This was a quiet week in terms of community repostings on Facebook. I needed to repost some stuff from the blog to make a difference. The statistics weren’t great either–but I decided to finish the week with a Facebook question–and that really took off.
From East Wind, news of a variety of corn with interesting colors and an interesting name.
Unfortunately, as intriguing as the corn looked, it got one love and only seventy-six views.
The folks at Southern Exposure are always trying to find ways to support gardening, even when it doesn’t succeed, so this time they borrowed Mister Rogers to help them.
Encouraging for gardeners and it got three likes, one ‘care’, and a comment, but it only got fifty-eight views.
Still, I always think that a way to bring in the views on Facebook is to write a really good question, so I did.
Simple enough, but it was enough.
We got a bunch of comments and I’ll share most of them.
Some were well thought out with useful insights.
And then there’s the joker, as well as a really practical author with a whole book on the subject.
And finally, there’s the person with the extremely detailed proposal.
And, yes, it did well, with seven comments, four likes, a love, and a care, and a very nice two hundred and thirty-eight views. Ya just gotta ask the right question.
Some people look at Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn (which are all built on the same model) and think that’s the proper way to do income sharing. It’s one way but there are many others.
A lot of the newer little communities that I’ve lived in (Common Threads, Cotyledon, the little commune I’m in now–even Glomus to some degree) operate or operated on the one pot method: different people have different sources of income and it all gets thrown into the same pot (or bank account) from which we collectively decide how to spend it.
Similarly, the community doesn’t have to own the place they live in to have an income-sharing community. Cotyledon was also an example of what I’m going to call a rental commune. We lived in an apartment in Queens and one of our expenses was rent.
The Cotyledon crew in front of our Queens apartment.
One of my current commune mates suggested I write about using rented space to create income-sharing communities. They pointed out that most people can’t afford to buy a place these days but there is still this myth that if you want to start a community you need to find a place and buy it.
The rental commune is a much more possible way to create an urban commune (among other things) and it can also be a transitional model; a group can rent, share income, and live together while saving up to buy a place.
This also touches on something else I’ve heard people talking about: income sharing among people who aren’t actually living together. This is probably trickier but it may work better for some folks; again, especially for folks renting places (could be in the big city–but this could also work in smaller size cities and towns, and maybe even in rural areas).
My point, once again, is that there isn’t one way to do income sharing. You don’t need to buy a place, you don’t need to have a cottage industry, and you may not even need to live together. All you really need is courage and trust. If you have a group of people who are brave and willing (and really, it isn’t that hard at all), you can do income sharing.
Sky Blue has been very involved in the intentional communities movement, including being part of starting several communities. Here Sky gives tips and tricks that could be very useful to potential community founders.
I have lived in some pretty small communities (and I’m living in one now). I’m talking about three, four, five, six people. I’ve also spent time in large communities: Twin Oaks, East Wind, Ganas, Dancing Rabbit. We’re talking over sixty people in any of these.
Small communities are intimate, sometimes too intimate. They are also fragile and fall apart easily. Most of them don’t last long.
Large communities are usually bustling and often somewhat diverse. They can also be impersonal and perhaps overwhelming.
It has occurred to me recently that there is something in between that might work better for some of us. Middle range communities seem more rare but they are definitely possible. I’m going to call these communities of over ten but under fifty people. Acorn is a good example. Glomus in its prime (when there were twelve of us) is another.
When I was visiting Acorn (now a decade ago) someone told me that Acorn wanted to limit their size to thirty folks. (A while back I heard that they were thinking of expanding that to forty.) When I asked them why Acorn wanted that size, the person said, “So we don’t become Twin Oaks.”
Acorn crew, recently
I also knew someone who moved to Glomus from a much larger community, just so they could feel like they were in relationship with everyone there, which was a lot more possible with less people.
A midsized commune might have the advantages of stability and perhaps a little diversity without the bustle and impersonalness of a large community.
Of course, getting there and staying there is the difficulty. For new communities, it can be hard to get to over ten folks. Sometimes it’s hard to get to even four or five. For older, successful communities, it can be hard to limit folks if there’s a lot of people wanting to join. (A solution to this problem often is to spin off new communities–which is part of how the Louisa County cluster got started.)
As I’m watching all of these new and scrappy little communities that seem to be emerging, I’m wondering how many (if any) of them will become midsized communes.
I recently wrote about the importance of ‘Scrappy Little Communities’. I also mentioned how “ephemeral” they are–they often quickly come and go. Although most large communes started off as small communes, the problem is that little communities are very brittle, very easily lost.
Having watched many, many small communities fall apart, I’m convinced that building membership may be the most important thing a community can do to survive, with paying attention to money the second and making sure that you’re bringing in income, the second. Building relationships is also key.
One thing that seems to have helped a lot with the survival of several communities is being part of a “cluster of communities”. Louisa County is an amazingly supportive place for communities and it’s not an accident that new ones keep popping up there. And a lot of smaller communities have lasted quite a while in that nurturant soil: Living Energy Farm, Cambia, Little Flower, etc. I suspect that some of these smaller communities might not have survived as long elsewhere. The NEMO (Northeast Missouri) communities of Rutledge and the queer communes of Tennessee are a couple more examples of these kinds of supportive clusters.
Kat Kinkade
When I look at income-sharing communities that have lasted, Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn stand out. Kat Kinkade helped found all of them. I often ask myself (and even others) “What did she know?”
One of the things that I have heard is that she believed in building communities up fast. A thought that I’ve had recently is that there is something in between small and large communities: medium, mid-sized communities. Maybe if we could get some of these little communes to medium size, they might have a better chance at survival. I plan to write more about this in the future.
I said in my last blog post that I was planning to expand what we cover on Commune Life–just a little bit. One of the places I want to explore is little communities that often have a big mission.
For example, while Twin Oaks and Acorn in Virginia get lots of coverage here, there are a whole bunch of little communities in Louisa County that are doing interesting things: Living Energy Farm, Cambia, Little Flower, the Magnolia Collective, etc. Some of them are doing income sharing, some of them are doing variants of income sharing, and some of them aren’t income sharing at all but seem to be doing some worthwhile stuff. And who’s income sharing and who’s not seems to change at times so it’s hard for me, many miles away, to know. And there are still new communities popping up there. I hope to have a piece about Bramble (perhaps the newest community in the county) in the not so distant future.
Another example is the Baltimore Free Farm. They started off squatting and then created a housing unit which they originally called Horizontal Housing but have renamed it Green Eggs in Hampden. I’m trying to find out what they are up to these days.
Meanwhile, up here in New England, I’m living in a very small income sharing community in western Massachusetts. The reason that I haven’t written about it is that they don’t want publicity. But I think what they are doing is very interesting. The place has a focus on interdependence and mutual aid and I have learned a lot more about those things by living here.
I’m excited by all the things going on in the area around me. I’m finding small communities of all kinds around here–political collectives, farm focused communities, a co-op house built around New Culture–and I’ve been hearing about a bunch of anarchist collectives emerging in Worcester, an old city between here and Boston.
And now, Serenity Solidarity is not far from here, having moved from Louisa County to a place near Albany, NY. At the moment there is only one family there, but they are determined to make it a refuge for many people–especially for BIPOC folks, who have often had trouble fitting in communities created by white folks and based on white culture.
Ericka of Serenity Solidarity and Ethan of the Possibility Alliance (holding baby Kiwi)
Also, the Possibility Alliance, mostly Ethan and Sarah and children, is in New England now, having moved to Maine from Missouri some years back and they are attracting folks and working with indigenous tribes around there. They are the most low tech and yet very progressive group I know.
I’m currently exploring some stuff up in Vermont, including Earthseed Ecovillage which has a lot of land, a few people, and some very big ambitions. I am in dialogue with them, hoping they will write a bit about what they are doing. I’m also working with some folks in that area to create a small community to work on emotional and relational intelligence. Maybe something will emerge from this that I can write about.
And I keep hearing about interesting communal projects. One of the ones that I think is most intriguing is a new squat (an illegal home) created in a major city by some former communards that is trying to house immigrants and former prisoners that have nowhere to go. I doubt that they would want publicity either, but it certainly sounds creative.
And while most of what I’m talking about is on the east coast of the US, I know there are a lot of little projects happening around this nation and around the world. It’s an exciting, if scary, time.
Unfortunately, most of these small communities are ephemeral. It’s hard starting a community and even harder when you are doing something experimental and you don’t have very many people. In my eight and a half years managing Commune Life, I have watched what seems like dozens of communities come and go.
Still, big communities like Twin Oaks and East Wind, etc, started off small. It’s hard to tell what is going to work and what isn’t and it’s worth learning from the stuff that didn’t work. I do want to report on some of these communities because I think they have a lot to offer and a lot to learn from. I admire the ambitions of these scrappy little communities.
A bunch of us went out to help Serenity Solidarity with work needed on their new place and, while a bunch of work needed to be done on the beams and kitchen indoors, some of us also helped with outside work, including spreading gravel on the driveway so tires wouldn’t get stuck in the mud. The first picture is of the house and the drive, the second is of Erin and Jess shoveling out the gravel, and the third is of an area that was patched with the gravel. There was also a small pond that needed work and a hoop house that had gotten overgrown (before and after). Finally, there’s a picture of Ethan from the Possibility Alliance in Maine with Ericka from Serenity Solidarity and baby Kiwi.
For the past eight years I have managed Commune Life with a fairly strict definition of ‘Communes’ as income sharing communities. I’ve occasionally gone beyond that to talk about where or how income sharing communities fit into the larger communities movement, the process of creating communities in general, or even sharing in general.
Now with the FEC dormant and income sharing communities seemingly less visible (other than the big three of Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn), if not far fewer, I’m going to expand the scope of Commune Life just a little. I still want to focus on income sharing communities (and Commune Life will still have lots of posts from and about Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn), but I am going to include other experiments in sharing, like partial income sharing, and other communal experiments, looking at stuff on the leading edge of the communities movement. I’m also going to start looking at what I will call scrappy little communities–small communities with some type of special mission, some of which might not be income sharing (more about that next week). I also want to explore more the phenomenon of ‘clusters of communities’, perhaps as well as regional networks of communities which seem to be forming, and various examples of extending sharing through mutual aid and interdependence that have some community involvement, and maybe even looking at communities with a mission (income sharing or not) that are changing and growing in interesting ways.
What I’m not interested in is general stuff about communities, especially plain old co-ops, cohousing groups, or ecovillages, or big networks of them (national or global). There are lots of other spaces for that: the Foundation for Intentional Community, NASCO, CohoUS, the Global Ecovillage Network, etc.
Don’t get me wrong; these are great. They’re just not my area of interest and as I said, they are already covered.
But I’m ready to expand what we do here, covering communities and communal experiments even if they are not strictly income sharing. I’m interested in things that are, at least, edgy–the new, the small, the experimental, the radically different–as long as they are still promoting some type of sharing.
I hope you will join me as we continue to explore where communes and communities are going in the third decade of the twenty-first century. My belief is that we need these kinds of alternatives more than ever.
Yep. We’re back and I’m back to reposting old Facebook posts. And since we didn’t publish through August, these are two month old posts.
Starting with a post from the fourth of July for the new Convergence of Intentional Communities.
This post did okay, with three likes and 126 views.
Acorn posted about collecting collard seeds.
This post did about as well, with four likes and 121 views.
East Wind’s main business is selling nut butters, so they are always coming up with ways to use them.
This post just did okay. It got one like and one love (and East Wind Nut Butters, which liked the last two posts, didn’t even respond to this one) and just a hundred views.
Finally, I posted a question on Facebook, because questions get a lot of views and comments and likes, and this post did very, very, very well on all of these. My question:
A lot of the more savvy readers know that by the ‘Kat Kinkade’ communes, I meant Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn, all of which Kat had a hand in forming and all of which have lasted over thirty years, a lot longer than most income-sharing communities. And, yes, I got a lot of comments. Here’s most of them:
Like I said, this post did very, very, very well, with twenty-six likes, thirty-six comments, and an amazing eight hundred and sixty-six views. This is what happens if you ask the right question.
After a couple of years searching around in Virginia, the folks creating Serenity Solidarity purchased land near Albany, New York. Here’s some pictures from it, including a couple of pictures of the house, a small pond in back, a hoophouse, two views of an old barn, a little shack, two views of the Posten Kill–a creek that runs on the edge of the property, and an amazing waterfall a three minute drive from the house (not on their property) with Ericka and Mason from Serenity Solidarity and yours truly in front of it.
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