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.

Directory Campaign Starts Today!

Today the Fellowship for Intentional Community is launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise $6000—the funds needed to assemble a new print version of our flagship publication, Communities Directory. This will be our seventh edition, and first since 2010.

If this FIC resource—which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month—is important to you, I urge you to click here and help us reach our goal, and to share this blog widely among your friends.

While we've made our listings available as a searchable online database since 2004, there continues to be a steady demand for it in book form. Here's why:

o  You're not always near a wifi signal, especially when out in the boondocks trying to track down rural communities.

o  The book version contains an incredibly helpful set of cross-reference charts that sorts listings by the most commonly asked objective criteria (things like acreage, population, how long they've been around, economic model, decision-making process, etc). This chart is not available online.

o  It's easy to scan the maps for how communities are geographically distributed in the book. Online we offer maps telling you where each group is located, but not their proximity to other groups.

o  The book features a handful of key articles about how to use the information intelligently.

o  The book includes a thorough index. 

What's more, the money raised through the Kickstarter campaign will be used both to defray costs of producing the print version and to overhaul our online Directory at the same time.

Enhancements to the latter include:

—A complete rewriting of the listing questionnaire, so that the information collected better matches what seekers want to know (after 28 years in this business we have a solid idea what people want).

—A much tighter protocol for removing listings that have not been updated or verified in more than a year. That means removing the dead wood more promptly.

—Starting to post response rates so that inquirers will have a decent idea of what to expect from listed groups, based on the percentage of inquiries that that community has addressed within 10 days over the course of the preceding 12 months. (We have been fielding some complaints that listed communities are not getting back to seekers in a timely way and we want to shine the light on that phenomenon.)

—We will reorganize the information into three major groupings:

Established groups 
These are ones that have four or more members that have been living together for two or more years. We think of this section as the backbone of our Directory.

Forming (and reforming) groups
This category is a good deal more volatile than the preceding one and we think it's a substantial service to seekers to let them know this up front. On the one hand, attracting additional energy in the early years can make a life or death difference to tenuous groups—which is why we include them. On the other hand, new groups are inherently less stable and it's important that seekers understand that expectations need to be adjusted when trying to contact communities in this category. 

Groups that used to be listed but no longer are
As groups disband or become unresponsive we'll move them into this category—which we'll be making available online for the first time. Listings here will be "gravestones only" (name, location, and years of existence to the extent known). Because people often search for a particular group by name, it can be a big help knowing that they no longer exist. This data can also be important for research purposes, and who's in a better position to collect it than us?
 
So the money we raise from the Kickstarter campaign is intended to cover a lot—all of which is geared toward making the Directory a better tool, both as a book and as an online reference.

Directory History
Here's our production history:

Year                 Number of North American communities listed
1990                 304
1995                 565
2000                 585
2005                 614
2007                 908
2010               1055
2016                     ?

Over the course of the quarter century that we've been chronicling the intentional communities movement, every time we've published the book the number of North American communities listed has grown. Though we don't yet know the final number for the edition we release next spring, we're expecting something around 1400.

Partly this is because there's been an actual rise in the communities extant; partly it's because it's easier than ever to report a community's existence; and partly it's because FIC has established itself as a trusted network that will fairly display the information.

The Directory was FIC's first project. We committed to it in 1988 and we published our first edition two years later. At the time—still ahead of the tidal wave that would become the world wide web—a book was the way to go and we sold 18,000 copies of each of our first two editions. For the first 10 years the Directory was our cash cow that enabled us to develop all our other programs, such as becoming the publisher of Communities magazine, creating Art of Community weekend events, and taking over Community Bookstore.

By 2000 however, the web had made substantial inroads into the bookselling market and there was a growing sense that reference material ought to be free—never mind that it took thousands of hours to collect, compile, and display the information.

As our commitment to providing the information ran deeper than our commitment to the business model, we swallowed hard and started offering the information online at no charge in 2004. While this has worked well for meeting our mission to disseminate the information broadly, we've had to scramble to make up the shortfall in income via advertising and donations.

It's a measure of our faith in this approach that we're relying on our supporters to be our partners in making the next evolution of Communities Directory a reality. If this incredible resource has been an inspiration in your life—or that of a community dear to you—we're asking you to take a moment to pay it forward for all those who will follow in our footsteps, seeking cooperative alternatives.

Together, we're making a difference.

Tarheel Transition

As a process consultant, almost all of my work involves traveling to the client and engaging with them in situ (much better than asking the group to travel to my situ).

Since hanging out a shingle as a process consultant in 1987, I've called Missouri my home the entire time, which afforded me the witty opener, "I'm from Missouri, and I've come to show you." OK, maybe it's not the funniest of one liners, but it was serviceable… until today.

I'm now a North Carolinian.

I piled what I could fit into a compact one-way rental Tuesday afternoon and drove away from Dancing Rabbit and into a new adventure. I'll be trying to reinvent myself in the coming months. Here's what I have in front of me:

1. Consulting/Teaching Transition
Though my work has been steady in recent years (unlike almost everything else listed below), I'm increasingly interested in handing off to others what I've learned, which means shifting purposefully from doing to teaching. The tricky part is that demonstrating what I can do is the main way I generate students, so there's a balance point. [For details about the facilitation trainings I'm offering currently, see my blog Facilitation Trainings on Tap from March 22, 2015.]

The context of my work has always been nurturing cooperative culture, as distinct from the dominant, competitive culture. Increasingly, my work comes in two flavors:

a) Process ConsultingFor the last 28 years my main focus as a consultant has been cooperative group dynamics. Mostly I've worked solo, but occasionally I partner up. Now, moving in with Joe and Maria, we'll be discussing whether it makes sense to form a process collective. They have both parlayed their experience (which includes being students of mine in the two-year facilitation program I run—but don't misunderstand; they were already the main facilitators in their respective communities before I met them—I was polishing diamonds) into occasional facilitation gigs in the region and would like to do more. Though neither has left their day job (yet) it may be a way to accelerate their facilitation careers and at the same time accomplish more of the handing off that I'm seeking.

Auspiciously, Joe & Maria worked with me to conduct sold-out pre-conference workshops (one on Facilitation & Leadership, and another on Conflict) at the recent National Cohousing Conference in Durham (May 29-31) and both were well received. In the days ahead we'll discuss what more we might do together.

b) Economic Consulting
In recent years I've gotten steadily more interested in opening a second front, turning my attention to the poor stepchild of sustainability: cooperative economics. For this, my primary partner is Terry O'Keefe, who lives in Asheville NC. While still 3.5 hours away by car, that's a helluva lot closer than Missouri.

We also did a packed-room workshop at the cohousing event, and it also was well received. Flushed with that experience, Terry and I need to cook up what's next in our efforts to light a fire among cooperative groups to take a pro-active interest in supporting their members having more economically sustainable lives.

While we're not sure what the business model is for our being fairly compensated for this work, we're both entrepreneurial by nature (read risk tolerant) and can't help ourselves from testing the market.

2. Home Transition
One of the casualties of Ma'ikwe's decision in Feb to end our marriage was that I no longer had a home. To be sure, I could have remained at Dancing Rabbit—both the community and Ma'ikwe were fine with that—but DR was Ma'ikwe's home before it was mine and it's too tender for me right now to be operating under her shadow. 

So I'm trying something new. I'll be experimenting in the coming months with what I can create with Joe & Maria: three people who care deeply about community, social change work, right livelihood, and leading an examined life. It's a great foundation. While I went through a period of wondering what the existential reason was for my being tested in this way, I've now worked myself around to being eager for the chance.

One of the larger unknowns for me is what I'll be able to manifest relative to connection to the Earth. Slowly, over a process of decades, that became an essential element of what made Sandhill Farm (a food-centered community) my home, and now I've moved into a house that does not include a garden. Maybe I'll wind up doing some canning from farmer's market surpluses in July and August. We'll see.

Chapel Hill is a great location for securing locally grown wholesome food, and there's a great local co-op (Weaver St Market) but I haven't been so removed from my food in over four decades. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

3. Partnership Transition
Obviously a huge shift happened for me when I lost my partner. I think being away from DR will make it easier for me to process my grieving to the point where I can again be open to a new relationship. I don't feel any hurry, yet I also don't want to be afraid to get back on the horse—despite suffering a nasty fall.

Among other things, I am blessed with many good friends (who have provided wonderful support for me the last four months) and I don't feel lonely or lacking in emotional depth in my life. My scars will heal and I'll get to the place where other women will be interesting again.

4. Health Transition
It has been an incredibly long haul trying to recover from back strain that originated in early October and persists to this day. But I'm determined to recover all that I can of my health and mobility. 

One of side benefits of my new digs is that I'm on the third floor and climbing two flights of stairs after pouring a cup of coffee is both aerobic and good for my right knee, which is still not 100% after I hyper-extended it in September 2012.

I am just about well enough to restart a regular (if gentle) yoga practice, and I'm looking forward to that.

5. FIC Transition
The year is about half over, and that also marks the halfway mark in training my two main successors in Fellowship administration: Aurora DeMarco as our Development Director, and Sky Blue as our Executive Director.

The trainings have been going well and I'll be ready to turn over the reins at the end of the year as planned. While I'm sure I'll still be involved in FIC affairs in the years ahead (I represent an enormous investment in relationships, after all, and it would be a shame to squander that asset), I don't know yet what that will look like.

In fact, there's a lot about my life right now that I don't know about. It's an interesting time.

The Murky Line Between Discipline and Violence

How do you define violence? Is striking children in the name of discipline violence?

These were questions that the Fellowship for Intentional Community Board wrestled with at its recent semi-annual organizational meetings, held Oct 23-26 at Dancing Rabbit.

FIC has been around for 27 years and is best known for its comprehensive Communities Directory, which was first published as a book in 1990 and continues today both in print and as a searchable online database. We only have three boundaries around being included in the Directory:

a) That you tell the truth (no misrepresentation).
b) That you don't advocate violent practices.
c) That you don't interfere with members freely disassociating from the community if they no longer wish to be a part of it.

While we receive few complaints about listed groups—about 2-4 annually—mostly these amount to someone not liking what a group is doing and urging us to drop their listing based on their personal distaste. If it's nothing more than that we don't act. Our job is not to tell people what they should like; it's to give them options and let them choose for themselves.

However, if the complainant believes that the group has crossed one of our three boundaries above and is willing to stand by their position in a direct communication with the community, then we're willing to open a dialog with the community. Sometimes this amounts to clearing up a  misunderstanding, occasionally this leads to a modified listing, and every now and then it leads to our pulling a listing down.

We received a complaint this summer from someone who claimed a listed community had a policy of abusing children in the name of Biblically-inspired discipline, and he was perfectly willing to discuss this with the community.

Realizing that this was not going to be simple to resolve, I brought the issue to the Board. 

We had two issues to consider: 1) is the group misrepresenting its practices in its listing; and 2) is it advocating violent practices?

1. What's Happening and Is There Misrepresentation?
The complainant stated that community children are regularly disciplined by adults using reeds or sticks sufficient to raise welts and cause pain, though not enough to break the skin. Investigation shows that there are a number of ex-members who have testified publicly that this occurs. In television interviews, reporters asking for verification of the community's discipline practices are consistently rebuffed. On the one hand current members do not deny the practice, yet neither do they confirm it.

However, further research uncovered a website supported by the community in which the community admits to this practice. That resolved the question of what's happening and that it's a community practice, yet still left open whether there's been misrepresentation because this controversial practice is not mentioned in their listing. It would probably satisfy FIC's standard for honesty if the community explicitly included in their listing that the community condones disciplining children with a reed or switch that inflicts pain.

2. What constitutes violent practices?
When we first articulated our policy about violence, we distinguished between an act committed in the heat of the moment (while it may be no less traumatizing, acts of passion are easier to forgive than a policy of violence—such as regularly siccing attack dogs on unwanted visitors, or threatening people with guns).

Years later, we further refined our position by determining that hate speech is considered violence and grounds for being excluded from our listings. We had not, however, previously come to any conclusions about spanking children.

While a number of FIC Board members found the community's discipline practices personally abhorrent, the community claims that their practice is inspired by Old Testament Bible passages and discipline is done in the name of love. To what extent, if any, is it acceptable that a practice that is otherwise unacceptable be allowed because it's rooted in spiritual interpretation?

We needed to thread the needle around our commitments to: a) nonviolence; b) freedom of spiritual practices; and c) diversity of parenting philosophies. What a pickle!

What's more, one Board member wondered if this approach to discipline—however repugnant it is when considered in isolation—might actually be an effective deterrent to worse practices, helping to keep parents and other adults more disciplined about how they administer discipline. Who knows?

As FIC's main administrator (and the first monkey in the barrel when fielding critical feedback about listings), I needed a position that I could clearly delineate. If we took the view that striking children in the name of discipline was violent, how slippery was that slope? What about communities that take no position about disciplining children, leaving that wholly up to parents (which is what most communities do, so long as practices are acceptable within the eyes of the law)? Were we saying that any community that condoned spanking would be excluded on the basis of violating our boundary around violence? That could be quite a few.

After a thorough discussion we had narrowed our options down to:

Option 1
Deleting the community on the basis of their advocating violent practices. Some Board members felt this was a straight forward extension of our commitment to nonviolence. As they found the community's discipline practices unacceptable, its listing was unacceptable. If there are other groups that condone striking children in the name of discipline—even implicitly, knowing that it occurs on a regular basis and not acting to stop it—then we should take down their listings as well.

Option 2
Allowing the listing to continue if modified by the community to explicitly disclose information about their child discipline practices, accompanied by a statement from FIC that we are allowing this listing in the name of diversity and spiritual freedom, even though many of our Board believe this practice to be a form of child abuse. The argument here is that this might do a better job of balancing all the factors in play and it may be a more effective social change strategy because it attempts to educate about the issue, instead of turn our backs to it.

In the end, there was no consensus among the Board about where to draw the line, and it falls to me to do more investigating. By opening up a conversation with the community it may become clearer which way to proceed.

It was one of those moments where I hated the issue and loved the process, and an excellent example of using Board time appropriately—figuring out the best course of action in those awkward moments when our core values don't play nice with each other.

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.

Strangers at the Table

Ma'ikwe and I are visiting Hummingbird Ranch, a beautifully sited community tucked into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside of Mora NM. Fortunately, the weather has been benign enough to all us access to (and hopefully tomorrow, egress from) their winding entrance road.

A year and a half ago, the Fellowship for Intentional Community held its spring organizational meetings at Hummingbird, and part of the deal we made in exchange for hosting was that I offer some process consulting. (Barter of this kind is a standard offering we make when searching for a meeting site, and it works out well—simultaneously keeping our costs down and deepening connections with the host.) While it took a while to arrange a good time for me to honor the process commitment, Ma'ikwe and I are making good on that right now.

The community asked for a Consensus training, so that they could better understand how that compares with the Attuned Alignment decision-making process that they've pioneered (for more information about that, check out their publication, The Co-Creator's Handbook), and in yesterday's session we got into an interesting side conversation about integrating new members. In particular, at what point does it make sense to invite new people to participate in community deliberations? I think that's a great question.

At my community, Sandhill Farm, we typically invite prospective members—even visitors—to attend community meetings, as it's a terrific way for them to get deep insights into the group's dynamics and for us to assess how savvy they are about communication and how we solve problems. We observe how much they speak, how much their comments are apropos, and discuss with them afterward what they observed and what their impressions were. The new people are generally flattered to have been allowed to sit in, and the information we get about their experience has proven to be an excellent predictor to who's likely to be a good fit if they wan t to pursue membership. On top of that, we've rarely had a problem with people inserting themselves inappropriately into our deliberations to the point where it's seriously getting in the way.

That said, there is a legitimate concern that untrained or uninitiated folks can disrupt the flow or sense of safety in a meeting, especially if the group's discussing difficult or sensitive topics. As such, at Sandhill we reserve the right to call a closed, members-only meeting. Though we invoke this only rarely, we make it clear to new folks that this is a possibility, and occasionally some members are relieved to make that choice (most commonly when we're discussing critical feedback about someone in the community and are unsure how best to proceed—it often feels more constructive to keep the circulation of such information to a minimum, while committing to provide all parties who have been excluded from the meeting with a summary of what was discussed).

In the case of Hummingbird, they have many visitors and some members have grown weary of new people taking up valuable plenary time with naive suggestions or requests to be filled in about what they alone don't know. As this can be a real concern, I offered two possible ways to cope with this short of banning non-members from meetings:

First, you can ask the new folks to observe only. You might give them a chance to share how they experienced the meeting during the time for evaluation at the end, or you might assign an established member the job of discussing with the new people how it went in a one-on-one conversation after the fact.

Second, if you're willing to be more expansive, you might allow the new folks to participate, with three caveats: a) that they do their best to be respectful of the group and to take into account that they may not know sufficient background on a topic to contribute constructively; b) that they will not be allowed to block a proposal; and c) that the group reserves the right to not spend plenary time trying to catch the new person up on what they don't understand.

Essentially, this becomes a choice of whether it's more challenging to have the rhythm and safety of the meeting be at risk (by allowing the new people to participate), or more problematic to have the new people complain about being excluded by a group that claims it's committed to diversity and inclusivity. Pick your poison.

In the end, I think the best you can do is to explain to new people at the outset why the group has a policy that allows exclusion, the conditions under which that right might be invoked, and the pathway by which the new person can earn the right to fully participate. If the group does all this, and also commits to reaching out to the new person and listening to what their experience was like (of having limited rights to participate in the meeting), then I think you have a good chance of coming through this with minimal hard feelings.

Funding Community Where You Are

Last Wednesday I was in Yellow Springs OH. For a couple hours in the evening I was the featured presenter at an FIC House Party—which is a gathering of folks interested in community, where everyone gets to hear from me what the Fellowship is up to, hear my pitch for why that's important in the world, and is then asked to write a check in support of our work. At the end of the night I had garnered about $800 and had fun in the process, getting folks pumped up about our efforts to build a more cooperative world.

It's the third House Party I've done (the other two were in Seattle and Ann Arbor) and it's one of my favorite activities as the Fellowship's chief fundraiser. In addition to help balance the budget (we can always think up good ways to use money faster than ways to earn it), I'm building personal connections with our constituency, learning first-hand what's exciting for them and how community touches their lives. In short, I'm building community in the process of promoting it. How good can it get?

In Yellow Springs, before I gave my 20-minute spiel about FIC's history, its current program, and the opportunities for everyone in the room to take up an oar on the Fellow Ship, we did a Go Round where I invited participants to speak briefly about their connection with community. The answers were touching—both to my heart, and to other threads in my life:

o Many lived in Yellow Springs, and connected with community that way. Though a small bedroom village in the outer orbit of Dayton in western Ohio, Yellow Springs has always had a special feeling of community by virtue of being the home to Antioch College since 1852 and the residence for many years of Arthur Morgan, author of the seminal work, Small Community, which advances the premise that small communities are the essential building block of a healthy society. While Arthur did not limited his focus to intentional communities, he was definitely promoting the idea of developing local communities with intention. Since 1940, Yellow Springs has been the headquarters of Community Service (CSI)—now styled the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions—a nonprofit devoted to the promotion of Arthur's thinking. The House Party was being held in the home of Faith Morgan & Pat Murphy. Faith is Arthur's granddaughter, and Pat is the current Executive Director of CSI.

Yellow Springs has developed a rich community heritage by virtue of a citizenry motivated to Create Community Where You Are (which has been part of FIC's core mission since 2005). This reputation has attracted others who have been Finding Community Where You Are. In both cases—whether one is a community pioneer or a community settler—residents are cherishing what they have.

(Faith, incidentally, is my age, and it's awesome for me—who has lived in community for 35 years—to have a contemporary who is not just a fellow lifer; she's third generation community.)

o One participant had attended the Arthur Morgan School a Quaker-based boarding school for grades 7-9 in Celo NC. My daughter had gone there in 1999-2002.

o Three people in the room (Ray & Pat Olds, and Don Hollister) had been part of the founding of Communities magazine in 1972. FIC took over operational control of Communities in 1992, and I'm the publisher of that periodical today.

o Faith, in conjunction with CSI, produced the video The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peal Oil, which is a terrific example of a society responding with creativity, dedication, and optimism to the challenge of drastic changes in their access to energy. It's the inspiring story of how one culture built community in response to crisis. FIC is a purveyor of hope as well, especially when anchored by community building.

o One attendee lived for years in Argenta BC, an alternative community enclave nestled in the Kootenays of southeastern BC. I have a dear friend who owns land there and used to be on the staff of the Argenta Friends School. She has been regaling me for years with stories of life there.

The House Party happened because two local people—Faith Morgan and Don Hollister—agreed to put it together. They sent out the invitations, they promoted it locally, they provided the refreshments… they took time out of their busy lives to make it happen. While FIC provided the names and addresses of people in the area with a known interest in community, all I had to do was show up and make the presentation. It was a partnership, and successful House Parties—not unlike successful communities—aren't possible without partners.

Inspired by Faith & Don's example, Raines Cohen & Betsy Morris have signed up to host a House Party in Berkeley next year. Does anyone else care to put their hand in the air?