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Mental health is a somewhat controversial issue in the communes, where mental health challenges sometimes flare up but it’s also claimed that communal living improves your mental health. I decided to put the issue out on Facebook.
As you might note, I only got four comments, but they were all detailed and thoughtful:
As they say, it’s complicated. Still, these are issues that need to be addressed in many communities. At what point is the community helpful and at what point does the individuals mental health threaten the community? There aren’t any easy answers but at some point many communities will need to deal with these issues.
Today seems like an appropriate day to talk about governance. Not of countries (although I assume there will be many folks thinking about that today) but of communities–specifically, egalitarian income sharing communities, the kind that are in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (aka the FEC).
The ‘egalitarian’ in both phrases is because not all income-sharing communities (ie, communes) are egalitarian. There are income-sharing groups (mostly spiritual communities) that have a guru or bishop or abbot or some other leader who makes most of the decisions for the community. Egalitarian communities have some sort of ‘horizontal’ governance structure where most to all members have a say in decisions.
That having been said, there are a variety of decision structures in the communes that I am familiar with. The older, larger communities (Twin Oaks and East Wind) have unusual structures, where most of the newer, smaller communes (like Acorn and Glomus) use consensus decision making.
The FEC only requires of its communities that a community “Uses a form of decision making in which members have an equal opportunity to participate, either through consensus, direct vote, or right of appeal or overrule.”
I have written about how consensus works. I’ve also written about when it’s better to use it or not. My summary of that last article is that consensus works better in small, somewhat homogeneous groups. For a small commune (including Acorn, which has thirty folks) I think that consensus is the way to go. Twin Oaks and East Wind are older and larger and don’t use consensus.
Twin Oaks, 1987
Twin Oaks has a very complex decision-making structure that involves their planner/manager structures, their O&I board, and their policies. Paxus and Keenan, who both live at Twin Oaks, have written about how Twin Oaks governs and they can explain it better than I ever could.
The East Wind community has a whole page on its website devoted to Self-Governance. It’s worth reading because, like Twin Oaks, their governance structure is complex. One of the statements on that page is “Our bylaws set forth our purposes, direction, ideology, define the rights and obligations of membership, and state the guarantees made by the community to its members. The bylaws allow for experimentation and are intentionally minimal in their restrictions. The bylaws can be amended in any manner desirable with a two thirds majority vote of full members. The bylaws state that East Wind may ‘govern itself by any reasonable means which its members desire.’ We encourage those who are interested in visiting East Wind to read our bylaws in full.” It goes on to discuss several other decision making structures, including “Legispol” which is something that I’ve heard East Winders talk about and wouldn’t say I had any real understanding of.
East Wind folks, 2016
For the Fourth of July last year, Theresa wrote a Facebook post that pointed out while communities claim to strive to have all voices be heard, there are barriers, often, to that happening, particularly for people of color or folks coming from other classes or cultures. This will probably mean changes in our way of governance.
I have claimed that communities are laboratories for social change. I think that we are places where we can experiment with new methods of governance, and today, as the US changes its government and, perhaps, tries to improve some things, it might be good to look at other ways of governance for society as well as for communities.
It’s not that I think that you could run a whole countries could be run by consensus (although there are forms of consensus that I think could work with larger groups–I heard of a situation where over a thousand anti-nuke activists needed to agree to an arrest plea and were able to do that using something called small group to large group consensus) and I even suspect that you couldn’t run a country using sociocracy, but I think that we need to look at ways to decentralize power, and I think that the communes are at the forefront of that.
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It’s Martin Luther King day in the US and I don’t want this to be lost amidst the pandemic, the storming of the Capitol, the inauguration, etc. Racial injustice is still a major problem in the US (and world) and most communities (especially the communes) are overwhelmingly white.
The Foundation for Intentional Communities decided that something needed to be done about it and this past summer decided to put money into creating change. In November they sent out this email:
None of these links work because these are photocopies of the letter, but if you are interested in exploring this more, here is a link that does work and you can find out more info and ways to donate.
If you believe that communal living has something to offer the world (as I do) then here is a way to make it more accessible to the people who are usually left out of the process.
There have also been several attempts to support the creation of income-sharing communities led by folks of color, but as of the moment, I don’t know that any of these has actually started. It’s very hard to start communes in general and when there’s folks from a less privileged group trying to start it, it seems nearly impossible. Still, I want to credit the FIC for forming a fund to at least remove some of the financial barriers, both to starting communities and to joining communities. I truly hope that this results in more alternatives opening up in the communities movement for Black and Indigenous folks and other People of Color.
The two previous book reviews this week (books on sustainable community and collaborative groups) focused on books written about how to do collaborations (including communes and communities) well. Today I want to review a book about what not to do. It’s called Come Hell or High Water and is subtitled “a handbook on collective process gone awry”. It’s published by AK press–“one of the world’s largest and most productive anarchist publishing houses”–that also publishes a bunch of other interesting books (including adrienne maree brown’s book on Emergent Strategy which I based twoblog posts here on).
As the cover illustrates, this is a funny, cynical book that has a bunch of cartoons illustrating some frustrating problems. It also has a lot of hard won lessons about how all these wonderful processes that we talk about here and which other commune building guides extol can go terribly wrong. It’s written by a couple of anarchists who believe strongly in “egalitarian collectives” but have seen the pitfalls in the process and have looked at ways that form what the authors term “predictable patterns” that can lead well-meaning groups to things like “hierarchy, mistrust, looking out only for oneself, and sometimes even underhanded scheming.”
Although this is a modest sized book (and a quick read–127 small pages) Delfina Vannuchi and Richard Singer look carefully at issues like misusing consensus, how not to do power sharing, the difference between politeness and kindness, character assassinations and banning, justice and due process and free speech, and how vagueness can lead to authoritarianism.
I’ve seen reviews of this book that complain that this book is overly ‘pessimistic’. However, I think that it provides a nice counterbalance to all the books on the wonderful things you can do with group process. (See my two previous reviews this week.) The cartoons are also a nice touch that makes the emphasis on problems easier to take.
The authors end the book with a section that they entitle “There’s hope” where they talk about how “Virtually all problems in collectives can be overcome by applying compassion, and by being thorough and even-handed in our thinking.” Sounds lovely but not easy to do, especially when things are tough.
Here’s the last paragraph in the book, which is a nice summary of their thinking:
“An egalitarian collective is meant to accept and incorporate differences and heterogeneity. The task is to create a productive, relatively peaceful community out of all the different and sometimes contradictory personalities that form the group. No collective will ever be a perfect picture of unity, but it doesn’t have to be. A working collective is more like a crazy-quilt of disparate styles, all stitched up by a common thread. Frayed edges and all, that’s what a functional egalitarian collective looks like.”
It’s a nice reminder for people living in or trying to build communes.
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Starhawk is a witch and a political activist and a permaculture teacher and the author or co-author of thirteen books. She has also lived in a collective household in the Bay Area for decades. In 2011 she wrote The Empowerment Manual, which she subtitles “A Guide for Collaborative Groups”.
Starhawk
I think that this is an incredibly useful book. While Starhawk points out that there are many different types of what she calls collaborative groups, which are any group of people who are working together for common goals that are decentralized and egalitarian, she definitely includes communities in the mix. One theme through the book is a fictional story that she tells about “an imaginary cohousing community”. She uses this story to illustrate many of her points. Unfortunately, I think the story is one of the weaker point of the book (I think that it’s both hokey and a bit soap opera-ish) although it does provide useful examples of what she’s talking about sometimes.
The Empowerment Manual has whole chapters on group vision, power and responsibility, communication and trust, “Leadership Roles for Leaderless Groups”, conflict, and, particularly useful, “Dealing with Difficult People”. Information is interspersed with exercises to practice or use what she talks about. There are two tables of contents, the second labeled “Table of Questions and Exercises”, so you can easily find some of the more useful exercises.
Starhawk ends the book with a chapter focusing on “Groups that Work” so you can see actual examples of successful collaborations. After looking at three such groups (a cooperative grocery store, the 1999 Seattle blockade, and her own Reclaiming collective) she finishes by listing what she calls ‘Lessons from Success’. I think that the points that she makes here are so useful for communes and communities that I am going to quote a few paragraphs. (Italics are in the original.)
“Ideals and values are important; they are the guiding force that drives people to organize together and work together. But groups that survive find ways to balance the ideal with the pragmatic needs of the moment. They are flexible, rather than rigid, and accepting rather than judgemental. They value diversity rather than orthodoxy, problem-solving over toeing a party line.
“Successful groups balance unity with autonomy. They have a bias toward freedom and impose the minimal structure necessary. But they do have structure and often hold a unifying vision and set of core values.
“Collaborative groups that last over time reinvent themselves periodically. They may need to change their structure, organization and ways of working as they grow and develop. They are not static, but dynamic, not artifacts, but living organisms.”
I think that, not only anyone who wants to start a community, but anyone who thinks that their community has begun to stagnate, should read this book full of both good ideas and useful processes.
Next, so what could go wrong? On Friday, a book that looks at that.
Thanks for reading! This post was made possible by our patrons on Patreon. The Commune Life team works hard to bring you these stories about our lives in community, and that work couldn’t happen without support from our audience. So if you liked this article, and want to help us make more like it, head on over to https://www.patreon.com/communelife to join us!
It’s book review week again at Commune Life. Today I want to take the unusual step of reviewing two books that I have only skimmed and partially read because they are connected and one of them was just published.
Both books are by Yana Ludwig (formerly Ma’ikwe Ludwig) although the latest one is co-written with Karen Gimnig. They are both published by the Foundation for Intentional Community (the FIC, formerly the Fellowship for Intentional Community). Yana Ludwig lives in the Solidarity Collective, an income-sharing community in Laramie, Wyoming.
The original book that was written is called Together Resilient and is subtitled ‘Building Community in the Age of Climate Disruption’. It talks about the problems we are dealing with as climate change occurs and how we can deal with it. The author looks at what the Global Ecovillage Network calls the four dimensions of sustainability: worldview, social, economic, and ecological. (She also mentions Joanna Macy’s “three types of activism”–a model that has been very important to me–Holding Actions, Systems Change, and Worldview Changes.) Yana Ludwig then goes on to talk about “Community as Experimental Laboratory”, another concept that I have long espoused–she sees communities as places where we can try out and model what we must do to live sustainably.
As ‘Case Studies’ for the work that she thinks needs to be done, she uses the communities of Dancing Rabbit and Twin Oaks (although she talks about a bunch of other groups, many not residential communities, but some that are, such as the Ecovillage at Ithaca). As the subtitle of the book says, everything is very related to community living (the subtitle of Chapter 2 is “Community as a Tool to Reduce Carbon Footprints” and Chapter 4 is entitled “Starting a Residential Intentional Community) and there is a section in the book called ‘The Case for Deeper Communalism’ where the author talks about the advantages of income sharing. She also includes her ‘Spectrums for Intentional Communities’ chart which I think is one of the more useful tools that community seekers and community creators can have.
My biggest complaint about the book is that the author starts relying on a Ken Wilbur color theory where everything evolves toward what he calls ‘yellow’ and the state he calls ‘green’ (the space that many communes and ecocommunities are in) is too extreme. Yana Ludwig advocates for what she calls ‘hierarchy-lite’. Her vision of what she calls ‘Sustainable Cooperative Culture’ fits in between ‘Extreme Competitive Culture’ and ‘Extreme Cooperative Culture’. Somehow I don’t think that being too cooperative is dangerous and feel that this color theory and these spectrums are trying to paint the more radically cooperative elements as extremists and thus justify her approach as more moderate. Still, I think that it’s a small gripe for a book that pulls in so many useful ideas and approaches.
Throughout the book Yana Ludwig mentions The Cooperative Culture Handbook–which wasn’t actually written until three years later. It was just published near the end of last year which is why I wanted to get this review out since this book is practically ‘hot off the press’.
At the beginning of The Cooperative Culture Handbook, the authors talk about how when Yana wrote Together Resilient, “the section on group dynamics and culture kept getting longer” and “After a conversation with her publisher and editor, it was decided that she’d write a second book”. Yana Ludwig went looking for a writing partner and, after several partners didn’t quite work out, she began working with Karen Gimnig. This book is the result and it’s subtitled ‘A Social Change Manual to Dismantle Toxic Culture & Build Connection’.
This is basically a book of exercises. The authors try to balance personal and group work to help folks do the work that they call creating cooperative culture. They begin each section with an idea that they call a “Culture Key” and then follow each ‘Key’ with two exercises. They emphasize ‘Discernment’, stating clearly that there are no “simple, easy answers”. They go on to say that no workshop or policy will eliminate conflict and oppression. “If that were so, this would be a much shorter book!”
Most of these exercises look useful. The book begins with exercises to promote “Skillful Hearing” and ends with exercises designed to look at multiple ideas of how to proceed and to come up with something that is aligned with the group’s collective mission. The first three ‘Keys’ all come with an exercise drawn from the Imago Dialogue work developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt and there’s a bit more about Imago Dialogue (which apparently is something that Karen Gimnig was very influenced by) in the appendix. The authors also put diamond symbols in the Contents next to their “favorite general use exercises.”
My only real difficulty that I have with the book (at least from skimming it) is that it again tries to frame certain viewpoints as extreme–this time breaking methods into “Mainstream Culture, Cooperative Culture, and Counter Culture” and saying “we think the pendulum can swing way too far from Mainstream Culture and land us in the pitfalls of Counter Culture.” As a person who was very much a part of the counterculture of the ‘60s and’70s, I definitely react to this characterization. Fortunately, they do say in the beginning, as they are talking about all this that they hope “…that you will give yourself and us the grace to set aside pieces that we may have gotten wrong or described badly, or that simply aren’t a fit for you.” I think that their emphasis on discernment may be their saving grace here.
I’m very glad that I got these two books. They look very useful for anyone wanting to understand why community is so useful in our current climate catastrophe as well as anyone wanting to build some of the skills needed for group living. If either (or both!) of these two situations describes you, I would definitely recommend these books.
Thanks for reading! This post was made possible by our patrons on Patreon. The Commune Life team works hard to bring you these stories about our lives in community, and that work couldn’t happen without support from our audience. So if you liked this article, and want to help us make more like it, head on over to https://www.patreon.com/communelife to join us!
“What is the biggest challenge of living on a commune?,” I asked when realizing that the regenerative farm I was spending my COVID days was just that. It was as much an icebreaker as it was a question to ease my nerves, as I was taught growing up to proceed with caution when it came to communes. I awaited the answer.
“We trigger each other.” It was so human and so true for moving through life, commune or not.
Without a car, in a pandemic, for five months, I was submerged into the small commune. What struck me most was the awareness of social hygiene of the community: the meetings to form a collective understanding of an individual’s growth and role within the whole. We certainly got on each other’s nerves, but we also held each other, bonded, and evolved as people together.
Every human has baggage or “areas of improvement,” which we so often cannot recognize until a sudden disruption forces us to stop life, in order to see the pattern of ourselves. Our own pattern of responding when under a stressor ripples out affecting others. We trigger each other. Perhaps in the hectic pace of life we can, overtime, put our pattern together make it conscious and actively “work on it.” It takes time to see that pattern when interactions are brief and often shallow.
However, in the community, these ticks are apparent immediately, where we are constantly bumping up against people’s ups and downs of life. I saw how we quickly learned what each person needed on an emotional level during their ups and downs. It was remarkable to see how people got vulnerable and held each other through COVID anxieties, moods, disagreements, and mournings. Personally, I learned how to communicate my own emotional needs and to trust people in sharing my needs rather than bottling everything up until some idealistic romantic love comes along. I learned how to lean on and be held by others. I was flexing my emotional intelligence muscle.
All the emotional flossing, holding, trigger-induced growth on that small commune, I found beautiful. Yes, at times it was frustrating, but it was also special. It was how strangers coming together to live together can live, work, and build together. It is how basic needs of survival can be met, so the collective can be rooted in their ability to offer something outwards.
This experience opened me up to a whole new way of thinking about the so-called emotional underbelly of human interactions – being triggered. We live in a traumatized and traumatizing culture, but safe collectives can be catalysts for our own self-awareness, emotional growth and trauma healing. I am grateful for my time living in a commune. Like any real challenge, it is where the true learning lies, so I am glad to have cast my caution aside, built relationships and experienced some healthy individual growth.
I have written a bunch of articles on starting a commune or community, and we’ve published more here. In many of them, we talk about how hard it is and in at least one of them I stated that you should join and live in a community before starting one. And probably for the majority of community minded folks it’s easier to just join a community as opposed to starting one.
Yet with all the posts on the perils and promise of starting a community, I realize that there have been few articles on what’s involved in joining one.
This piece was inspired by reading a post by a disgruntled former Twin Oaks member where he (at least I think the writer is a he) talks about how the community treats new members as “peasants”. I’ve seen other things written about how communities build themselves on the labor of new members and that new members get less privileges than older members. And there is some truth to this, especially in the larger communes like Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn (as well as non-income-sharing communities, such as Ganas and Dancing Rabbit) but I’ve also seen things like this happen on a smaller scale in smaller communities.
A Twin Oaks visitor group
The biggest part of that is that new folks can’t understand how things operate really until they have been there a while. And it takes a community a while to understand and trust new folks. Just because someone has been through a three week visitor period (like they have at Twin Oaks) doesn’t mean that they truly understand the community or the community truly understands them.
I heard a long term member at Ganas say that a person would join them and within a day announce that they had finally found the community of their dreams and that they intended to stay forever and then a second person would come and say that the place seemed ‘okay’ and that they might stay a little while and see if they liked it, and generally the first person wouldn’t last six months while the second might end up staying years. It’s not always true, but it often is.
The thing is that almost every community has people coming and going–many people idealize communal living and try it out before realizing that it’s not perfect and it’s not for them. People who are willing to make compromises and don’t expect utopia and are willing to stick through with something they believe in, even through the rough patches, often do very well at Twin Oaks as well as other places. Seniority makes a difference and I think that it makes little sense to give full privileges to someone who just got in the door and doesn’t even understand what they are doing yet and probably won’t stay very long and I think that’s the way most communities feel.
So when you join, be prepared for a rough patch at the beginning. If you think that the community is what you want, try to stick it out. It will get better if you hang in.
from the East Wind visitor page
Another thing that I’ve noticed is that you shouldn’t expect to get close with or even become good friends with the long term members. They have already built friendship bonds with each other and they probably don’t want to invest a lot of energy in you, if they have no idea how long you will be there. Instead, try to get to know the other new folks. They’re in the same boat as you are and they will be looking to build friendships as well. I noticed that when I was at Ganas I got close with a number of folks and they were all members who arrived around the same time as I did, or later. I did build one close relationship with one long term member, but that didn’t happen until I had been there well over a year. This same person basically ignored me when I got there.
So this is my advice to anyone joining an already established community. Hang in there. Be useful, be committed (as long as it makes sense), and seek out other new folks to make friends with. If you can stick with it, you can create a nice life for yourself in community–but it will take time.
Thanks for reading! This post was made possible by our patrons on Patreon. The Commune Life team works hard to bring you these stories about our lives in community, and that work couldn’t happen without support from our audience. So if you liked this article, and want to help us make more like it, head on over to https://www.patreon.com/communelife to join us!
I probably don’t need to say it, but I’m so glad that the year 2020 is over. Many horrible things happened that affected everyone–and affected the communes and the communal movement. I have a feeling that the changes from 2020 will affect the communes for years to come.
Maybe our need to just let the year go is why, when I posted a question on Facebook about what we could learn from 2020, no one responded with any answers.
Notice that it reached 191 people and 11 folks liked (etc) it but there were no comments.
Have we learned anything from the year? As much as we would like to forget that 2020 ever happened, I really hope that we could learn something from the year. As I said, I think the communes will feel the effects of the year for many years hence. Maybe we will be able to think about what we have learned when we have more distance from the year.
Welcome to 2021! The year 2020 is officially over. One of my commune mates pointed out that nothing really changes as the calendar year rolls over, but there’s a lot of symbolism, especially this past year when so many (mostly not good things) happened all at once.
I will try to focus on commune related things in listing my hopes, but the coronavirus has had a major impact on the communes, and will need to be dealt with. My first and biggest hope for this year is that, with folks getting vaccinated, we may be able to move somewhat beyond having to deal with the repercussions of the pandemic. In terms of this happening, I’ve heard everything from late spring, to the summer, to sometime in the fall. This will mean a lot for the communes.
The only good thing out of all this is that I think that the pandemic has increased interest in communal living. It’s also made it hard to join communities. So when some of the pandemic restrictions are lifted, I am very hopeful that many of the communes, which are at low populations now, will be able to bring in some good folks and increase their membership.
I also hope that this encourages some folks to decide to actually create communities. There’s certainly enough interest in it–maybe with restrictions being lifted, some folks will decide to just do it. I know that I am often discouraging of people simply starting communities, but if someone is really willing to begin the work (and a lot of this work is outlined on the blog) and reaches out and knows others who are also interested–and especially if they have some communal living experience, goodness knows we need more communes. And I believe that if 90% of new communes fail, and we want to get at least ten new communes up and running, we’re going to need to start a hundred communes to get there, so I am actually in favor of folks starting communes, particularly if they are willing to do the research and networking they will need to do.
A big, pandemic related, hope for this year is that if the restrictions can be eased on time, there can be the usual August gatherings at Twin Oaks this summer. I have never been to the Queer Gathering and I was planning to go last year but TO canceled all three gatherings. My hope for this summer is that the Queer Gathering and the Women’s Gathering and the Communities Conference can all happen again. I mentioned networking earlier and these are all great networking events. If they happen (I hope, I hope, I hope they do) I would strongly encourage anyone interested in communal living to attend at least the Communities Conference, and if you identify as queer, the Queer Gathering, and if you identify as a woman, the Women’s Gathering.
Another hope for this year is that the communes continue to look at and figure out how to embrace racial justice, whether that’s by figuring out how to become more diverse or by figuring out how to support communities of color. For horrible reasons, there was a large upswelling of interest in this over the course of 2020. My hope is that this wasn’t another political phase but the beginning of some sustained work in all of our communities.
And my final hope for this new year is that folks find fun in all of this. A lot of 2020 was grim and we have a lot of work to do, building back community membership, creating new communities, and continuing to work on racism (and classism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and creating access for people with disabilities and…) and that we find a way to be joyful and even playful in all this because we will never attract anyone if we are all too damn serious.
