We are returning with more news from the communes, more information on building communities, and more ideas about what the world can learn from the communes. I’m hoping that this can be a better year for all of us.
Welcoming the New Year
Communication
1 K!
by Raven
WordPress informs me that this is the thousandth post on the Commune Life Blog.
I’m delighted and amazed…
I see this blog as a resource. I think that I can safely say that Commune Life is the best source of information for income-sharing communities in North America, if not the world.
If you are interested in intentional communities in general, there are much better resources available: ic.org for North American communities, for example, or Diggers and Dreamers for communities in Britain. I’m sure there are sites for those interested in continental European communities or the Kibbutzim in Israel, etc. But if you are looking for information on income-sharing communities (also known as communes), especially in the US or Canada, I think you can’t do better than to start here.
There is an organization for US and Canadian income-sharing communities, called the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC), and it has a useful website, but it’s most useful for the technical details of building communes and joining the FEC. Commune Life, in contrast, is exactly what the name implies; we are devoted to giving anyone who finds this site an idea of what life in the communes is actually like. We are here to give anyone who wants to start an income sharing community some notion of where to start and anyone who’d like to join one some idea of where to look.
I only wish this site was easier to find your way around. I didn’t create the site and I’m still not sure how to make it any more user friendly, but I’ve written a bit about how to navigate here and I will do it again.
In the top right hand corner, when you first come to the page, are three horizontal lines.
If you click on them, a menu drops down.
I’ve explained all of this in greater detail (including showing what you see when the menu appears) in my blog tour. (Same link as what I wrote about navigating above.) Rather than repeat all that, let me just say briefly what you’ll find if you look at the menu.
First of all, we have a Welcome! page with a lot of general information about the blog for anyone new to it. This is followed by the heading Categories that starts with a list of communities and projects (many of both of these are now sadly gone). If you are interested in learning about a specific income-sharing community, clicking on its name will give you most, if not all, of the articles that we have written about that community on Commune Life. (The same with the communal projects.) Following that is a category called What Else under which there are dozens of subcategories of topics related to the communes. Again, clicking on Aging (for example) will give you the articles we wrote about aging in community, Agriculture, articles about agriculture in the communes, Animals, animals in the communes, etc, down the list to Weather, where you will find articles related to weather and the communes.
The drop-down menu also lists Recent Posts, Recent Comments, and the Archives which list the posts in every month dating back to when the blog began in May 2016.
So, yes, I’m very proud of this blog. I’m happy that everyday we get between thirty and a hundred and thirty visitors, even if many of them are just coming to read How to Start a Commune. As I said, I see this as a valuable resource. I really don’t expect many readers to start a commune or join a commune, but I would really like more people to know that they exist and the people in them are enjoying themselves. Sharing is simple. I wish more people understood that and I hope this blog helps more people to understand it.
A Prayer for the Dead
Theresa Kadish of Glomus Commune is in mourning. She doesn’t know what to say about the horrible events going on an ocean away, so she simply says the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.
Juneteenth and The Box
For this year’s Juneteenth celebration in Louisa, the Serenity Solidarity Community created a replica of the box that Henry “Box” Brown shipped himself to freedom in. Later the Louisa Historical Society did an exhibit on Henry Brown and featured the box that Serenity Solidarity made.
Tomato Seeds, Notes, Squash, and Notes
by Raven
Not a bad week on Facebook, and one of our posts did very well.
Acorn has been pushing the idea of saving tomato seeds. They’ve put out two videos on the subject (we’re publishing them on Wednesdays) and they also put this post out on Instagram which we then reposted on Facebook.
This did pretty well on our FB page, with five likes, two loves, and a hundred and eighty views.
Twin Oaks remarked that they still communicate the old fashioned way:
This also did well, with five likes, two loves, and a hundred and thirty-eight views.
East Brook Farm posted these squash pictures with a lovely quote.
This post did very, very well (best of the week) with eight likes, three loves, and a full two hundred and fifty views.
Finally, Twin Oaks also posted about their tofu business.
This was our low performer of the week and it didn’t do badly at all, with four likes, a love, and a hundred and twenty-six views.
Agreements and Policies #2
by Raven
2: The Importance of Visioning
This is my second post in a series on Agreements and Policies. If you want to create a community and you’ve found some people, your next step is to make sure you are all on the same page. Communities start easier when there are already agreements and policies in place.
Your first and most important agreement is on how you make decisions. Once you’ve decided that, the next thing your fledgling potential community needs to do is to vision together, to create a Vision or Mission Statement or (preferably) both. Why?
At one point in my community creating journey we were talking about a community I called the “Bus Community”, because we were in a city area and I got on buses frequently and on many corners several buses would come. How would I decide which bus to get on? I would look to see where the bus was going. If I didn’t look to see where the bus was going, I could end up anywhere.
Likewise, when you get folks together to create a community, most of them want to do more than live together. It’s good to make sure at the very beginning that you are all looking for the same thing and it is very disconcerting, after you’ve been working together for a while, to discover that many folks are looking for different things.
However, even if folks seem to be generally looking for the same thing, it is useful to spell it out right at the beginning because almost all of the other agreements and policies flow from this. Having Vision and Mission Statements are especially important for membership policies (and for finding new members) but they can also help shape labor and financial systems (if income sharing is part of your mission, for example, labor and finance are going to be very different from a community where everyone works separate jobs and has independent finances) as well as legal structures and ownership agreements which depend heavily on what you want your community to look like.
I’ve written already on Collaborative Community Design, which can be the prelude to writing your Vision and Mission Statements. Knowing what everyone’s bottom lines and deep desires are can help shape Vision and Mission. What’s important is the collaborative part. You want to make sure that these reflect contributions from everyone. Having buy in on your Vision and Mission is essential. As I said in my Collaborative Design post, you don’t want it to be one or two people’s vision. A real community incorporates the visions of many folks. When everyone has a part in creating the Vision and Mission Statements, everyone will feel a part of this new community.
So what’s the difference between Vision Statements and Mission Statements? (In all honesty, I had to look it up.)
A Vision Statement is aspirational, focusing on the goal(s) of the community. It’s why you are creating a community. It is usually a rather short statement, often a sentence or two. A Vision Statement might read, “We are creating this community to support each other and work toward a better world.”
A Mission Statement is more of a roadmap, focusing on what you intend to do. It’s how you hope to achieve your vision. A Mission Statement might include the line, “We will create a community business that will fund our day to day community as well as our social change efforts.”
Yana Ludwig’s book, Building Belonging, has a whole chapter on “Visioning Your Community” and includes six actual mission statements from a variety of community endeavors that the author felt were good examples of clear, concise statements.
Her biggest piece of advice is to avoid what she calls Rorschach words, words that can mean a variety of different things, depending on who is reading them. These include words like sustainability, affordability, diversity, respect, safety, and even the word community. (I often tell the story of an early attempt at community building that I was part of where we slowly gathered a group of folks and had events and meetings, and when we thought we had a good solid group we suggested talking about living together. We did not expect anyone to be surprised by that idea, but most folks seemed to be. We asked, “What did you think we meant by community?” and found there were four different ideas of what various people thought the word ‘community’ meant.)
It’s not wrong to use any of these words, but make sure that they are clearly defined. Yana includes a story of one of her attempts to create community that became something she didn’t expect because the three organizers were really looking for three different things and didn’t realize it until they had gathered a group which had three different visions. There was something created out of this, but she says “it never really became a coherent community…”
As I said, everything should flow out of your Vision and Mission Statements. You should spend a while crafting them and they should reflect the desires and goals of everyone involved.
Once you have decided what you are doing, you will probably want to look how you are going to get it done. In my next post on Agreements and Policies, I will look at Labor and Work.
Agreements and Policies #1
by Raven
1: How to Decide How to Decide
Yes, I am starting a new series.
The second most popular post on this blog over the last couple of years has been my post on Four Steps to Building a Commune. In it I said, “Step Two is about working on vision and agreements together.” I later wrote a post about the process of making agreements. Recently, as I ended my series on Starting from Scratch, I wrote a whole piece on Agreements and Policies, outlining what I think are the most important agreements and policies a beginning commune needs to make. In this series, I am going to go over each of them in more detail, starting with what I think is the first thing a fledgling community needs to do: you need to decide how you are going to make decisions.
What most people in this society are used to is deciding things by voting. While voting is certainly better (and more democratic) than having decisions made by one person (king, queen, or dictator) or a small group of people, there’s a big problem with voting. It creates winners and losers. While I am not particularly an advocate for voting in general, this is a lot more problematic in community where you have to live with the losers. If you have a community of say twenty-one people and eleven of them vote in favor of something, that means that there are ten folks (nearly half the group) that don’t agree with the decision and they will all be living with you. That may not be fun.
There are, however, a lot of alternatives to majority voting. I am a strong advocate of consensus decision making, however it is not the only way to go. There is a large range of decision making structures between majority voting and strict consensus, including things like supermajority voting (you need to get 60% or two-thirds or three-quarters of the vote, etc) on one hand and consensus minus one, or two, or three (so that one or two people can’t block a proposal) on the other. There are also things like Sociocracy and Holacracy that often work better for larger groups. I do believe, however, that consensus works better for smaller communities, especially income-sharing communities and co-op houses, and I’ve seen it work well in both of these.
The problem at the very beginning is that you haven’t agreed on a decision making process and in chicken-and-egg fashion, how do you make a decision on a decision making process if you don’t have a decision making process in place?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you make this first decision by consensus, even if the decision is to use another decision making system. I’ve seen groups use consensus to decide to use a different way to decide things from then on. (And none of these agreements are locked in place. Really, you can use any form of decision making to decide to decide differently.) The advantage of using consensus to decide on a decision making system is that at least everyone knows that you have all collectively decided that this will be the way that you make decisions.
Once you have done this, congratulations! You are on your way to making many agreements and policies.
Now, you need to decide (together, using your newly agreed upon decision-making system) what your group is all about. That will be the focus of my next post on Agreements and Policies: writing Vision and Mission Statements.
Acorn Portraits, LEF Harvest, and Twin Oaks Article
by Raven
As I said last week, since we restarted this month and the month began on a Friday, rather than reposting a week of one day and a week of five, I covered three days last week and will do the next three days this week. Next week I will repost a full week of Facebook posts (usually five posts, sometimes less if I didn’t get enough material from the communes and had to repost something from here onto Facebook).
This weeks posts covered stuff from three of the Louisa County communities and each did okay on Facebook.
Acorn posted a series of pictures of their current membership.
This post did well with five likes, a love, and a care, and a hundred and seventy views.
Living Energy Farm posted a picture of a basket full of green beans and strawberries.
This did okay at with a like and a love and just over a hundred views.
Zamin Danty added a comment on the aesthetics of the picture.
Finally, Twin Oaks is the largest and oldest secular income-sharing community in the country so naturally it gets written about. They recently posted this on their Facebook page which we then reposted.
Here’s the link to the full article.
Again, this did okay on our FB page, with two likes and over a hundred views.
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.
Watermelon Pleading, Historic Box, and Gardening Blog
by Raven
I’m still trying to catch up with our Facebook posts and I’m finally on this month’s posts, but because we restarted on a Friday, I’m splitting the weeks and doing three of the posts this week and three next week. Then I will return to a weekly (often five day) schedule.
I’ll start with East Wind Community trying to lure former member Otto back.
I often talk about a hundred views as my minimum okay post. This almost made it. It got one like and ninety-four views.
Louisa County, Virginia, is the home for many of the communes. Their Historic Society recently put on an exhibition about a person born in the county who found an unusual way to escape from slavery–and Serenity Solidarity Community contributed the main exhibit.
An intense and amazing story. I only wish it did better. It did do better than the previous post, but not by much. It only got ninety-seven views, although it did get three likes and one care.
Finally, Pam at Twin Oaks is a recognized gardening expert. She has a blog.
I hope no one tried to tap on what was only a picture of the link to Pam’s blog. Here is the real link to the blog.
This one did a tiny bit better than the other two. It had been hanging around in the nineties but must have recently got a few more views so it just got over a hundred. It also got four likes and a love.
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