning, and figuring out how to cooperate instead. The gleanings from the intentional community experience can be exported into schools, churches, neighborhoods, and workplaces—wherever people ache for more community and sense of connection—and that’s why it may save the world.

There and Back Again

Not only is the title to today's blog the alternate (lesser known) title of J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 classic fantasy, The Hobbit, but it accurately captures my relapse into lower back pain following my overzealous representation of Sandhill Farm at the Best Missouri Fair at the Shaw Botanical Gardens, Oct 3-5. That is, I went there and now my back hurts again.

I know that was nearly three weeks ago but I still hurt.

Unfortunately the basic problem is getting older, which I suspect is terminal. The tenderness that I'm dancing with traces back to a fortnight of heavy construction on a cistern project for Sandhill that I oversaw (and apparently overdid) in late May. My folly was thinking that I could do anything (or at least anything that I've been able to do in the past), and that ain't necessarily so.

Having been a homesteader since I moved to Sandhill four decades ago, there's always been an emphasis on physical labor, and mostly that's an aspect of my life that I've fully embraced. Gradually, however, my work mix shifted from lifting with my arms, legs, and back to lifting with my pen, voice, and brain. Over time I did less work on the land and more as a nonprofit administrator (first for the Federation of Egalitarian Communities and then for the Fellowship for Intentional Community) and as a group process consultant and trainer.

Last May I got up close and personal to my physical limitations with the questionable choice to jump into concrete work after months of doing nothing more aerobic than carrying my own bags on train trips and pecking away vigorously at a keyboard. My back could tell the difference.

After a couple weeks of rest and recovery from the cistern work, my back wasn't "normal" (which condition I'm not sure I'm ever going to experience again) but I was able to resume normal non-constructive duties—I just needed to be cautious. When I got overambitious with a shovel digging up a suspect water line behind our house in July, my back made it clear the next day that that wasn't such a good idea.

The thing though that put me over the top of the pain threshold, was a four-day sequence at the beginning of October. On Thursday I was over at Sandhill grating, blending, and jarring 10 gallons of peeled horseradish root (yielding 127 half pint jars for sale—about eight gallons). In addition to the tears and irritated mucous membranes, I had to schlep our 90 lb Univex slicer/shredder from the commercial kitchen to our front porch (never try to shred horseradish indoors). It was like lugging a bag of cement. Ugh. At the end of an eight-hour shift I was bone tired and my back was sore.

The next day I returned to Sandhill to load for the fair, which entailed packing several boxes of sorghum (a case of quarts weighs over 40 lbs) and myriad cases of condiments. After a couple hours the pickup was full, and so was my quota of lifting for the day… but I wasn't done.

When I got down to St Louis I had to unload everything in our booth space and my back was protesting. I knew I was in trouble when I went to bed that night, but I still had to reload everything that didn't sell at the end of the fair Sunday evening and I was hurting badly by then. (Is there anything worse than lifting a weight that you know you shouldn't?)

It is now 16 days later and ibuprofen is my best friend.

My recovery has been painfully slow and I'm not used to being so limited in my activities or needing to be so careful when I get out of bed. I was walking to a meeting in the dark two evenings ago and when I stepped into a low spot in the road that I couldn't see, I overstrode slightly and it was like someone was gouging my lower back with razor blades. No fun. While I'm making do, I have to be way more cautious than I'm used to.

There is one silver lining: the sympathy and support I'm getting from Ma'ikwe, who has been struggling with lower back issues herself since '09, as a symptom of chronic Lyme. While it's not so great having both of us needing to be extra careful when lifting buckets, Ma'ikwe has been totally understanding when I ask her to help put on my shoes first thing each morning, before I've limbered up enough to be able to do it myself.

It's the different between sympathy and empathy—she's not just patiently listening to her partner describing pain, she's actually been walking in my moccasins. Painful as that is, we're navigating this together and that helps a lot.

When Consensus Is Contraindicated

Let's suppose you're part of group that's seriously considering (or questioning) whether to make decisions by consensus. In today's essay I'm going to explore the limits of consensus in two ways: a) why it may be a poor choice for the general way that the group makes decisions,; and b) why there may be times when the group is better served to make specific decisions by a method other than consensus, even though that's what the group generally uses.

I've been living the last 39 years at Sandhill Farm—a group that's always made decisions by consensus—and have been an active participant for more than three decades in community network organizations that have used consensus (the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, 1980-2001; and the Fellowship for Intentional Community, 1987-present), and I'm an unabashed advocate of consensus for making decisions in cooperative groups. At the same time though, I've been a process consultant for the last 26 years and have witnessed plenty of groups struggle with consensus.

Thus, when a facilitation student asked me recently when it might be appropriate to not use consensus (in a cooperative group), I realized I had a lot to say…

A. Why a cooperative group may want to think twice about adopting consensus
Despite my overall enthusiasm for consensus, it's not an easy process to learn, and you're not likely to enjoy what you get unless you're willing to make a number of commitments. Here is a laundry list of ways you can get in trouble:

o  Vague common values
The bedrock of consensus is the group's common values, because that's the well you drink from when trying to sort out how to proceed when the group is pulled in two or more directions. Your primary navigational tool in safely negotiating a passage through these choppy waters is keeping focused on how best to balance common values in relation to the presenting issue(s)—and you can't very well be guided by that pole star if you're sailing in a fog.

o  Weak communication skills
If the group's members are not particular skilled at clear articulation, accurate listening, giving and receiving feedback, and shifting perspectives to see things through others' eyes, meetings can be a real slog.

o  No (or minimal) training in the process
Consensus is antithetical to the way most people have been conditioned. In recognition of that it's naive to think that the group will be any good at it unless the whole group has gone through training. Hint: Having read a book or watched others do it is not enough.

o  Failure to understand the need to make a cultural shift
Community living, almost by definition, is a conscious effort to live more cooperatively. Given that the mainstream US culture is competitive and adversarial—which is the sociological opposite of cooperation—it requires real work to turn that around. The key challenge is the moment when people disagree over something that's close to the bone. Will they respond as if threatened, or with curiosity? If you don't grok that effective use of consensus necessitates a culture shift and a willingness to do personal work, then you're in for a world of hurt.

o  Minimal care in membership selection
To protect your investment in a cooperative culture, you need to purposefully screen prospective members for those who have done or are willing and able to do the personal work described above. If you're careless about this, you're sowing the whirlwind. Membership selection has to be more than whether they claim to have read your vision statement and their first check clears. At Sandhill, assessing prospective members for social maturity is our number one screen after values match. (We figure we can always teach a person how to drive a tractor, but it's damn hard to teach someone how to listen.)

o  No major commitment to integrating/training new members
Even if you do adequate initial training in consensus and carefully screen prospectives for social suitability, you still need to invest in the integration of newbies into the group. And that means orientation in how things are done in your cooperative group. Hint: it is not enough to simply give them an owner's manual and tell them to read it; in many cases new members will not even know the right questions to ask, and the veterans need to be pro-active in making this happen. Don't wait for the new folks to figure it out on their own.

o  Sloppy minutes 
One of the key ways that groups can bring new members up to current is by introducing them to the archive of plenary minutes (and how to search them by topic). Fortunately, in this age of sophisticated word processing programs, it doesn't have to be that heroic to have decent, accessible records. Key here is solid guidance and follow-through on how minutes will be taken, what will be included, how they will be reviewed for accuracy and completeness, how they will be stored, how they will be indexed, and how they can be accessed. If you fail to do a good job of this be prepared to handle the tension that results from new people wanting to revisit old decisions, while the veterans roll their eyes. It's a train wreck.

o  Poor record of agreements
It's no fair telling new members that they have to get up to speed on past agreements if that material is not laid out plainly for them, indexed by topic. If you're not doing any better than pointing them in the direction of multiple notebooks of handwritten plenary minutes, it's hopeless. What this leads to is reliance on oral tradition and the long-term memory of long-time members to guide you through. Good luck with that.

o  No agreement (or understanding) about how to work emotionally
Even though all groups experience emotional responses in the context of examining issues (not on every issue, but often enough), few groups discuss it as a process dynamic and make deliberate decisions about how they'd like to proceed when strong feelings emerge. Absent any agreements about it, the group proceeds by the seat of its pants—with predictably awkward and haphazard results. Yuck!

o  Not defining blocks well, or understanding how to handle them
One of the biggest challenges for most groups struggling with consensus is the concept of "blocks"—by which a single individual can stop the group from making a decision. It's imperative that consensus groups have a clear understanding of: 1) the point at which blocks can occur (Answer: only when the group is poised to make a decision; anything before that is a concern); 2) the legitimate grounds for a block; 3) the process by which blocks will be tested for legitimacy; and 4) the process by which a validated block will be examined, and a clear statement of everyone's role in that effort.

o  Lack of skilled (or authorized) facilitation
Facilitation is much more than deciding who will talk next. In fact, when a group is trying to make a successful transition to cooperative culture, skilled facilitation can often make a night-and-day difference in the likelihood of the group having productive, energizing meetings. In general, you want your most process-savvy people running the meetings, because of their greater ability to steer things constructively. To get the most of this potential, it's important that the group give the facilitator authority to step in things get off the rails.

Hint: In most groups the four most common elements of meeting fatigue are: 1) repetitive comments; 2) people speaking off topic; 3) working at detail below plenary level; and 4) inability to hold off proposals until after the group has identified what the proposal needs to address. You need facilitators who understand how to manage all four of these challenges and have the authority from the group to step in and redirect whenever they surface. Otherwise, you're blowing in the wind. Answer: If your facilitators don't have the capacity to handle this, get them trained.

o  Vague understanding about what kinds of topics are appropriate for plenary
Not everything can or should be done in plenary (whew). Some topics shouldn't even be attempted in plenary—because they are a matter of personal discretion, already fall within the bailiwick of a committee or manager, or are outside the scope of the group's mission to tackle. In addition, it's important to know when the group has reached the end of plenary level concerns and it's time to hand it over to a subgroup (or manager) for completion or implementation. If you don't know where that line is, it's damn hard to know when you've crossed it.

B. Why a consensus group may want to make certain decisions another way
Here's a news flash: just because your group has an agreement to make decisions by consensus doesn't mean you are forced to make all decisions by consensus. There are cases where it makes good sense to decide by consensus that you'll make a specific decision by another method (which is typically voting, but could be throwing darts, drawing lots, pin the tail on the agreement, or relying on the inspiration derived from a Ouija board or chicken entrails).

Why would you do this? 
o  The stakes are low (perhaps the matter falls entirely within a committee's or manager's purview)
o  It's mainly a matter of aesthetics
o  All major concerns have been addressed in plenary and the remaining details are considered minor

Examples include:
—naming questions (which could be as trivial as what you call the pet turtle in the community pond, or as serious as what you call the community
—when to schedule a group event
—what palette of colors to allow for exterior paint 
—the menu for Thanksgiving dinner

Most often groups get in trouble in this regard for one of two reasons: a) failure to understand that it's OK to make minor decisions other than by consensus; and b) lack of clarity and/or discipline about not taking up plenary time with issues that are below the level of whole group attention.

Caution: I am not suggesting going to another decision-making rule as a work-around for a block. I refer to this as club-in-the-closet consensus—where the group commits to honoring dissent only if everyone "behaves." The concept of if-you-push-too-hard-we'll-shove-back-harder is not consensus; it's majority rule dressed up to look pretty.

Cooperation Among Cooperators

As someone who has immersed himself in the cooperation business, I'm always looking for ways to take things to the next level. (If a little bit of cooperation is good, isn't a large bit better?)

I took my first definitive step down the cooperative path in 1974 when three others and I joined together to start Sandhill Farm. 

After six years of living in an income-sharing community, I ratcheted that up when Sandhill joined the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (a network of income-sharing communities) and I became the community's delegate—a position I held for 21 years. 

Seven years after (in May 1987) that I was in the room at Stelle IL for the inaugural meeting of the revitalized Fellowship for Intentional Community, for which group I have been the main administrator for two decades. This widened my arena of focus from income-sharing groups to all forms of intentional communities.

Gradually realizing how few people were likely to ever live in intentional community (there are roughly 100,000 doing so in the US today) relative to how many people desire a greater sense of community in their life (by which they mean more sense of connection, civility, and belonging), FIC officially expanded its mission in 2005 to include Creating Community Where You Are. This meant expanding my sphere of cooperative focus yet again—this time beyond the boundary of intentional community.

This past weekend I get another chance to widen the cooperative circle. In this case, by exploring a significant potential collaboration among networks devoted to the promotion of community and sustainability.

Here's a summary of what happened at Whole Village in Caledon ON, when I participated in a meeting of the Ecovillage Network of Canada (ENC). 

• • •

The background is that the current FIC was launched in 1987, and that was followed eight years later by the founding of the Global Ecovillage Network. Where FIC focused on intentional communities in North America, GEN focused on promoting ecovillages (a subset of intentional communities) around the world.

GEN was organized into three major regions: 
o  GENOA covering Oceania and Asia
o  GEN Europe covering Europe and Africa
o  ENA (Ecovillage Network of the Americas) covering North and South America

Over the years, GEN softened its strict emphasis on ecovillages to include any community focused on creating sustainable culture, and FIC embraced the strong link between community and sustainability. However, even though the mission of the two networks gradually moved closer to alignment over the years, there hasn't been much collaboration.

Last year though, a new opportunity presented itself when CASA broke away from ENA so that Central and South American (the Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries) could be a separate network from the US and Canada. This year, GEN convened a Task Force charged with establishing a parallel North American network (tentatively styled GENNA) to complete the transition from the break up of ENA.

Taking into account the convergence of mission between GEN & FIC, coupled with how GENNA's geopgraphic focus exactly mapped onto the territory that has always been FIC's primary interest, the Fellowship was keenly interested in the conversation about what got created.

Here's a summary of what coalesced at Whole Village:

1. Our primary interest is exploring the possibility of FIC, ENA, and ENC merging to become a single organization focused on promoting sustainability, community, and cooperative culture in North America (which we currently define as the US and Canada). This conversation is timely because GEN would like to see a North American-focused network arise from the ashes of ENA. Last year CASA became the GEN-affiliated network for Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries in the American hemisphere, breaking away from ENA. That left the US and Canada unrepresented in the GEN family. The idea of a merger is attractive because: a) the US and Canada is FIC's primary focus; and b) there is energy within GEN and ENC to see a North American network established. Do we need two groups focusing on sustainable community in North America (FIC and a separate GENNA) or can one handle both portfolios?

2. We're agreed that progressive networks have chronic issues with too little money and too little human resources. Not only would a single network be better positioned to be efficient with limited resources (instead of operating two networks with substantially parallel missions), but it behooves groups committed to promoting cooperative culture to make a strong effort to demonstrate cooperation among networks. 

3. While it will be important to agree on the mission of the surviving network (such that the FIC Board and the Task Force empaneled to restart a GEN network in North America are both satisfied), we are optimistic that this can be achieved based on the way that FIC and GEN have conducted themselves to date.

4. In addition to our general good feeling about a potential merger, we discussed briefly the following questions:
a. FIC has focused mainly on social sustainability; GEN has placed more attention on environmental sustainability.
b. Some GEN reps have focused attention on government relations; FIC has not.
c. GEN has worked to get grants from governments and foundations; FIC's fundraising efforts have almost exclusively been focused on individual donors.
d. GEN has put energy into developing Next GEN as a way to groom people in the 18-35 age range fir leader leadership; FIC has no comparable program.
e. GEN serves ecovillages; FIC serves all intentional communities, of which ecovillages are a subset.
f. GEN is doing its web programming in Drupal; FIC is using Word Press.

Without going into details, we felt all of these questions can be resolved satisfactorily. Though that optimism does not guarantee success, it fueled our collective sense that we were on the right track and that aiming for a single surviving network is the right impulse. If further work reveals a stumbling block that we cannot resolve, we can always fall back on an approach where GENNA is created as a separate entity from FIC.

5. We propose to proceed in this order:
Step A. Secure the buy-in of our respective groups (Laird with FIC; Lee, Russ, and Nebesna with the Task Force; Lawrence with Valhalla) with the direction we defined Sept 14-15 at Whole Village.
Step B. Reform the Task Force to include representatives of FIC and Valhalla, and perhaps others.
Step C. Explore (at least in broad strokes) and resolve any questions or concerns about the mission of a merged network.
Step D. Based on the outcome of Step C, determine what constituencies we intend to serve, and assess whether all of them are adequately represented among the Task Force. If any are missing, make a priority effort to recruit representatives to join the Task Force.
Step E. Sketch out the programs that the new network will have.
Step F. Develop the organizational structure of the new network.
Step G. Determine the new network's name, the location of its office(s), how the Board will be selected, how the Board will make decisions, and perhaps the composition of its initial Board and/or who will be the Executive Director.
Step H. Determine a sequence by which FIC, ENA, and ENC will be laid down and authority fully transferred to the new network.

6. We are agreed that the Task Force (as constituted per Step B above) should determine what will best serve the needs of North America for a community and sustainability focused network, and then present the result to GEN to see if they are satisfied. This approach was supported by both Daniel and Lee, GEN Board members who conveyed the clear message that GEN was taking a largely hands off approach to how the Task Force did its work.

7. The formulation of a new network will mean a special opportunity for new blood to get involved, both in program development & implementation, and in network administration. We're hopeful that Next GEN and other young people will step forward and take advantage of this opportunity.

8. Finally, it's important to note that there was high resonance among us, and considerable excitement about the possibilities of creating a single network going forward.

• • •

It's both fun and energizing seeing just how wide we can make the reach of cooperate culture in my lifetime.

Springing Back & Forth

I'm in Springfield MO, midway through representing Sandhill Farm at the Baker Creek Spring Planting Festival, held today and tomorrow (that's right, a rare Sunday/Monday gig) at the home of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Mansfield MO—about 60 crow miles east of the motel room where I'm typing this blog.

Oddly enough, though I've been a resident of the Show-Me State for 39 years, and Springfield is our third largest city, this is the first time I've ever done more than drive through it at 60 mph. It's 300 miles from home and I hardly ever come this way.

While the calendar says it's May (happy Cinco de Mayo!), the weather was stuck in the 50s today with everyone strolling by our booth in windbreakers, earmuffs, and woolen caps. Friday, for the first time in living memory, they had a May snow shower in Joplin, which is in extreme southwest Missouri. Ufda. Last year it was warmer than this in March, and I have the eerie sensation that the seasons are running backwards.

[While I was only home about 13 hours between my recent East Coast consulting foray and this trip as a purveyor of Sandhill's organic food products, it was long enough to poke around in the woods for two-and-a-half hours wildcrafting morels (I was able to snag nearly three pounds of these delicate little beauties). While spring's emergence seems delayed this year, the mushrooms are making their appearance in line with historical averages. I'm keenly interested to see what's still out there when I return home Wed. I'll be ecstatic if this unseasonably cool weather translates into a prolonged morel season.]

Here in Springfield we've been promised (by the weather gurus) temperatures tomorrow "soaring" into the upper 60s, with occasional glimpses of sunshine. We can hardly wait.

While it's always good for Sandhill to experiment with different fairs to see which ones are good for our product mix, sales were desultory today ($285 in gross intake doesn't justify driving 300 miles one way) and I doubt we'll be back next year. I was persuaded to try this mainly because it was an excuse to hang out with my good friend, Ira Wallace, who I've known since my very first community conference 34 years ago.

Ira was selected as the 2014 recipient of the FIC's Kozeny Communitarian Award, which honors someone's lifetime achievements as a community builder. In addition to peddling sorghum this weekend (and catching up on inter-community gossip), it's my pleasure to spend time collecting sufficient details about Ira's life that I can craft the citation for her award. Some tasks are more pleasurable than others, and this assignment is one I'm genuinely looking forward to.

Among other things, Ira & I have each:
o  Lived in community for about four decades (though never in the same one, we've always lived in secular income-sharing communities that have been affiliated with the Federation of Egalitarian Communities.

o  Been involved deeply in community networking, often enough at the same time.

o  Been entrepreneurial and have helped start successful community businesses.

o  Developed a capacity for public speaking and blogging.

o  Developed a fondness for playing bridge.

[For more on Ira and her amazing life, see this interview from in the current issue of Communities magazine.]

So it's always fun to hang out with Ira an find out what she's been up to. A conversation with her can warm me even on a blustery day when the outdoor temperatures are running well south of our ages. It represents both a springing back (to any number of stimulating conversations we've shared over the years), and a springing ahead where we grizzled community veterans can dispassionately discuss what it will take to replace us, and the key role we can play in greasing the skids for our successors.

It turns out that busy people never really run out of work; we just run out of time.

Monday with Mildred

A week ago (before Sandy wreaked havoc on New York City) I had a chance to visit with an old friend, Mildred Gordon, at her home in Staten Island.

Mildred celebrated her 90th birthday in August, and is in failing health. Each of the three days I was in town, starting with Monday, I made a point to spend 45-60 minutes visiting her in situ in her ground floor room, reminiscing, reflecting, ruminating, and remonstrating (I have never known Mildred to resist sharing her insights about what I ought to be doing). Not being sure if I'll see her again, I savored each conversation—which were both light (because we weren't trying to solve any problems and reach any conclusions) and evocative (because Mildred still asks probing questions and offers trenchant observations about human foibles in general, and about mine in particular). While she no longer has the strength to stand on her own, her opinions do not need a walker.

I had been warned that her cognitive focus comes and goes and that she might not know me. While it's possible I simply lucked into a stretch of good days to visit, Mildred had no problem recalling who I was, or many of the details of our multitudinous interactions over the last quarter century.

• • •

I first met Mildred at Twin Oaks in the late '80s, when she and a contingent of others from her community (now called Ganas, but then flying under the flag, Foundation for Feedback Learning) attended an assembly of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. The founding core group had moved together from the Bay Area in 1978 to establish their community in a thoroughly urban row house section of Staten Island, an easy 20-minute walk from the St George Ferry Terminal, where commuters by the hundreds journey to and from lower Manhattan every half hour. 

They purposefully sited their community to maximize their exposure to urban stimulation and cultural diversity, and they got their wish. While I stopped by Ganas a handful of times in the late '80s, my visitation rate went up substantially in the '90s, after Elke Lerman, my ex-partner and mother of my daughter, Jo, moved there in late 1989. While Elke and I had ended our romantic relationship, we had an enduring commitment to co-parent that encouraged me to visit Ganas more frequently.

As a natural consequence, that meant more time with Mildred and the other long-term members. Ganas turned out to be a fascinating community culture, where members routinely devoted at least five hours every day to examining interpersonal interactions and the myriad ways in which we mishear one another and distort reality in a never-ending attempt to control it.

It was fascinating to be immersed in the conversations and to witness how the group—mainly under Mildred's deft guidance—would unpack emotional distress for the purpose of illuminating dysfunctional patterns and getting to the place where clear-headed problem solving was possible. In fact, I owe much of my thinking about the interplay of emotions and thought to watching Mildred work. 

While some of the time I was the monkey in the barrel (that is, it was Laird's reactivity that was in the spotlight), I never felt picked upon—I was just taking a turn like everyone else.

My memory of those exchanges with Mildred (back in the '90s, before she was in her 90s) was that she was much more interested in my receiving her reflections of me than the other way around. While I struggled with this imbalance it at first, I ultimately came to see how it was foolish to let this get in the way of receiving her gift. Though it was up to me to determine what weight to give her views (and there were times when I definitely didn't agree with her), it was not in my best interest to push away what she had to offer—which, of course, was exactly the reason her community was originally styled the Foundation for Feedback Learning.

Most people (unwisely) have armored themselves against hearing critical feedback, even though it's extremely valuable knowing how others respond to our words and our behavior. Sure we might be misunderstood, but how will you know that unless people tell us? And the problem can be much worse than mishearing. It's not rare for people to assign bad intent to things you did or said that they don't like and it can cripple relationships, even permanently, if that's not brought to light. I'm not talking about being happy that people are having a negative reaction to you; I'm talking about being happy that you get a chance at the information that they're having a bad reaction to you.

Earlier this year I was working with a group in which there was a committee that thought they were conducting business as a paragon of good process. They believed they performed to a standard of openness and information exchange that was unparalleled in the community. However, that was not the word on the street, where multiple members reported to me privately that they were disgruntled with that committee, that they found to be arrogant, pushy, and close-minded. When I duly passed along to the committee this anonymous feedback they were dismayed. 

Because I had been asked primarily to attend to a different issue, it turned out that we did not have time during my visit to examine the gap between the committee's view of itself and the reservations others in the group held about the committee's performance. Thus, in the closing evaluation, I was sympathetic to the committee convener who was in anguish over my having uncovered a tension point in the group affecting his work with no progress having been made on resolving it. He was, understandably, not a happy camper.

The convener then went on to say that he'd gotten nothing out of the weekend, which I felt went too far. It is not at all the same thing to think that everything is going to fine and to know that it isn't. While much remains to be done (laying out the dimensions of the problem, working through people's reactions to what was shared, and deciding what to do about it), it's a definite first step to even know that a problem exists.

It occurs to me as I write this how much that exchange I had with the convener last spring was a perfect example of why Mildred devoted a large chunk of her life to examining all the goofy things humans do to insulate themselves from feedback. It also occurs to me how potent the lesson was because she offered it to me as a gift, not as a trade, thus helping me to better see the subtle ways in which I also have learning to do about receiving feedback. Thanks, Mildred. 

 

Remembering Marcos

I learned yesterday that an old friend, Marcos Canyon, died of a heart attack. I hadn't had contact with him since the early 90s and had lost track of what he was up to. But for a period of five years in the mid-80s, he and I worked closely together as fellow delegates to the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC). Hearing this sad news brought back a flood of memories...
As I recall, Marcos joined East Wind (a sister community to Sandhill, it's located in south-central Missouri) in 1983, when he was in his 50s. He retired early from the 9-5 world and decided on a rigorous program of lifestyle experiment for the latter half of his life. East Wind was either the first or second stop on his adventure. His modus operandi was to select some innovative situation that caught his fancy and then fully immerse himself in it for five years. He didn't just want to observe, like a tourist; he wanted to roll up his sleeves and try it out first hand. More than that, he wanted to help. When five years was up, he'd select something else and move on. I've never seen curiosity subjected to such strict discipline.
After East Wind, Marcos devoted his next half-decade stint to Innisfree, a cmty nestled in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mts and noteworthy for its efforts to create a therapeutic and respectful environment for the developmentally disabled, integrating them into everyday cmty life. Marocs served as their Outreach Director for a time.
(Innisfree is an excellent example of the growing understanding that belonging to a community, all by itself, contributes to health. In essence, humans are herd animals and we crave close connection with our own kind. In isolation—think suburbs—our lives become fragmented and basic health is undermined. The good news is that the damage is largely reversible.)
After Innisfree, I lost track of Marcos on his next rotation.

• • •

Because we were both active FEC delegates, it meant we maintained a regular correspondence—this was back in the days when people wrote letters—and we'd sit at the table together twice a year at the semi-annual assemblies (when the delegates gather to discuss business). His given name was Mark, yet he affected a Latin air; hence Marcos. (Although I never asked him, I always wondered if he was partly moved to select that name in honor of the imaginative child who served as the protagonist in Dr. Suess' first classic, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. He was curious, too.) A careful dresser, Marcos carried himself with erect posture and something of an patrician air (think South American aristocrat). He was not snooty, but precise. He'd occasionally season remarks with bits of Spanish phrases. Whether his actual heritage was Spanish I never knew.
For such people, how they are perceived in public often carries high significance, and one of my cherished memories of Marcos is how he taught me a humbling lesson about the trouble one can get into by failing to take into account that people differ in how they like to be approached. Let me tell that story.
Marcos shouldered more than his share of the FEC workload and was a respected delegate. Because both of us were busy in Federation affairs, our work tended to intersect. Mostly that was good (FEC was, after all, a network of cooperative communities). However, occasionally there would be tension. My style, when I have an issue with what someone has done (or not done) in the context of organizational business, is to bring this up directly at the next business meeting. When this involved an unflattering observation about Marcos, he would bristle, and the exchange would invariable go poorly. To set the stage properly, I mostly admired what Marcos did and was generally careful to make sure that I appreciated the things I liked, so that my comments about his performance were not overly slanted toward the critical. While he acknowledged that the ratio of my observations was overwhelmingly complimentary, he dismissed it with (and I remember the quote because it stung so much at the time): "When I go to the symphony, I only hear the sour notes."
OK, now I was really pissed. Who did he think he was, dismissing me and acting as if his actions were above evaluation? Even at this early point in my nascent career as a process consultant, I was already locked into the idea that in a healthy group all members need to provide each other an accessible avenue for feedback about their behavior as a member of the group. It looked like Marcos was shutting me out and I was getting pretty righteous about how wrong that was.
This pattern persisted for a couple years. Because we were both high functioning, the work was still mostly getting done, but I was doing a slow burn about not being able to bring up with Marcos the occasional problem I had with his choices. Then, one day, we had an unexpected break in our schedule at an FEC assembly and Marcos and I went for a walk. With considerable courage (which I didn't recognize fully until after the fact), he asked why I tended to pick on him at meetings. Huh? Here I thought he was arrogantly ducking responsibility for his actions, and he experienced my attempts to discuss it as disrespectful churlishness! Once the dam had burst, it only took us about five minutes to sort it all out.
I explained my need to be able to comment—sometimes critically—on his choices, and he had no trouble at all agreeing with the legitimacy of that request. In turn, he requested that I raise my concerns in private; he didn't want to have his pants pulled down in front of the whole group. To my chagrin, I realized that I had never asked him how he wanted to be approached. I had just blithely assumed he'd be OK with whatever I preferred. Boy was that stupid. And ineffectual. After that five-minute conversation, we never again had a problem giving each other feedback (I'm not saying we always liked what was said; I'm saying we never again had a problem with how to say it).
It was one of those keep-your-eyes-on-the-prize lessons. The point of feedback is to solve a problem (or at least reduce tension and/or clear up any misunderstandings); it is not to look great or to embarrass your audience. That means paying attention to the need for delivering feedback in the manner most likely to be received constructively by your audience.
It was my dance with Marcos 20 years ago that brought this invaluable lesson home to me. Muchas gracias amigo, and adios.