Starting from Scratch #8

by Raven

8: Landing

One of the main things that I did in my month off from Commune Life is move.  As I said I would in my last Starting from Scratch post, I have moved into an already up and running community.  They have people, they have land, they have tried community, and they want to do income sharing (and have money coming into the community).  What they didn’t have was agreements.  

This is one of the reasons that the previous attempts didn’t work out. While people do occasionally get a whole bunch of folks together and it all works out, more often it turns out that when folks have different ideas of what they are doing, it leads to disagreements, often to the point that the damage is not repairable–especially if it turns out that folks want to do very different things.  I will write a post soon on the process of making agreements.  I’ve become a lot clearer on the particulars over the last five years, mostly due to working with Cotyledon and Glomus Commune on policies, as well as watching communities like Compersia struggle to create policies, and reading Yana Ludwig’s book on Building Belonging which has a good list of policies starting communities need to think about.

What I want to say here is that finding and/or creating community is an organic, real world process.  While I can outline the four steps and say “This is how you should create a community,” in real practice what you get may not be exactly what you were looking for and may not come about exactly the way I say, the books say, or anyone says.

This is an especially important reminder if you are thinking of creating a community and you are reading Commune Life and everything else you can read about community building.  It’s all useful and every situation is unique.  I am reminded of the quote from Emergent Strategy about how things are “non-linear and iterative”: “Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track.   It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions.”  This is often true of community building (although the explosions are more often part of the ending of communities).  You can plan all you like, but you need to know things are not likely to go according to plan.  

Certainly, I did not expect to have a situation like the one I’ve landed in just fall into my lap.  Yet here I am, in neither something I really did start from scratch nor a fully functioning community that was looking for new  members.  

Maybe this is the final thing you need in taking on community building, a large degree of humility.  We’re really not in control, we just like to think we are.