Celebrations are important at communities. Cicada shared these pictures from her birthday party at Glomus Commune.
Cicada’s Birthday
East Brook Farm
Starting from Scratch #9
by Raven
9: Agreements and Policies
As I said in my last ‘Starting from Scratch’ post, I’ve just moved into an already functioning community. One of their major challenges was that they didn’t start with much in the way of agreements. In this post I want to look at a list of agreements and policies I think every community should have and I will briefly say why I think each of them is important. For many of them, I will write future posts detailing the particular agreement or policy. (I’ve written about agreements before, but mostly about why they are important. Here I want to list most of the agreements and policies you want to make. And as I mentioned in my previous post, I developed this list from my time working with Cotyledon and Glomus Commune as we were developing policies, as well as watching communities like Compersia struggle to create policies, and also after reading Yana Ludwig’s book on Building Belonging which has a good list of policies that starting communities should think about.)
Here is my list, along with a bit on why.
First of all, you need to decide how you will decide things. This is the first thing you need to do, because you need a way to collectively make decisions in order to create these policies and agreements. I will talk more in a future post about various methods of decision making.
Next, I believe, your group needs to create a Vision/Mission Statement. This is key because I believe that everything else, all your community’s policies, flow from this statement. Again, I hope to devote a whole post to this.
After this you can begin to create your community’s policies. Here’s my current list of what I think are important policies to have in place.
A Labor System: Everyone is going to need to work, at least in some capacity, to keep the community going. This is a lot more important in income-sharing communities, where work is the currency, but every community has some work involved, and to be fair, everyone needs to do some. How do you decide who does what and how much should each person do? Yes, this will be another post.
Financial Systems: How are you going to get money? How are you going to track the money you get? How are you going to budget? You can be as communist as you want but your community still has to survive in a capitalist system.
Stipend/Allowance/Mad Money: Income sharing communities take care of each members needs but it’s also good to have some money that each person has that they can spend on little extra items they might want, money that they can spend, no questions asked. How much? How often do they get it? How do you decide what’s a necessity and what’s a luxury?
Membership Process: How do you decide who is a good fit for the community? (I’ve seen communities try to go without having a membership process and I’ve also seen it backfire. Badly.) Like the decision making, this is tricky at the beginning. What do you do about the initial group of people? Make them go through the process or just grandmother them in?
Legal Structures: You have to deal with the outside world as a community and it’s good to have some kind of legal entity. Welcome to the world of LLCs, 501c3s, 501ds, housing cooperatives, and home owners associations. It’s as much fun as it sounds like. And yes, you are probably going to need to consult with a lawyer at some point. Hopefully only briefly.
Land Ownership: Who owns the land, the buildings, the property? In an “egalitarian community” it’s all supposed to be equal–either we all own it or no one owns it. (You can have a community where everyone is a renter.) Two interesting possibilities are land trusts and permanent real estate cooperatives.
Exit Agreements: It would be nice to assume that everyone is going to stay forever, but the reality is people come and go from communities. How do you make it easier for someone to leave if they decide to or need to? We take care of each other while we are living together and I think it’s important to take of someone when they leave, particularly if they’ve been a member for a while and put quite a bit into the community.
And those are the easy policies. Here are the ones that are trickier but you absolutely want in place because things will be worse if you don’t
Conflict Resolution Structures: Most people don’t like conflict. (I’m an admitted conflict avoider.) Having some kind of agreed upon way of managing conflict before conflict happens makes things a bit easier.
Violence Policy: Hopefully it’s not going to happen, but you don’t want to try to figure this out when you are dealing with a really difficult situation.
What to do if a member is sick, disabled, or dies: If your community is around long enough, it’s going to happen.
Finally, the two you really don’t want to think about and you really need to have in place: a Member Expulsion Policy and a Community Dissolution Policy. No one wants to think about expelling members and even less about dissolving the community but, like the violence policy, it’s going to be even more horrible if you are trying to come up with a policy under the high stress of one of these happening.
The good news is that these don’t have to be permanent policies. You can revisit them or change them over time. When we dissolved the Common Threads community, we had a policy in place which we basically ignored because another solution made more sense at that point.
Policies aren’t there to bind you if everyone can agree to something else. They are there as a fall back when you can’t agree. Fortunately, you already have something in place as a default. Having policies already can make a really hard time just a bit easier.
Glomus Greenhouses
East Brook Community Farm, Glomus Commune’s main business, is always trying to extend their season. They have had what they refer to as “The Greenhouse” for years and use it as their nursery and used to plant early crops in it. The first two photos are of the outside and inside of it. Their new “Hoophouse” was just built a little over a year ago and is the main place they grow early and late season crops. The rest of the pictures are of the outside and inside of “The Hoophouse”.
We documented the building of The Hoophouse in this post.
Home Valley
Theresa celebrates the land around Glomus Commune, her valley.
Robin Chicks at Glomus
Theresa built an outhouse at Glomus Commune. Some robins built a nest inside and raised a few baby chicks there.
Goat, Sheep, BBQ, Craft Fair, Primrose Party, and Crops
This was a good week on Facebook–at least in the sense that many people viewed these posts and they were successful in that regard.
When I visited Glomus Commune, a couple of months ago, I was struck by the one goat they had, who was very interested in me, and their two new sheep, who huddled as far away as they could, wanting to have nothing to do with people. I had to blow up the picture of the sheep to focus on the two of them.
This did pretty well, with three likes and two loves and a hundred and eighty-five views.
Acorn advertised a barbeque, but with a picture of stuff growing in the fields.
This did pretty well, however, with thirteen likes and loves, and a hundred and sixty-six views.
Twin Oaks have been selling their hammocks at craft fairs for years, although with the pandemic they had to stop for a while. Now, they’re at it again.
This did okay, with seven likes and loves and over a hundred and thirty views.
We’ve posted about the primroses at Acorn before and in their blurb, Acorn promised they would have primrose view parties in the future. And they did.
This post had the lowest statistics of the week which, at five likes and loves and a hundred and twenty-seven views, was not bad at all.
East Wind, which hadn’t post much for a while, recently did a couple of what they called ‘photodumps’, the first of which was of their crops.
This post did really, really well on Facebook, with fourteen likes and loves, two shares, and a whopping three hundred and twenty-two views.
What’s Inside the Door?
There’s an outhouse at Glomus Commune, and look what Theresa found inside…
History, Party, Produce, and Award
Another week with little tidbits from the communes via what we post on Facebook.
We posted this from Serenity Solidarity (a commune in process) about a Louisa history lesson.
This post just did okay on Facebook, but it did get four likes and over a hundred views.
The Magnolia Collective (a rather small community) had a party that brought in a lot of the Louisa communes.
Their Instagram post has a little video (the picture above is a still from it) from the party.
This post did very well, with five likes and three loves and almost a hundred and ninety views.
East Brook Community Farm makes its money selling at Farmer’s Markets (most years except this one), and also through their CSA and farm stand–and this year they also have produce for sale at a store in town.
This post did very well also, with ten likes and two hundred views.
Twin Oaks was very happy that Ira (who left Twin Oaks to start nearby Acorn) won the James Beard award (which we reported here a couple of weeks ago).
Here’s a link to the video.
I said when I posted Acorn’s piece on Ira winning the award (complete with pictures of Ira) that while I usually hope for a hundred views or more, when it’s about Ira I expect at least two hundred views. This post was a big exception. I don’t think that picture was very exciting and it obviously didn’t draw in folks. In spite of five likes, two loves, a comment, and a share, it only got a disappointing sixty-nine views. It seems clear to me that having a picture of Ira is a big draw.
I will repeat Zamin’s comment because it does reflect Ira’s impact.
Ladybug Larvae, Peace Concert, Craft Shows, Juneteenth, and Magic Primroses
by Raven
We have quite the variety of posts from the communes this week.
At East Brook Community Farm, they posted a bunch of pictures of ladybug larvae.
Unfortunately, as magical as these “monsters” may be, they weren’t very popular on Facebook, getting three likes and only ninety-one views.
At Acorn, at the end of June, they were holding a “Concert of Peace”.
This post did pretty well with eight likes and a love and a hundred and sixty five views.
Twin Oaks is doing craft shows again.
This almost did well, with two likes and a love and ninety-nine views. It’s quite possible over the next several days or weeks, the number of views may slide over to a hundred or a little more.
Serenity Solidarity Community posted about the Louisa County Juneteenth celebration.
This did well, with three likes and a hundred forty-seven views.
Finally, Acorn posted about their night blooming magic primroses.
This did very well, with seven likes, two loves, and a wow, and a hundred sixty-eight views.
Outhouse Painting
At Glomus Commune, Theresa and Peach cut down a branch that obscured the view of this painting, which they then polyurethaned.
commune life 