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.
The island’s grid is old, expensive and unreliable. Can a solar system developed on a Virginia farm provide a sustainable alternative?MEGAN MCGEE / TRUTHDIGCONTRIBUTOR
After Hurricane Maria decimated Puerto Rico’s infrastructure in September 2017, Tara Rodríguez Besosa got busy rebuilding the local food system. There was no shortage of work to be done. The storm destroyed the island’s power grid, leaving millions without electricity and causing extensive damage to hundreds of thousands of buildings. In the mountainous region around the city of Caguas, Besosa and other founders of El Departamento de la Comida, a restaurant and nonprofit produce store, joined one of the “solidarity brigades” that had sprung up to repair local farms. While Besosa and her fellow activists fixed roofs, built rainwater collection systems and installed solar energy systems, they engaged in a discussion about the future of food in Puerto Rico: what needed rebuilding, and what needed replacing.
Out of this conversation, says Besosa, emerged an “understanding that there isn’t going to be food sovereignty if we aren’t also achieving energy sovereignty.”
In Puerto Rico, the energy conversation begins with the island’s antiquated electrical grid. Already decrepit for years before Maria, it has not improved much since. The island still suffers constant outages. Due to the U.S. colonial government’s policies, the grid relies almost entirely on imported fossil fuels, with coal ash disposal sites concentrated in low-income areas along the southeastern coast, where they release harmful toxins into the air, water and soil.
Installing rooftop solar panels / Photo courtesy of Tara Rodriguez Besosa
A main component of any solution, as you might imagine for an island in the Caribbean, will involve solar photovoltaic power. In particular, and especially for rural farms, this means micro solar systems designed for off-grid living. And while some Puerto Ricans have already begun turning to off-grid energy solutions like solar microgrids, most versions rely on costly battery storage to run when the sun isn’t shining. This makes them inaccessible for most residents of wealthy countries, let alone Puerto Rico’s poor rural citizens.
In March of 2022, Besosa was introduced to a couple from central Virginia who were working on a possible solution to this very problem. The husband and wife team of Alexis Zeigler and Debbie Piesen lived in an intentional community called Living Energy Farm in the rural township of Louisa, Virginia, where they had developed a solar energy system called Direct Drive DC Microgrid. They struck upon the design in 2010 using a non-electric storage system using thermal mass and insulation when the sun isn’t shining, minimizing the need to purchase expensive battery storage.
“Massive battery banks are not affordable and are therefore an irrelevant solution to our renewable-energy problem,” says Piesen.
Due to the U.S. colonial government’s policies, the grid relies almost entirely on imported fossil fuels, with coal ash disposal sites concentrated in low-income areas along the southeastern coast, where they release harmful toxins into the air, water and soil.
In January of 2023, Besosa helped Zeigler and Piesen organize an extended visit to Puerto Rico. During two months on the island, the couple installed their micro-solar system at three community centers and six residences as part of the final round of a competition, “Empower a Billion Lives,” organized by the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers. In March, the invention received an Honorable Mention at the IEEE’s Global Energy Access Forum in Orlando, Florida, along with a prize of $5,000. As LEF begins to work with engineers who expressed interest in their model at the IEEE conference to apply this technology within the context of other models, Piesen says they want to expand their project in Puerto Rico.
This expansion is urgently needed by millions in Puerto Rico dealing with the psychological toll of frequent power outages. “I think that is really the single most important thing we could be doing,” says Epic Jefferson, who coordinated an installation at a community center near his childhood home in the San Juan barrio of Cupey.
The problem is especially acute for older residents who depend on air conditioning in Puerto Rico’s tropical climate.
“The priorities change when you get to a place like Puerto Rico,” says Jefferson. “The issue is, ‘How can we prevent death?’”
* * *
Zeigler and Piesen met in 2009 at Twin Oaks Community, an intentional community in Louisa, Virginia. Piesen worked on the farm, while Zeigler gravitated toward engineering, where he acquired a range of skills around utilities and carpentry. While living at Twin Oaks and similar communities during the 1990s, he began designing and building community-scale renewable energy systems, learning what worked and what didn’t. In 2008, he had the idea to start an intentional community that would run without the use of fossil fuels.
LEF house and kitchen / Photo by Debbie Piesen
In 2010, the couple founded Living Energy Farm in Louisa as an off-grid organic farm and appropriate technology center. During their first year, they developed the DC Microgrid system that continues to power their farming community of six adults and two children, as well as a seed business. (Disclosure: The author is a former intern of Living Energy Farm).
The vision behind LEF, says Piesen, is “to demonstrate a way of life that everyone on the planet could afford, both environmentally and financially. They’ve been fed this packet of greenwashed B.S. from the mainstream environmentalist movement that says, ‘It will all be fine because we’re going to run the grid on renewables and you don’t have to worry about how much electricity you’re using.’”
LEF’s system uses daylight drive, or direct DC power, to run during the day, relying on non-electric storage at night. For example, when a DC solar refrigerator isn’t running, the food itself stores energy as thermal mass. If the fridge isn’t full, one can store large jugs of water on the bottom shelf to make sure the food stays cold. Because heavy loads run daylight drive, much smaller battery sets can be used, and high-quality, durable batteries become much more affordable. LEF uses nickel-iron batteries, which can last 50 years or more, to power lights, fans and electronics.
“We knew durable battery technology existed, we knew about direct drive, and had heard about running things DC, but nobody else had taken it to a community scale,” says Piesen.
Knowing they wanted to run a farm and irrigate, they made the well pump their first priority. Once they found they could run the pump on DC, Zeigler had the idea to try running a seed blower, thinking that both could not possibly run at the same time. “It worked, because DC motors can share power in ways AC motors can’t,” she says.
Zeigler and Piesen met in 2009 at Twin Oaks Community, an intentional community in Louisa, Virginia.
Most AC motors, Piesen explains, require quantities of constant voltage, which is not what comes off a solar panel, where the current and voltage constantly change. LEF uses permanent-magnet DC motors, which are easily available, inexpensive and can tolerate the large voltage swings that come from a solar panel in varying weather. As the voltage increases and decreases with changes in the weather, the motors go faster or slower, which means if you run multiple motors that are drawing more power than the solar panels are supplying, the work just gets done a bit slower.
In Puerto Rico, as in the Caribbean generally, the climate has proven to be an ally in using solar energy without battery storage because heating is not a concern as in temperate climates. In 2021, Zeigler traveled to Jamaica, where electricity prices are among the highest in the world, to install the systems with on-the-ground partners. The following year, they received a grant to work in Puerto Rico as a follow-up to that project and began making local contacts through the intentional communities’ movement. This led them to Besosa and El Departamento de la Comida.
“Connecting with Tara is where things started to take off,” says Piesen.
* * *
Before Maria made landfall, the energy infrastructure was already vulnerable from years of disinvestment and mismanagement. After the Puerto Rican government accrued $72 billion in debt to Wall Street, President Barack Obama established an oversight board in 2016 to control the island’s finances. Among its barrage of austerity measures were budget cuts to the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which managed the grid until its privatization in 2021. Today, Puerto Ricans still experience persistent outages, yet pay more than double the U.S. average in energy costs.
In the wake of Hurricane Maria, a slew of AC solar companies began popping up in Puerto Rico. This made local energy sovereignty advocates like Millo Huertas Hernández suspicious. The message seemed to be, “Just plug it in, and you have the same consumerist mentality,” says Hernández, who appreciates that LEF’s DC systems are “a completely new way of understanding how much you consume, and why.”
Most AC motors, Piesen explains, require quantities of constant voltage, which is not what comes off a solar panel, where the current and voltage constantly change. LEF uses permanent-magnet DC motors, which are easily available, inexpensive and can tolerate the large voltage swings that come from a solar panel in varying weather.
When LEF reached out to Besosa with DC Microgrids, it perfectly fit the mission of El Departamento de la Comida (El Depa), which opened in 2010 as Puerto Rico’s first multifarm community-supported agriculture program, focused on purchasing produce from local farms and distributing them to clients on a weekly basis. El Depa expanded in 2012 into a restaurant and nonprofit produce store, only to see the space that housed it flooded by Hurricane Maria. After reopening in 2019 as a food sovereignty nonprofit, Depa supports farms and food projects around the region with a 2,000-square-foot processing kitchen, where farmers who have excess produce can make nonperishable items like jams. The space also has a tool library, a community seed library and an educational-materials library. They host open houses once a month, and workshops on topics like fermentation, use of tools and ancestral agroecological practices. The workshops use a skill-share model that emphasizes and facilitates exchanges of knowledge.
The Depa collective supported the idea of holding trainings at LEF in the summer of 2022. Together, the two communities coordinated two groups of 15 people from Puerto Rico — including electricians, activists, farmers, entrepreneurs and cooks — to travel to Virginia for a two-week immersion course in the daylight drive DC model. Both groups stayed at the farm, where they did chores and became familiar with the appliances.
“We used LEF as a living, breathing model of the technologies we wanted to learn from,” says Besosa. “It was a wake-up call for everybody that went to the training that there are ways to harness the energy of the sun that don’t require [a major] investment in battery storage.”
One year later, however, a lack of supply chains for DC equipment presents significant challenges to scaling up LEF’s model on the island.
“A lot of this equipment exists, but it’s not available on the retail market,” says Piesen.
* * *
After a brief trip in November to visit potential installation sites, Piesen and Zeigler traveled to Puerto Rico in January 2023. Their first stop was Fundación Bucarabón, an organization in Maricao that partners with Depa, where they installed a DC water pump, fridge and solar cooker. Focused on creating economic opportunities in the poverty-stricken agricultural town of Maricao, Fundación Bucarabón began in 2018 when six locals occupied Francisco Vincenty Second Unit School, one of hundreds of schools closed by Puerto Rico’s Department of Education since the debt crisis. Maricao is one of many communities to respond to a school closure by reclaiming the space. There may be more solar power in Maricao’s future, with an energy cooperative planning to develop a community microgrid there.
People at the LEF trainings the previous summer had emphasized that solar refrigerators would be key in Puerto Rico’s climate. RELATEDGreen-Tinted Glasses
“That’s what people are really stressed about when they lose power — that their food is going to go bad,” says Epic, who attended a training. “Then there’s keeping medicines cold. Those are the people who are really affected with life-threatening issues with losing power in Puerto Rico.”
The DC refrigerator takes some getting used to, says Piesen, due to the need for thermal mass to stabilize the temperature. A full refrigerator will stay cold more consistently than an empty one, so the people receiving DC refrigerators are advised to keep their fridge full of food, or add jugs of water for thermal mass.
The system installed at El Departamento de la Comida includes a DC fridge and freezer, as well as battery kits for lights and charging stations. The power goes out often in their remote area, but Besosa says the DC system has already made a difference. “During our last open house, the electricity got cut off, and we had a fridge and freezer to rely on. We had a charging station to rely on, which was amazing,” she says.
One DC appliance they installed was the Insulated Solar Electric Cooker (ISEC), which involves a PV panel connected to a burner that turns electricity into heat. LEF has been working with the ISEC since 2020, when it was contacted by its inventor, a Cal Poly physics professor named Pete Schwartz. Zeigler started adapting Schwartz’s idea to more high-power designs, and the results are solving what had been one of the project’s biggest technical challenges: powering kitchens from morning to night. Cooking “takes a lot of energy and you want to do it multiple times a day, regardless of the weather,” says Piesen.
Work crew with the ISEC built at LEF in the summer of 2022 / Photo by Brenda Callen
Another stop on LEF’s visit was a coconut farm in Arroyo owned by an elder couple named Miguel and Dinorah. Along with Millo, volunteers and the Depa team, they spent two weeks installing six solar panels to run a DC fridge/freezer and cooker — what Piesen calls an “ambitious, complicated system.” They also put in a DC water pump so the farmers could have running water and a functioning toilet, replacing the manual pump Miguel had used to pump gallons of water in order to flush the toilet, bathe and irrigate.
After the system was installed, Miguel and Dinorah hosted a skill-share at the farm. Around 30 people came to learn about daylight drive and the new appliances. Besosa says the presentation was followed by a lively discussion about “our responsibility beyond having renewable technology, and the practices we have around using energy and when.”
Puerto Rico’s colonial status and history makes conversations like these important, notes Besosa: “When you have people coming in from the outside, like LEF, it’s very important to really listen to what the community knows, where the community is at and what our community needs.”
* * *
Piesen and Zeigler see huge potential for other parts of the world with little or no grid, but financing is a major obstacle, and they are currently looking into government support programs. “We want to work wherever there’s a demand for it,” says Piesen. “The question is, how can we bring down the cost and increase the volumes so it becomes affordable and scalable?”
The next step in the Depa team’s expansion plans is traveling to spread knowledge of the Direct Drive DC Microgrid model to other islands in the Caribbean. Right now, Besosa points out, Puerto Ricans have very little contact with the countries that are closest to them geographically. The Depa team’s vision is to bring Caribbean countries together in a shared struggle for food and energy sovereignty.
“Ever since we became a colony, there has been a movement for independence,” says Besosa.
“But we are not waiting for a change in our political status to start creating more autonomous communities in Puerto Rico.”
It’s Friday and time for another recap of the week’s Facebook postings.
At Twin Oaks, home schooling can mean you often get to learn what you want, including how to make exotic electronic instruments.
This post did pretty well, although not as well as some Twin Oaks posts do.
Living Energy Farm posted about one of their members driving a very full truck.
This one did really well on Facebook.
Glomus Commune hasn’t posted anything for quite a while, but I think I know why, so I reposted this old Instagram shot.
A simple old photo but it did very well.
While many of the communes aren’t posting much, Twin Oaks is posting a lot. Thus I began and ended the week with reposts from them. This is about changes to a building–both in terms of construction but even in terms of the building’s name.
This also did very well, but not as well as that old Glomus winter farm photo.
from the Living Energy Farm January 2023 Newsletter
Deb, Alexis, Rosa, Nika, and Deb’s sister Carrie are in Puerto Rico. We have been here about a month. We have finished our first solar demonstration sites at Fundación Bucarabón in the mountains of western Puerto Rico and at El Deparamento de la Comida (El Depa) near San Juan. Fundación Bucarabón is housed in a large, concrete school building. They operate various programs supporting farmers and the community, including a commercial-scale community kitchen. Their building is well built, but the original utilities are in poor condition, and grid power is very expensive and unreliable in their area. They are off-grid. In years past, Fundación Bucarabón received a few grants to install solar equipment. They installed two conventional battery-based solar electric systems. Those systems are on the large end of what you might find in an off-grid home. Even with a lot of battery power, they have been unable to pump water as they need, or to run their kitchen. The solar equipment that was installed before we arrived was well constructed, not cheap, and not small, but you can’t just plug in a bunch of AC equipment into a solar kit and expect it to work. Unfortunately, a lot of the messaging in the popular media around environmental issues and solar suggests that solar can directly supplant fossil fuel systems. It just doesn’t work that way. One normal refrigerator can be enough to drain most off-grid systems, even a sizable system such as they have at Bucarabón. To say that another way, a single refrigerator could cost you $10,000 or $15,000 in solar equipment if you simply focus on supplying energy instead of setting up efficient equipment. Sadly, not all solar suppliers are truthful about these basic facts.
Madeline, director of the food security program at Fundación Bucarabón, with Alexis and Debbie in their commercial kitchen. On the table are two solar cookers and a blender, all daylight drive.
Sourcing materials in the mountains of Puerto Rico has proven challenging. Try to find a pressure relief valve — good luck! But we have persevered, and the systems we are building are solid. At Bucarabón, we built three solar electric circuits: one high voltage direct drive, one low voltage direct drive, and one low voltage with a battery. We installed a insulated solar electric cooker (ISEC), and a smaller Chinese made solar electric cooker, and left them with an operational, direct drive blender. We spoke with them about converting more of their appliances to direct drive. We did a lot of work to upgrade Bucarabón’s plumbing. We installed a multi-stage booster pump from Sun Pumps. (The Sun Pumps are very high quality, though a bit pricey. We did some work, and some testing, and found a similar Chinese made multi-stage pump of good quality, at 1/5th the price. So we are importing some of those.) The Sun pump is up and running, and providing them improved water service. We have installed one Sunstar refrigerator (which is very well insulated, and uses no batteries) at Bucarabón. The Sunstars are custom made for us by Sunstar (in Indiana) with a German Secop compressor. We are planning to return to Bucarabón later in the trip to tie up a few loose ends and conduct a workshop. The folks at Bucarabón are very enthusiastic about our technology. The irony in all this is that our equipment is both much cheaper and more effective. El Departmento de la Comida (El Depa) is similar to Fundación Bucarabón in that they do lot of educational work, and support the surrounding community in various ways. They also have a commercial kitchen. Like Bucarabón, El Depa has an existing off-grid system that, though quite robust, has no chance of running their kitchen. At El Depa we installed two high voltage circuits, one to power a couple of ISECs, and one to power their existing solar kit. We installed two Sunstar refrigerators, each on its own circuit. We also installed a nickel iron battery kit (with 55ah Ukrainian nickel iron batteries). The mountains around Bucarabón are pretty idyllic in terms of climate. It’s cool enough this time of year such that you want to wear a long sleeve shirt in the morning. But the temperatures are quite moderate. The views are beautiful and numerous. The small towns are charming beyond measure. Our interactions with the local folks have been universally positive. We are in San Juan now, closer to El Depa. The city life is certainly noisy and hectic, and the people less patient, than in the mountains. The only serious frustration we have had so far has been dealing with vehicles. Looking at two months of potential rental fees, we tried to buy a used truck that could be sold or donated when we left. That turned into a fiasco. We are making plans to borrow and rent some for the rest of the trip. We have been working pretty hard. Most of our equipment has yet to be installed/distributed.
Alexis and the Bucarabón staff surveying solar panels on the roof.
International Electrical and Electronics Engineers Competition As we mentioned in a previous newsletter, we advanced to the second round of the IEEE’s Empower a Billion Lives competition. Their national conference is in mid March in Orlando. And we are going through Orlando on the way home. How convenient is that? They are paying expenses for our main presenter to attend and speak. There will be thousands of folks there, including people who have undertaken projects much larger than ours. We have already been exchanging thoughts and ideas with some of them. This event may significantly increase exposure for our technology. Our demonstration sites in Puerto Rico will serve as our “field test” for the competition. The competition is focused primarily on very low income people in other parts of the world. That said, energy doesn’t get any cheaper than our “daylight drive” DC Microgrid. At this point, we are early in the setup stages of putting things together in Puerto Rico. We have benefited from talking to people who have undertaken large projects in other parts of the world distributing solar equipment for low income people. For us, there are a lot of questions to answer yet as regards “business plans” or an ongoing nonprofit campaign. Certainly many people, both private individuals and organizations, are very enthusiastic about what we have to offer.
El Depa staff with their new Insulated Solar Electric Cookers.
Debbie, four daylight drive solar fridges, a pile of solar panels and other solar equipment, and one very unreliable truck.
Wood Rats vs. Biogas Back home at LEF, Brenda, John and Otto are holding down the fort along with a few new folks. Alexis noticed as we were leaving Virginia that something had gone wrong with our new, large biogas digester Seymost, but he didn’t have time to fix it. Seymost is a 2000 gallon tank with solar thermal heating and two layers of straw bales wrapped around it. A biogas digester with auxiliary heat, it turns out, is a very nice winter habitat for wood rats. Oh darn. Some of the biogas plumbing is plastic, and the rats have been chewing up the plastic pipe. So now, thanks to John and Otto, a lot of straw has been removed, pipes repaired and rat-proofed. Hopefully these lessons will put is in a better position to help others build biogas systems with less trial and error. Support us if you can.
Nika finds a baby dinosaur (aka iguana) in San Juan.
We were lucky to be able to hang out with a manatee near the edge of the water in a bay in San Juan. They are endangered.
Living Energy Farm is a project to build a demonstration farm, community, and education center in Louisa County that uses no fossil fuels. For more information see our website http://www.livingenergyfarm.org, or contact us at livingenergyfarm@gmail.com or Living Energy Farm, 1022 Bibb Store Rd, Louisa VA, 23093. Donations to the Living Energy Farm Institute are tax deductible. To make tax deductible donations, do not go to the Virginia Organizing website, go here instead: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/1388125 Make sure to designate your donation for Living Energy Institute (formerly the Living Energy Education Fund).
Carrie and Alexis mounting solar panels on the roof at El Depa.
We’re back to doing full weeks (five days) from Facebook and what a week it was.
Twin Oaks put out another post about their persimmons and I reposted it.
Posts about Twin Oaks tend to do really well on the Commune Life Facebook feed, and this one did phenomenal.
One of our readers sent me a Facebook message with a picture and I turned her picture and message into a post.
This post did really well too, although no one sent an updated photo or commented.
And East Brook Farm posted this picture of Rachael with a mouth full of greens back in November to entice folks to place produce orders. I thought it was cute and worth reposting.
It did pretty well.
I thought the best part was the one comment. Bill Kadish is not only a big Commune Life fan, but Rachael’s father.
The Magnolia Collective was slow in posting this and we were slow in reposting it but they had a very appropriate post for the National Day of Mourning.
This post just did okay.
Finally, Serenity Solidarity was having a work party and wanted us to publicize it. I already had a post that was ready to be published about their New Year’s resolutions, so I combined the two. I’m not going to repost it here because, since it was a work party for last Saturday, I posted it here already. What was interesting was what happened on Facebook.
It was getting about twenty to thirty views, which was terrible. I did what I have often thought of but not done before. Since it was an important event and I wanted to get the word out I tried boosting it on Facebook. (Which involves offering them some money.) I was totally surprised at FB’s reaction. First they rejected it but said I could appeal, then they rejected my appeal, and then they seemed to have boosted it anyway. What I got from Facebook made it look like it was both rejected and boosted.
As you can see, it ended up getting 133 views (and 112 were apparently because of the boost). Ericka (from Serenity) told me two people contacted her saying they saw it on Facebook. That was enough for me. (And it seems like FB charged me less than $2 for this.)
Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out why it was being rejected. Facebook said it was because of ‘social issues’ (more on that in a moment). I thought maybe the New Years resolutions were too radical, and since the important thing was the work party, I posted it a second time without the resolutions. And without the resolutions (and without the boost) it bombed.
Here’s what Facebook sent me about what my ‘boost’ accomplished. After how the alternate version did, I was very glad I decided to boost it.
And why was it rejected? This is what Facebook claims.
Which is totally weird because there is no mention of politicians or attempt to sway voting or legislation or anything related to voting. It was a work party. To help create affordable housing.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t understand Facebook.
It’s the weekly catch up on Facebook posts, and since the new year (and the resumption of both Facebook and this blog) began on a Sunday, and the only unique Facebook post was on that Monday before I copied the blog post over to FB on Tuesday and shared the same photoessay on here and FB on Wednesday, I’m going to include the Thursday and Friday Facebook posts to have three this week, and I will probably have three posts copied on next Friday before reverting to the usual five the following week.
That one Monday post was from Twin Oaks where Valerie demonstated an artistic method of reusing stuff.
It’s a lovely picture and it did very, very well on Facebook.
On Thursday, I reposted a picture from the Magnolia Collective who pointed out one of their members is in the catalog from Acorn’s business.
This did well on Facebook, though not as well as Twin Oaks quilt.
Finally, the Friday post was from the Serenity Solidarity community showing the work being done on the house they are staying in at Little Flower (more communal cooperation).
Keenan Dakota lives at Twin Oaks community in Louisa, Virginia. He has been there since 1983. Among other things, he has helped build several of the Twin Oaks buildings. He is currently on leave from Twin Oaks and traveling around the country with his son, Rowan. They visited Glomus Commune in June while I was still there and I interviewed both of them, separately. We published my interview with Rowan in July. This is my interview with Keenan.
Raven: Here’s my first question. How did you find out about community and how did you find out about Twin Oaks?
Keenan: When I was going to college, I was studying business management. I was not interested in living in a commune. But I took an elective class on popular movements and active non violence. In that class, we had to do original research. And one of the parts of doing original research was to go on a tour of a commune that was just a few hours away. That sounded easy to me. As a business major, I thought I would have a good time just ripping apart the premises of this commune. So I went on a tour. I was shown around by Kelsey and she described how the systems work and how children were cared for and how old people were cared for and that there were businesses that were run on the property. And I couldn’t find anything obvious to make fun of. I thought, “You know, this makes a lot of sense.” So I thought about it. That summer, I went back for a three week visit. I was in the same visitor group as Kat Kincaid because she had left Twin Oaks and was returning. She and other people encouraged me to go back to college and get my diploma. (I was a junior.) So I went back for another year. It was an enlightening year and a challenging year. But I decided I didn’t want to have a foot in and a foot out. I didn’t want to hedge my bets. So at the end of June, the end of the school year, I still had two more classes to get my degree. Instead of taking those two classes, I went to visit Twin Oaks in May and then decided to join on July 10, 1983. (Laughter.)
Raven: What do you see as the joys and challenges of living in community?
Keenan: Well, one of the great things about living at Twin Oaks is taking care of children. It is a great place to be a parent. It’s a great place to be a family. It’s a great place to raise children and it is a great place to be around children, if you don’t want to have children of your own. But also, Twin Oaks is a great place to be an old person. There’s a pension program and people who are aging get well taken care of and don’t have to worry about expenses or health care. But for most people, a lot of the benefits of living in community is the flexible work schedule. You can get a lot of different types of work. You can gain a lot of different skills.There’s a lot of joy and not a lot of stress in the work environment.
Keenan and Rowan at Glomus
Raven: What are the problems in living communally?
Keenan: I have talked to a lot of ex-members of Twin Oaks and asked them, ”Why have you chosen not to live here? You’re still friendly, you come over to visit.” Just to try to see if there’s any consistency in their answers. It turns out that the problems with living at Twin Oaks are about a loss of control. There’s a genuine loss of control over your immediate environment. I think it’s worth all the trade offs. But there are ex-members who say that they like going into the kitchen, and the only dirty dishes in the sink are the dirty dishes that they left there, and that they can decide to paint the room or take down a door or put up a door or put up a shelf without consulting with anybody or going through a meeting or hearing feedback about it. And I think that that is a legitimate issue about living in community.
I think the hardest thing about living in community is dealing with the opinions and emotions of other people and not being able to get a break from it. So when you just want to get a snack in the middle of the night, you might run into somebody that you’re having some emotional issues with. The community is a little bit diverse so there’s going to be some diversity of opinion about anything. When I am doing something out Twin Oaks, even if I’m doing something I know most people like, I also know that I’m making somebody unhappy. And that’s hard.
Once, when I went into another building, I thought I’d be nice, since I was waiting there, and I washed the dishes that were in the sink. Somebody came in after I was done. I was expecting praise for spending my own time washing their dishes.Instead, they said, “Who did all these dishes? That was the work I was supposed to do today! Now I have to go find other work.” So, even something as straightforward as when I think I’m going to help you, can get negative feedback. That happens all the time in the community. Even Kat Kincaid, at the end of her life, chose to live on her own in the house so she didn’t have to deal with unpleasant opinions of other people.
Raven: Okay, so what would you say would be the joys and challenges of actually income sharing?
Keenan: Well, the joys are, you’re never going to be poor. You’re never going to do without, you’re never going to not have health care, you never have to worry about finances next year or the year after that. For a lot of people that is like a huge burden lifted off of their shoulders. It’s like, “I’m going to be okay financially”. Even when the community is struggling, what we do is collectively tighten our belts and we get older vehicles and we don’t buy chocolate chips or we don’t have coffee. But the community itself doesn’t feel very different. It doesn’t feel like the community is taking this huge hit.
I think that’s the main benefit. We can say to somebody who’s walking in off the street, “For the rest of your life, you’re never going to be poor. You don’t have to worry about that.” That’s great. The main drawback is you’re never going to be rich. We can say to anybody, ”Whatever you see around you now is basically what’s going to be here for the next 30 or 40 years. Things might get a little bit better, but you’re not hitting the jackpot here. There might be newer vehicles, there might be a new building, but you are not going to be rich.” And for most people that is a huge turnoff. Even very poor people can maintain the fantasy that someday they’ll hit the jackpot. But in community, you don’t hit the jackpot. Instead what you have is a soup pot. Everybody gets a little bit of soup but there’s no jackpot.
Raven: How did you learn to be a builder and what have you built?
Keenan: I love that you get to learn things at Twin Oaks and in community. Before I moved to Twin Oaks I had built a bookshelf. Now I am a skilled, capable builder. In the mainstream, if you’re going to take on any career, you have to get training. If it’s being a plumber, an electrician, a doctor, a nurse, anything, you’re going to have to receive training and certification in that field. A huge amount of the training or the degree that is required is irrelevant of what you need to know in order to do the actual job. Most jobs are not that difficult to do. And these days with YouTube, you just look up on YouTube, like how do I lay tile and then half an hour you can know how to lay tile. The second benefit of being in community is that if you want to be a plumber, you just start fixing toilets. If you want to try building, you can just start building or doing building maintenance. When I came to Twin Oaks, I wanted to learn how to do mechanical things, to learn how to build things. And basically I just started building things and when I had questions I would ask the experienced builders in the community, but mostly it was just filling up by doing it or reading a book. Back in those days you would read a book like Modern Carpentry about how to build.
What I have built: There’s the visitor building at Aurora. I was the co-honcho, building it with Alexis, who’s now at Living Energy Farm, and Gordon, who is now a dual member with Acorn and Twin Oaks. I was co-honcho with McCune in building Nashoba. I was the sole honcho of a very large warehouse building. I built a lot of swings and play structures. I really like building play structures that are multigenerational, that little kids can play on and adults can play on, and so there’s playgrounds all around Twin Oaks. I was in charge of building Appletree, which I built as a homeschooling project with my teen boys and the other teenage boy who was living in the community at the time, Elijah, who’s a planner now
Raven: What other work do you do when you’re not building things?
Keenan: What do I do? I like having a very flexible schedule. So, most of the time, my labor sheet is blank when I get it and I wake up in the morning and decide what I’m going to do. One of the things that I do is that I am the Trustee Manager, which is about acquiring furniture and fixing furniture for people’s rooms and moving furniture around. I do most of the road maintenance manager work because I like to stay in shape. Mostly that involves shoveling gravel If the weather’s nice outside I go and shovel gravel and fill potholes for a few hours. That’s my workout for that day. I take care of some little kids at Twin Oaks, but I also do a construction class once a week for teenagers. What I tend to do is special projects. I’m also the conference site manager and I work at fixing up things there, which is why there’s a huge epic swing there and a zipline. So, come to the summer events and you can see the epic swing and the zipline.
I try to keep my schedule flexible so that if there are special projects that need doing, I can do the special projects. So each of my days is really very different from every other day. Somebody asks me to build a shelf in their room, or somebody asks me to take them to the doctor that day. And because my schedule is more open than a lot of people, I often get pulled into things that require somebody who is not more scheduled.
Raven: You did an ‘Ask Me Anything’ on Reddit and it got a lot of views. What did you learn from that experience?
Keenan: I had no idea what I was getting into. I had never been on Reddit. I didn’t know what ‘Ask Me Anything’ was until somebody else set up the interview. Somebody else put the information on there. I thought if I get even a couple people asking questions, I’ll be happy to answer their questions. I was just floored when, like, literally thousands of people went online and were asking me questions. I was doing Reddit from a porch in Costa Rica where I was on vacation.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the comments showed a profound misunderstanding of intentional community. There was a lot of concern about what people thought was a lack of freedom at Twin Oaks. There were a lot of fearful questions and concerns about the well being of the children. Of course, there are cults and there are places where children are unsafe. But, arguably, children are safer at Twin Oaks than they are in a Boy Scout troop or in the Catholic Church. I tried to correct those misunderstandings in my AMA. But I think a lot of people have prejudices about communal life. Many of them were fearful and were saying to other people, don’t go there because you’ll never get out. We’re a 100 people living in the woods of Virginia. So far, this has not taken over the world. There’s not a lot to be afraid of.
Raven: Yeah, I saw somebody who said, “Oh, that would never work.” Well, Twin Oaks has been doing it for 55 years. All right, so the final question I always ask is, is there anything else you want to say to Commune Life readers?
Keenan: I’ve been around long enough that my opinion about a lot of things is already in the public domain. What I want folks to know is that the Communities Conference is coming up after not happening for a few years and I think that anybody who’s interested in communal life should come to the Communities Conference this September at Twin Oaks.
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.
commune life 