Radical Sharing

by Raven

Sustainability is important to many people. Some of the newer income sharing communities, such as Living Energy Farm and the Stillwater Sanctuary/Possibility Alliance, focus on reducing their carbon footprint, but Twin Oaks, a large, older communities, has never been very concerned with this, and still uses almost 20% of the resources of an average American.

The reason is that Twin Oaks embraces what Paxus refers to as ‘Radical Sharing’.  Twin Oaks has 17 cars for nearly 100 people.   (To compare, a hundred average Americans probably have 67 cars.)  They share tools and bikes and even clothes, not to mention books and musical instruments and, of course, income.

Truly, most communities, even co-housing communities which are sort of at the other end of the spectrum from income sharing communities, do some degree of sharing.  However, most of the income sharing communities, by their very nature, do much more sharing than simply income.

Car sharing board at Twin Oaks

Acorn also shares cars and bikes and tools and clothes, as does East Wind.  And at new communes such as Cambia and Compersia the work of building the community is shared.

Car key cabinet at Twin Oaks

I have a button that I wear sometimes that says “Consume Less, Share More.”  In the communes this type of radical sharing is a daily reality.

 

Uninauguration

Photos by Steve and GPaul of Compersia

Folks from the DC and Virginia communes were very involved with the protests:

Christian and Paxus of Twin Oaks appreciate PETA’s big fuzzy suits.

Vegans GPaul of Compersia and Christian of Twin Oaks pose with PETA people.

Paxus of Twin Oaks and GPaul of Compersia rest after the disruption protests, while Steve of Compersia (only hand seen in picture) appreciates a good pun.

Residents and guests of the Keep, a cooperative house in Washington, DC, make signs in preparation for the Women’s March on Washington.

Steve of Compersia and Caroline formerly of Twin Oaks march in the Women’s March.  Also Bryan Cahall of the http://extraordinaryrenditionband.com band marching to draw attention to Prison Liberation. Compersia hosted 3 from the band and it was delightful!

Residents, guests, and friends of the Keep, a cooperative house in DC, tell stories over food during a bunch following the Women’s March.

Residents, guests, and friends of the Keep join in a large post-protest Sunday brunch.

James of Point A NYC takes in the crowd at the Festival of Resistance Against Trump

A gaggle of Twin Oakers rest and eat dinner at Compersia after the Women’s March

More of Twin Oakers resting and eating dinner at Compersia after the Women’s March

One more photo of Twin Oakers at Compersia
Twin Oakers and Compersians participate in a blockade at the inauguration in solidarity with communities threatened by Trump and his administration.

Compersia and friends let loose after the inspiring Women’s March on Washington.

Kathryn of Compersia protests at Trump’s inauguration in solidarity with communities threatened by his administration.

 

 

Thanks Compersia, for tips on starting a commune

Dear Connor, GPaul, Jenny, Kathryn, and Steve,

Thanks very much for hosting Tom and me at Compersia!  We learned so much from talking with each of you!  And you were so friendly and open in how you included us in your community family while we were there!

We feel lucky to have met you, the pioneers of your new thriving income-sharing community.  Learning from your experiences makes it far more likely that we’ll be able to participate in making a new income-sharing community in New York.

In gratitude for our time with you, we wanted to share the unexpected lessons we learned about Compersia when we visited you — lessons which might be helpful not only to us but also to others working on starting income-sharing communities:

1. The founding members of Compersia applied the membership process to themselves.  No one was “grandfathered in” (which would have created two classes of family members).  Instead, everyone went through the membership process.
2. The community formation process included intentional work on building trust and affinity, simultaneous with the work on building the structure of the community.  The personal connections among Compersia members grew and deepened through clearnesses and transparency tools during the community formation process.  All along, the personal connections were growing side-by-side with the community decisions.
3. Community members bonded around and stuck with a few fundamental principles — such as income-sharing, urban location, and FEC principles — together with additional important shared values whose implementation the members left open to work on together — such as community engagement, ambition, non-violence, feminism, and environmentalism.  Additional details of the vision remained open so that prospective members could carve their own niches into the vision.
4. The pioneer Compersians engaged in a reflective process, consciously returning to basic principles, not a mechanical process about defining procedures in advance.  The idea was to work together to implement principles, not to follow other communities cookie-cutter style.
5. Additional people became interested in Compersia for a variety of reasons.  One approach to attracting others: Ignition first by figuring out what’s important to new additional potential members and showing how the commune will achieve that.  Then remove individual barriers to joining.
6. While forming, Compersia enjoyed lots of support from multiple existing groups!  The support included a paid worker for a year supplied by the Point A project and Acorn as well as free housing and food provided by The Keep.  To start a commune, it takes a lot of material support and time and commitment to shared principles!
7. We’ve been asked what complaints we heard at Compersia, and we can’t remember hearing even one single complaint!  How rare to find a group where no member feels a need to complain!  It’s not that all the circumstances are perfect.  Instead, the communication and support network is such that everyone seems to feel that their needs and feelings are respected.  When issues arise, the community talks about them.  At Compersia, we heard conversations about expansion, chores, and the communal house.  The community choices were made by consensus and represented the intentions of the community members, upon taking each other’s feelings into account.
8. Compersia feels like a family.  Income-sharing may help, but may not be the only way.  The shared love and caring is inspiring.  There’s far more than the sum of the parts.  Compersians provide each other support to take risks and grow, individually and together.  The sense of caring and love seems to increase through working together as a group to pursue shared principles and seems to extend beyond Compersians to genuine caring for those not yet inside the community.
   

   Thanks so much to each of you!  We had a wonderful time and learned a lot!
   

   Happy new year and best wishes!

   Love,

   Jon

Fun at Compersia

Communal living isn’t all work as these photos from the new community in DC show:

The Election and the Movement

by Connor

Last night, during our shared meal, all seven of us at Compersia discussed our emotions after the shock of election night 2016.  Reactions were a mixed spectrum of grief, tempered somewhat for the sake of the children – in the end though it was their reactions that cut through to me.  Cheerily, one of our little ones described a creative coping project they participated in at school. The picture they described drawing was shocking, sad, and perhaps inevitable after the traumatic saturation of this past year; a ghoulish dystopian potpourri of bigotry and violence, some hyperbolized and some all too familiar, unfiltered by the experience that we adults quietly hold as backstop to our political frenzy.  In it I saw reflected my own fears for the future, both the concrete and the absurd.

Trump won.

Those are hard words to write, and harder words to swallow.  It seemed unthinkable, but even if the popular vote had changed the final results we would be forced to confront the reality that almost 50% of the United States embraced a platform and a candidate that seems anathema to everything we stand for as a movement.

Living at a fledgling project, we’ve been thinking hard about how we wish to be seen and the membership we want to attract.  We are committed to the ideals of equity, anti-discrimination, sustainability, communication, and growth.  Our processes are specifically designed to include everyone equally, to encourage confidence and not favor those with an excess of privilege or ambition.  We’ve all felt recently that the world was turning in our direction – that perhaps the time was right for these ideas to finally blossom and gain a wider audience.  The results of the election seem at first glance to be a stinging rebuke of that optimism.  It’s tempting to despair that the racism, sexism, nationalism, and religious bigotry on prominent display seems not only to have been accepted but rewarded – how could we have been so wrong about who we were?

But I believe that this viewpoint ignores the true impetus behind the results.  The majority of the country did not vote in favor of hatred, but in reaction to a terror which has been carefully and cynically stoked for years.  Our political process has become addicted to fear.  Precious little else is left that can inspire us; We are disenfranchised by a system which, despite newly elected faces and promises, despite victories negotiated or wrested, refuses to confront the forces that keep us in misery.  What motivation could there be to not attempt something new and better?  Only fear, the base threat of annihilation to ourselves and those we hold dear.  And so that final impetus has been used again and again by those who would use our strength for their own, turning us in anger against one another – against the very people we seek to protect.

Part of why we chose to locate ourselves in the city was the desire to be surrounded by viewpoints and experiences different from our own, to overcome superficial divisions and create a more inclusive vision.  There has never been a greater need to reach out to those we think of as our antagonists, to work together and break new ground in a way that sidesteps tribalism and divisiveness.

America is desperate for a better way.  We have chosen rashly, and without thought towards what will replace that which we tear down, blinded by unachievable promises.  When these too are not delivered there may be an opportunity – a chance to break through to people, many of whom truly viewed this as their final chance at salvation.  The next four years will be difficult.  We will have to be more engaged, more committed, to push back against threats to the values we hold dear, to stand with and fight for those unable to defend themselves.  In short, we will have to continue that which we are already undertaking everyday, with redoubled effort and an open mind.  We are uniquely suited, called upon even, to build a better alternative to what we’re witnessing around us.

The message of change at the heart of our movement is one that has never been needed more desperately.  Together, we can see it realized.

Compersia lands on the Atlantic

by Paxus Calta, from Your Passport to Complaining, September 22, 2016

A collection of intrepid adventurers have launched the newest income sharing commune in Washington DC and it is called Compersia. After failing twice to name this new community using naming parties, they discovered that one of the limitations of naming parties is that they are good at coming up with funny or lighthearted names. But when you are naming your home you might want something a bit more serious.

Compersia retreat, January 2016

Compersia is derived from Compersion, which is roughly defined as the opposite of jealousy.  More precisely compersion is when you feel good about your intimate experiencing intimacy with another person.    Part of the reason why compersion is only roughly defined as the opposite of jealousy is that you can feel both compersion and jealousy at the same time.

The name is barely a month old and the major liberal magazine, the Atlantic, has completed a 6 minute video on them.  Here is the link to the Compersians discussing their community.  The reportage is all in the words of the members and thus it is a pretty upbeat piece of coverage.  Compersia is looking for new members and this might well help.

Curiously, just the day before the Atlantic posting, Realtor.com ran an article called “With Housing Costs Sky-High, the Commune Makes a Comeback” Which quotes a number of our friends at Ganas and Twin Oaks.

A collection of old Twin Oaks photos used by Realtor.com

Nice to be seen a bit by the more mainstream press.

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Photos from the DC community

(Thanks to Steve and GPaul)

Connor tells it like it is so hard his fingers blur!

Ascension Day! The meeting at which AC*DC officially began… after two plus years of work.

Point A DC folks and Joseph from Sandhill and some group house friends relaxing at a game night.

One of Point A DC’s first event, “Let’s Do It Better Together”, featured a bunch of parallel conversations, this one on income sharing.

Point A DC has its first event of the summer talking about why communes are important and what stands in the way of people joining them with members of AC*DC, Twin Oaks, Acorn, Cambia, and the Chocolate Factory and curious potential communards to be.

A Look Behind the Scenes in DC

by GPaul

A little while ago, while the DC communards were still scattered between a few different houses, a fellow member of the as-yet-unnamed DC commune shot me this quick note:

Hey, I liked this article that you wrote: http://frompointa.org/blog/2016/02/15/a-busy-month-for-the-dc-crew/.

It occurred to me that a blog article that peeks behind-the-scenes at what policies we’re working on, why and how the discussion/consensus/writing process works, would be interesting. Especially for people who would consider starting a commune. And for people who are like, “So what are you DOING? What is the ‘work’ that you keep talking about?”

I thought about this because when one of your housemates and I were chatting in the car today, they were like “GPaul keeps talking about all the work people are doing for Point A, but I don’t get it. What is the work?” And they live with us.

A little embarrassing, certainly, but to be fair the work of starting a commune is varied and non-obvious. In fact, even people planning on starting communes or really almost any sort of intentional community, frequently underestimate how much work goes into organizing them. The general advice from the intentional communities world is that any group trying to organize an IC of any significant complexity should plan on putting in one full person-year of work on it. In theory this can be done equitably by all the future members of the community but most advisors recommend paying one or two people to focus all their time on it. The communes have another option open to them, of course, which is to gift the labor time of one or more of their own communards to the task of organizing a new commune. This is a big part of how Twin Oaks started East Wind and Acorn and how Acorn started Sapling and assisted in the founding of Living Energy Farm. And most recently it is how Acorn assisted us in the founding of the first Point A DC commune.

A little peek behind the curtain. What strange magic are these communards up to?

So what does all this work look like? What takes a person-year’s worth of focused attention and labor? Here’s a partial list patched together from what occupied my time for year or so of organizing that I put in before the commune launched and other members started taking over a lot of the work (which is, of course, the goal for a horizontal democratic commune).

• Develop a pitch (or vision) for the commune that is both viable, inspiring, specific enough that people can imagine what it would be like but at the same time open ended enough that they can see room within it for their down dreams and schemes.
• Identify and individually recruit the initial group.
• Write, design, and produce fingerbooks, pamphlets, business cards, and a website to get the word out.
• Plan agendas, draft agreements, organize events, bring in speakers, check in with initial group to work through concerns and make sure that the project is engaging for them and that they feel inspired and invited.
• Keep doing that for a long time.
• Talk about what sort of property you want and can afford, go looking for it, follow up on leads, research potential properties, talk to owners.
• Research legal issues specific to your city.
• Research legal options for your group to incorporate or organize.
• Research tax implications for your legal organization.
• Continue recruiting, organizing events, checking in with people, drafting agreements, organizing meetings, attending meetings.
• Plan social events and trust building events between prospective members.
• Then do them.
• Get involved, under the banner of your commune, in groups and efforts and events that you want to be engaged with and that you want to be engaged with you.
• Cook food for meetings and events.
• Clean up after meetings and events.
• Look after the kids.
• Mediate conflicts between potential members.
• Research financing and funding options and then pursue them, either by wooing individuals or institutions.
• Don’t completely neglect your own needs.
• Write blog posts.

Surprisingly complicated for such a simple goal: can’t we all just get along?

Building a Commune in DC

Ira Wallace shares stories from a lifetime of learning to live together. We are eating, asking questions and making food for Acorn Communities Land Day celebration.

Shopping list on our kitchen’s chalk wall!

Our dragon-master faerie-queen finds his natural spot, perched on our tallest communard.

Dishwasher delivery – picked up on our bike trailer!

Welcome to our backyard. Those are American Elm trees, a classic tree that has been ravaged by blight, but they are wonderful shade for our constant outdoor meals.

We want to part of larger movement, and with this flowchart, we will be.

As we get our new home fixed up, the cats begin crawling through the walls. The cutest kitten is definitely Ash, who is watching you from the ceiling!