A mixed bag of communal offerings. All sorts of things and one didn’t do very well, two did okay, one did very well, and one did extremely well–and, coincidentally, that was in the order we published them. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from looking at our Facebook stats it’s that events don’t do well and pictures do very well.
The event was the Communities Conference and the post was announcing the keynote speakers.
You can read the whole thing, including what they plan to talk about and bios for both of them. Unfortunately, not a lot of folks looked at this although it got five likes and a love.
What does pollenation have to do with communal living? None of us live in a vacuum. The very air we breathe is brought to us by plants and even urban communes (sigh, which I wish there was still some of) need flowers and fruits and vegetables.
This post did okay, with just over a hundred views and six likes and loves.
I’m really impressed with Glomus Commune’s consistent support of Iridescent Earth, a self-described “Queer, Black & Latinx led farm group from the Bronx”.
Those images are just stills. I’ll encourage you to watch the actual video with lively music and all.
This also did just okay, with a couple less views than that the last post–but it did get eight likes and loves.
East Wind crafts some lovely stuff for their community. Here’s an example.
The image was well appreciated with thirteen likes and loves and a wow–and over two hundred views.
Finally, Twin Oaks posted this about a party they had to celebrate the chamomile harvest.
Like I said, people seem to really like pictures on Facebook. I thought this was a nice post but nothing spectacular, but it got spectacular results. Maybe it was because of the person who shared it (that’s what the one and the curved arrow mean) but twenty-eight likes and loves and over five hundred views. Wow.
John joined Living Energy Farm a couple of years ago and talks about the process of getting there and what it’s like being there and why living this way is important.
The Twin Oaks Communities Conference is looking for presenters for this year’s gathering which will take place Sept 1 through 4th in Louisa Virginia. If you are confident you should be presenting, here is the form to become a presenter. [Deadline Aug 1, 2023]
If you are unsure, the following article introduces the culture of the event and background to help you decide. Please note this is the Call for Presenters of curated workshops on intentional communities. There are also Open Space workshops where anyone can present on any topic without asking in advance.
We are especially looking for workshops on the two current topic threads:
Diversity and Inclusion
How to found or find an intentional community
Should you offer a workshop at the Twin Oaks Communities Conference?
Twin Oaks Communities Conference (TOCC) is looking for some compelling workshop presenters on the topic of intentional community. Perhaps you are asking yourself “Am I a talented workshop presenter?” Here are some ways you can tell:
“Are you on topic?”: Let’s say you are an expert in sustainable building design, every community needs these types of structures, you have done dozens of workshops and seminars on how to design and build sustainable structures of many types. Certainly, it would seem you are an appropriate presenter for this event, but not necessarily.
The focus of this event is Intentional Communities (self-selecting, place-based, residential communities who share material and cultural things). The only way a workshop on sustainable design fits our program is if it demonstrates how this technology serves the needs of ICs specifically. The intentional community focus needs to be baked into the content of the workshop,
“The truth is in the room”: What we’re looking for are interactive workshops that draw from the participants and the collective truth from the room. If your plan is to give a lecture, this is the wrong event for you. We’re hoping for workshops that introduce participants to ideas that they perhaps have never considered before or advance beliefs which are challenging or engage everyone in the space, including the presenter. We’ve found that open-ended questions and role plays are methods that work well with our participants.
The room has no walls, but the truth is still in there
Flexible: We’re looking for workshop facilitators that can sense the energy level of the participants. Does it look like a playful group? Perhaps games and simulations will be helpful. Is this a serious (perhaps intense) group or topic? A Q&A or a hotseat format could be more appropriate.. Conversely, perhaps the opposite prescription will work – the serious and intense folks could lighten up with games.
The point is that you as the workshop presenter want to build a good connection with your participants and tailor your presentation to the group you have before you. You could do a go round (if there are less than 20 people) and ask everyone for a single sentence about why they are in the workshop. Their answers will guide you to adjust your presentation for their level of expertise and their areas of excitement.
Flexible is key [Image by Bing/Dalle]
Reflect on Impact: Is it possible that you are going to share an exercise that will engage your participants beliefs or behavior? Is it likely they will be amused and entertained? We’re looking for workshops that will lead participants towards a greater understanding of themselves and how they present in community. How can we have more healthy and transparent relationships with fellow communitarians? How can libraries of shared material goods be created so we are living more sustainably and cooperatively? Can we be in romantic relationships with more than one person, in the same place? What are the details we can learn and share to live together more cooperatively?
Not a fancy event: The conference will provide chairs, rain protection, white boards, and, with advance notice, some sound system, but we’re in quite a rustic environment. Your powerpoint presentation, for example, might dictate which workshop space you need to be in.
It’s important to us to maintain the low cost and low overhead for this conference, so we cannot afford to pay you to present, although we can provide presenters with a free or reduced cost ticket. We can also help coordinate transportation for presenters from many places.
The Communities Conference has two types of workshops, these IC specific curated workshops which are selected in advance and Open Space workshops on any topic. The Open Space technique self selects for each workshop’s audience, so all are welcome to present on Sunday of the event. So if you hate filling out forms, or don’t want to be constrained by having your workshop in part on intentional communities, the Open Space section of workshops is likely best for you.
We are very proud to have Avi Kruley and Sky Blue doing the keynote address: Doing the Impossible: Generating what we need to manifest the potential of Intentional Community
I try to repost things from a variety of communities each week but, as I was preparing this week’s recap of Facebook posts from a couple of weeks ago, I noticed I had three posts from Glomus. I don’t know if it was just a slow week–or maybe I was favoring them because they had published so little over the winter and were putting out so much now.
The first was about a seed swap that they were participating in.
And while it didn’t have any likes or loves, it did well enough in terms of views.
Then, a few days later, we published this cute picture of a crocus that was on the East Brook Instagram page.
This got four likes and one ‘care’ and a respectable number of views.
However, I couldn’t resist publishing the sequel that they had on their Instagram page the next day.
And it also did well. I guess folks like spring flowers.
We also published another repeat from Acorn. They just kept putting stuff out about their Land Day and I couldn’t resist this picture of the stage there with the colorful artwork.
And, in spite of all the stuff we already put out about Land Day, this did very well, with the most likes, loves, and views of stuff we put on Facebook that week.
But what I thought was the most important thing we published during this time period (especially given the saturation of Acorn Land Day stuff and Glomus flower and seed swap pictures) did terrible. Twin Oaks announced that they would once again be having summer events and gave dates and links.
Since the links above are simply from a photo and won’t actually work, here are the real links:
I can’t say I was really surprised at how bad this did. Facebook has always turned out poorly when it comes to these events. Which I think is a shame because, honestly, I think they are more important to publicize than already past events (like Land Day and the seed swap) and pictures of flowers. There were no likes and only 44 views.
How do you find people for a community when there isn’t yet a community?
I’ve been using a scattershot approach or what I’ve heard as “throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks”. I’d love to tell you a no-fail method for finding potential communards but I haven’t found one yet. Having a functioning community with interesting folks is a good way to attract people, but you have to start somewhere and since my first step is always finding the people, the question is how do you find folks, and at this point, my answer is “any way that I can”.
It’s actually an approach that makes some sense. Since I don’t know what will attract folks, I think that trying lots of different things means using a variety of ways to reach the people I’m looking for. In particular, I think that this is a better method for times like now when things are less stable and what worked in the past may not be what works now. I’ve heard it phrased as “If at first you don’t succeed, try something else”.
So, what have I tried?
I’ve put ads on ic.org and in Communities magazine. I’ve also written an article about my search (called “Starting from Scratch, Yet Again”) that was just published in Communities magazine (Spring 2023, Issue #198). I’ve talked about it to visitors I met at Glomus, to folks I saw at Acorn, and to people I knew at the Ganas Community. I put something on our regional co-op email list. I went to the Collaborative Living Conference in Maine, and the Queer Gathering and the Communities Conference at Twin Oaks in Virginia. I gave a workshop on Collaborative Community Design at the Communities Conference and later at Ganas.
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From the workshop at the Communities Conference
In addition, I joined ICmatch, which is kind of a dating service but instead of trying to match up with a romantic partner, you connect with communities and people looking for communities. I also just joined Community Finders Connect, a Facebook page that tries to connect people with communities. And someone I know who runs a ‘clubhouse’ to talk about communities had me on to talk about income sharing communities.
And, of course, this blog and all that I write here (including this post) are more ways of getting myself out there.
Importantly, I have responded to everyone who has expressed interest to me and talked with them and tried to find out just how interested they were. I met with anyone who was nearby and had multiple emails and sometimes phone calls with folks further away. That included folks that were interested in what seemed to me off-the-wall things and the person who literally talked at me on a phone call for forty-five minutes and gave me little chance to respond. It has been a lot of trial and error for what has not been very many results.
But I intend to keep trying to find other ways to reach out. I’m still trying to think of different ways to attract folks. What avenues haven’t I tried? Who am I really trying to reach and is there a better way to reach them?
As I said at the beginning, I still haven’t found any easy ways to find the folks I’m looking for. If there was, I’d share them. But here’s the only way I know: Be creative.
This year, I offered a workshop at the Communities Conference on Collaborative Community Design. This material is very relevant to the community building work I am doing and, I think, to anyone who is thinking of creating some type of community.
If you go to ic.org, the Foundation for Intentional Community’s website, they have a directory that lists thousands of communities around the world. Many represent legitimate communities but there are a lot of others that seem incredibly detailed, to the extent that you might wonder who lives there.
Similar to my fictional Totally Utopia Community, I have a made up a fairly absurd community I often illustrate this with, I call the Purple Plaid Community. The fictional description of the community is that everyone wears purple plaid, and all meals are vegan except for the steak dinner on Sunday, and they all meditate at 6:42 in the morning, and on and on and on and on. It’s pretty strange but I swear there are communities that strange and detailed (or worse) listed in ic.org’s directory. And, again, who lives there? When I’ve looked it turns out to be one person, or more commonly, a couple, and they’ve created the perfect community for themselves and wonder why no one wants to join them.
I created the Collaborative Community Design workshop as an antidote to this. The process I came up with is not the only way to design a community together (I suspect that there are hundreds of ways a group could do it) but I think it’s a good exercise to get folks thinking about how they can design a community together, rather than just relying on one or two people’s vision.
The format I came up with and presented at the Conference had everyone put out two or three bottom lines (deal breakers, non-negotiables) and then make sure that there aren’t any conflicts between them. (If there are, it may be that you need to start different communities. At the least, this is good to know before you go any further.) Assuming these are all compatible, they would be listed all together as a foundation for the community.
We did this again for deep desires (listing two or three things each person might really want in a community but could give up if necessary) and again, if there weren’t conflicts, added them to the list. And finally we brainstormed a wishlist and anything that two or more folks checked off and no one had problems with got added to the list–thus developing a community description that was generated by the group rather than by a single person.
Combined bottom lines and deep desires for group at my workshop
When I did this at the Communities Conference, I was surprised that the folks who first volunteered to do it were already in an existing community. They said that they were thinking of reorganizing the community. But it seemed to go well and they were happy with the result.
I thought that was the end of it, because we ran out of time on the workshop, but there wasn’t anything in the next slot and a bunch of folks asked me to do it again, this time with a random group of people. So I did.
We generated a long rambling list. I doubt if these folks would actually work together to create a community but one interesting thing came out of this. I had said if two people had conflicting bottom lines, they probably needed to create different communities. I was thinking, one person wants urban and another rural, or one person wants under ten and another person wants over twenty, but in this group, one person wanted ‘nonviolence’ as a bottom line. I asked him what he meant by that, and he wanted a community where no one would even kill mice. I went on until a woman said that one of her bottom lines was livestock. I asked if she meant beef production and she said she did, so I pointed out that the two of them were not likely to create a community together, if he wanted no killing and she wanted killing cattle for meat.
The first group’s wishlist–note every item got two or three checks
As I said, I’m sure this is far from the only process to collectively design a community, but it’s certainly one. Everyone’s bottom lines are included, most people’s deep desires are included, and probably a bunch of stuff on various wishlists are included. Most importantly, a community vision emerges from several folks and thus not just one person’s idea of what a community should be. Among other things, this brings more buy-in to the community vision since everyone’s ideas have been included.
The main lesson here is that one person can’t create a community–you need a lot of folks involved in the process. In essence, it takes a community to create a community.
After a two year absence, the Communities Conference was held again this year.
The cover of this year’s Conference brochure
I have tried to go to the Conference every year, because it is such a great networking event for anyone interested in intentional communities. I have met lots of interesting folks and it’s often a chance to catch up with other communards.
The Conference postings that everyone looked at
I missed not going the last couple of years. This year’s conference was jammed with activities. They had so many workshops that they had workshops on Sunday morning, which I don’t ever remember them doing before. They also had a lot of folks attending.
Of course, it was pandemic affected. Similar to what we did at the Queer Gathering, we all had to wear rainbow bracelets to show that we had taken a covid test and had tested negative. But aside from the testing stations, and bracelets, and the sign above, we basically acted like things were ‘normal’ again.
One of the earliest things that happens at the conference, and one of the most important for me, is the Meet the Communities event that happens on Saturday morning. Folks from a couple of dozen communities had a minute each to describe their community and, after everyone presented, sat holding a sign with the name of their community, and people came by to talk with them about their communities. This is a major recruiting event. Folks often come to the Communities Conference either to look for a community to join or to find folks to join their community.
Does this guy look familiar?
Of course, since I’m now trying to start a community, I stood up and gave my quick speech about what I was looking for. I did talk with a couple of folks who said they were interested. (We will see what happens.)
The Pavillion where some of the workshops and a bunch of other events took place
On Saturday afternoon, there were workshops on Quilombos Culture for Community, Transforming Founder’s Syndrome (I went to it and it was useful), Renewable Energy: Power Your Community, starting a Commune in Costa Rica, a Legal Clinic for ICs, Authentic Relating, Biophilic Ecovillage Design (I also went to this and learned a bit), Aging in Community, Starting POC Communities: Panel Discussion, Travelers in Community: Hitching to ICs, Life at Twin Oaks: Q&A Panel (I went to and enjoyed), Apocalyptic Wakanda: Building a new world, “I didn’t mean it that way!?”: Identity related harm in ICs, Community Business: Making Money Together!, and LARP Game: International Solidarity against Oppression. (I attended only three workshops because there were only three afternoon slots and each workshop had four others running at the same time–you can’t be everywhere at once. I know couples and community mates that deliberately took different workshops so that they could report back to each other.)
The stage in the Pavillion
On Sunday morning there were even more workshops, and I ran one, on Collaborative Community Design. That meant that I couldn’t attend any of the others, on Community Singing, Rentals & Retreats for IC Funding, Polyamory in Community, and an Alleged Urban Squatting workshop. I will talk about the contents of my workshop in a future post.
In the afternoon they did “Open Space” workshops, which meant that these were impromptu workshops that folks came up with at the conference and organized. I attended one on dealing with feelings using DBT. I also skipped one of the open space sessions to take a needed nap. Taking care of yourself at the conference is very important.
Besides the workshops, the conference started with an introduction to Transparency Tools and a Talent Show, on Saturday night there was a dessert and dance party at the Twin Oaks dining hall (with a mandatory consent workshop beforehand, for anyone who wanted to attend), on Sunday night there were tours of Cambia, Living Energy Farm, and Acorn with each of the communities providing dinner for the folks who went there (I went over to Acorn, since I had been there for a month in February and wanted to catch up with life there). There were also Monday programs at Acorn (on Making Communities accessible for marginalized people, the Seed Saving Garden, Screen Printing, and Automation in Community) and Cambia (on Samba and Capoeira, Cob and Rocket Stove Building, and How we destroy relationships), but I didn’t go to any of these.
A bench at the Conference site dedicated to a former Twin Oaks Community member who died there in 2013
I’m so glad the Conference was back and I’m so glad I went. I hope it’s around next year, and if it is, I’ll suggest that you might want to go.
Okay, beginning catch up. I’m starting with what we put on Facebook at the end of July.
I’m getting old (it’s true!) and I can repeat myself. Usually, on longer pieces, I edit so that I’m not saying the same thing twice too often. It’s harder when I’m trying to put out lots of small posts and I’m not paying as close attention. Which is why I used practicallly the same start to two successive Facebook posts. In one I said that they were “finally starting to finish” and in the second I said that they were “finally finishing”. It was true in both cases, but I wished I found a different way to say it in one of them.
At Twin Oaks, it was about the year long Llano renovations.
This post did very, very well. Maybe people were happy that they ‘finally finished’ the Llano renovations.
At Acorn, it was their work remodeling the smoke shack.
Acorn wrote:
I don’t know if folks were less interested in Acorn’s smoke shack work or they were already sick of me saying “finally finishing” but this did a lot less well.
Finally (I’ve got to stop using that word–but this is beginning, not finishing) I put some pictures from the Twin Oaks site of the signs they were putting around for the conference site. Appropriate, since I was just about to put the Facebook page and this blog on hold for August while I attended the Queer Gathering and the Communities Conference on this site.
This didn’t do too badly, considering how hard a time I’ve had publicizing the Twin Oaks events on Facebook. It did get 115 views. Of course, it didn’t get any comments or likes.
On Monday, the actual report from the Queer Gathering.
We’re back–that is to say that Commune Life is posting again. Honestly, I’m still traveling and will be at the Communities Conference this weekend but, because of the magic of scheduling, Commune Life will begin catching up on all the community news from the last month or so, plus a report on the Queer Gathering, a new video from the kids at Twin Oaks, and more–including, hopefully in a week or so, a report on the Communities Conference and a podcast on the communes and communist economic theory. Enjoy! – Raven
Pavilion roof from Twin Oaks Gathering and Conference site
There will be no posts on Commune Life in August so I can go to the Queer Gathering and Communities Conference and travel and take a break. I will come back next month with reports on the Gathering and the Conference as well as all the usual communal updates. See you in September! – Raven
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