Scrappy Little Communities

by Raven

I said in my last blog post that I was planning to expand what we cover on Commune Life–just a little bit.  One of the places I want to explore is little communities that often have a big mission.

For example, while Twin Oaks and Acorn in Virginia get lots of coverage here, there are a whole bunch of little communities in Louisa County that are doing interesting things: Living Energy Farm, Cambia, Little Flower, the Magnolia Collective, etc.  Some of them are doing income sharing, some of them are doing variants of income sharing, and some of them aren’t income sharing at all but seem to be doing some worthwhile stuff.  And who’s income sharing and who’s not seems to change at times so it’s hard for me, many miles away, to know.  And there are still new communities popping up there.  I hope to have a piece about Bramble (perhaps the newest community in the county) in the not so distant future.

Another example is the Baltimore Free Farm.  They started off squatting and then created a housing unit which they originally called Horizontal Housing but have renamed it Green Eggs in Hampden.  I’m trying to find out what they are up to these days.

Meanwhile, up here in New England, I’m living in a very small income sharing community in western Massachusetts.  The reason that I haven’t written about it is that they don’t want publicity.  But I think what they are doing is very interesting.  The place has a focus on interdependence and mutual aid and I have learned a lot more about those things by living here.

I’m excited by all the things going on in the area around me. I’m finding small communities of all kinds around here–political collectives, farm focused communities, a co-op house built around New Culture–and I’ve been hearing about a bunch of anarchist collectives emerging in Worcester, an old city between here and Boston.

And now, Serenity Solidarity is not far from here, having moved from Louisa County to a place near Albany, NY. At the moment there is only one family there, but they are determined to make it a refuge for many people–especially for BIPOC folks, who have often had trouble fitting in communities created by white folks and based on white culture.

Ericka of Serenity Solidarity and Ethan of the Possibility Alliance (holding baby Kiwi)

Also, the Possibility Alliance, mostly Ethan and Sarah and children, is in New England now, having moved to Maine from Missouri some years back and they are attracting folks and working with indigenous tribes around there. They are the most low tech and yet very progressive group I know.

I’m currently exploring some stuff up in Vermont, including Earthseed Ecovillage which has a lot of land, a few people, and some very big ambitions.  I am in dialogue with them, hoping they will write a bit about what they are doing.  I’m also working with some folks in that area to create a small community to work on emotional and relational intelligence.  Maybe something will emerge from this that I can write about.

And I keep hearing about interesting communal projects.  One of the ones that I think is most intriguing is a new squat (an illegal home) created in a major city by some former communards that is trying to house immigrants and former prisoners that have nowhere to go.  I doubt that they would want publicity either, but it certainly sounds creative.

And while most of what I’m talking about is on the east coast of the US, I know there are a lot of little projects happening around this nation and around the world. It’s an exciting, if scary, time.

Unfortunately, most of these small communities are ephemeral.  It’s hard starting a community and even harder when you are doing something experimental and you don’t have very many people.  In my eight and a half years managing Commune Life, I have watched what seems like dozens of communities come and go.

Still, big communities like Twin Oaks and East Wind, etc, started off small.  It’s hard to tell what is going to work and what isn’t and it’s worth learning from the stuff that didn’t work.  I do want to report on some of these communities because I think they have a lot to offer and a lot to learn from.  I admire the ambitions of these scrappy little communities.