Turnover

by Raven Glomus

I’m surprised that I haven’t written on this before.  In fact, I don’t think that we’ve published anything directly about it on this blog.  (And WordPress informs me that this is our 700th post!)

Very often, when I talk about my communal experiences, I talk about Common Threads, the income-sharing community that I helped start in the 1990s, and how much I have learned since then.  One thing I share with folks that are talking about starting a community is how often we thought that we were failing because every year of Common Threads’ five year existence, we had a somewhat different crew of folks.  Our core (Susan, Robert, and I) remained the same, but people kept moving in and out.  We couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t hold onto members.

Since that time, I’ve lived in three or four co-op houses, a couple of different communes, and one large, complicated community.  I’ve also visited a bunch of communities and keep decent tabs on several.  All of them experienced (and, if they are still around, still experience) regular significant changes in their membership.  As they say in the computer world, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

How it works is that many folks think that they would like to live in a commune or some other type of community.  However, when they actually try living in one, they often find it’s not what they expected.  Other folks may know what they want but find that a particular community doesn’t meet their needs (after they’ve tried it for a while) and decide to move on.  Still other people live happily in a community for quite some time and then they change.  They decide that they want to do something that they can’t do in the community or it no longer meets their needs.  Whatever the reason, the majority of folks who join a community decide to leave at some point.  (There certainly those who join long lasting communities that live in them until they die.  That’s really just a different way of leaving.)

The result is that almost any community has people regularly leaving.  If they are good at recruitment, they will also have new folks coming in and, hopefully, the number coming in balances the number leaving, in which case the community is more or less stable.  All this is to say that turnover is just a part of community living.

Many of the newer communities have started to plan for their members leaving at some point and design exit agreements (which I plan to write about in the near future).

A different kind of turnover

Right now, many communities are still recovering from the pandemic where they lost a lot of folks and had problems and concerns about bringing in new folks, with the result that they have fairly low membership.  Now they are actively seeking folks.  

I knew that both Twin Oaks and Acorn were looking for people, but I was surprised when Paxus published an article on doing a Meet the Communities at the next Quink Fest.  There were eight Louisa County communities listed—-nine if you consider Magnolia separate from Living Energy Farm–and they are all looking for people. (For those unfamiliar with Virginia geography,  Louisa County includes Louisa, Mineral, and Cuckoo.) All in all, there are sixteen communities listed as presenting at this event–plus the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (representing the secular income-sharing communities of North America) and the Foundation for Intentional Community (which includes over a thousand communities, most of them in North America or Europe).

If you are interested in joining a community, this is exciting news.  Take a look at Paxus’ piece.  This might be the time to make turnover work in your favor.

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