The FEC Assembly

by Raven Cotyledon

The Federation of Egalitarian Communities is the organization that connects egalitarian, income-sharing communities in North America. It was created to facilitate transportation and labor exchanges between the communes. It was never meant to be a governing body for these communities, but currently it has been involved with various controversies between the communities and between communities and individuals.

This is Rejoice. She is the Secretary of the FEC.  She gets to be involved in tangles like where we will hold the Assembly.

 

Rejoice

The Assembly is a meeting of delegates from the communities in the FEC.  Originally we were going to hold the Assembly at East Wind, a large community in southern Missouri, but due to some controversy, we ended up holding it at Oran Mor, a small community, a half hour away.  Some of us spent a lot of time going back and forth between the two communities, through the Ozark region of Missouri. 

 

The building at Oran Mor where we held Assembly meetings

We had over twenty-five people descend on Oran Mor (not including members of their community and East Wind).  We came from communities in Quebec, New York, Washington, DC, Virginia, Oregon, Washington state, and Alaska (and, of course, Missouri).

 

Arielle and Marie-Claire from Le Manoir in rural Quebec 

 

Rachael and Maximus from East Brook Community Farm in central New York state

There was a lot of drama, personal and political, but there were also a bunch of more mundane things, like creating a budget for the next year.  There was some discussion about Commune Life, both the blog and the YouTube channel. An important item was creating leadership teams, so Rejoice wouldn’t have to do everything alone–and we could focus on getting more stuff done.

Caroline from Compersia in Washington, DC

Lo and Jesse from the Mothership in Portland, Oregon

One interesting aspect, we have been dealing with, is the FEC constitution, which was written many years ago and seems increasingly out of date.  Among other things, the constitution has an anti-discrimination clause which some folks thought meant queer communities, Jewish communities, women’s communities, and communities of color couldn’t join.  We were talking about changing the constitution, but it seemed tricky. We decided instead of changing the constitution, we might create a document with interpretations of the constitution, which might be easier to change in the future.

Iz and Tea from Rainforest Lab in rural Washington

Greg from Ionia in Alaska

In spite of everything, I was glad we had this Assembly.  It was wonderful to meet so many folks building communes around North America and the struggles we engaged in were difficult but important. It still seems amazing and critical to me that our communities are kept connected. This is the next level of community building–creating networks of communities and keeping the communication between our communes growing.

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