Sumner recounts and reflects (in detail) on his time living at the East Wind Community.
Membership
Acorn Community 2022
(I like the current Acorn Community webpage. Acorn is a great place to visit and they are looking for new members. I am reprinting their front webpage here. – Raven)
Acorn Community Farm is an egalitarian community in central Virginia founded in 1993. We are committed to non-coercive, non-hierarchical, voluntary associations both within our community as well as within the larger community in which we find ourselves. We are also committed to income-sharing, sustainable living, and creating a vibrant, eclectic culture.
We are members of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, which means that we hold in common our land, labor, resources, and income, and that we use this for the good of our community as a whole and our members as individuals. While all members must be enthusiastic about a culture of radical sharing and working with one another, we do not share religious, political, or philosophical beliefs. We use consensus decision-marking in our weekly meetings in order to make decisions about use of collective money, land, and resources.
Acorn is non-hierarchical. There are no bosses, owners, investors, or supervisors. Although structured in areas such as membership, we intentionally keep policies to a minimum, preferring a calm anarchy to prevail. Of the few policies that are in place, our culture encourages personal responsibility rather than supervision, as well as taking issues on a case-by-case basis keeping in mind that needs of individuals vary.
Our community strives to create a stimulating social, political, feminist and intellectual environment. Acorn strongly desires to support developing egalitarian and like-minded communities through participation in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. Our collectively owned business has been active in protesting GMO seed contamination by Monsanto. We desire to support queer and alternative lifestyles and gender expression.
Our thriving seed business – Southern Exposure Seed Exchange – is part of an exciting movement and growing network of farmers, gardeners and seed savers dedicated to organic, heritage agriculture and independence from the processed, genetically modified, corporately delivered “food” paradigm.
If you are interested in visiting us, interning in our seed business and garden or in other areas of our farm-based livelihood, check out our page on How to Visit Acorn Community Farm.
We are looking for folks to live and grow with us. Folks who share our vision of a vibrant, non-coercive, supportive, environmentally appropriate, self-sufficient community and have skills that are helpful in getting us to where we want to get to. Skills such as: vehicle & farm implement maintenance, repair & construction of our infrastructure, farming, livestock care, business management, customer service, healthy cooking, seed saving, organic gardening. Or if you lack specific skills but just like to work hard, get things done, and are willing to learn and take on responsibility, we would like to talk to you, so call us and schedule a visit.
Remember, this stuff is hard! Living and working together, trying to have fun while at the same time running a business, making decisions together and sharing income, are all challenging every day. These challenges give us many opportunities for personal growth. So in addition to the above mentioned skills, we are interested in meeting people experienced in community-building, communication and facilitation, who interested in building a healthy, dynamic, supportive social culture.
* We are accepting new applicants for membership. See our Membership Process page for more information.
Diversity, Resistor, Watermelon, Crops, and Leaves
by Raven
Last week was not our most popular week on Facebook, but I thought we put out some pretty interesting stuff.
We started with an award for the Twin Oaks Queer Gathering.
I thought this was nice news but, sadly, it didn’t do particularly well.
Living Energy Farm frequently has new and interesting things on their site and this time it was a homemade resistor.
This is a video which you can watch.
Fortunately, this did okay, just making it over the hundred viewers mark.
The Magnolia Collective hasn’t been publishing much lately, but they did rave about this watermelon.
This didn’t do particularly well on Facebook.
East Wind hadn’t been publishing much for a while, so I was glad to see this little video about their crops.
I don’t know if it’s because of the monotonous background sounds on the video or what, but this did particularly badly on Facebook, very low, and not even getting any likes, comments, or shares.
Finally, Twin Oaks published their latest issue of “Leaves” filled with what I think is interesting stuff.
And fortunately, this did pretty well–or at least better than anything else from last week.
East Wind Member Interview: PT
Musician, Garden Manager, FEC delegate–PT played a lot of roles during their time at East Wind. This video has a lot of music in it.
Totally Utopia Update
by Raven
Five years ago (May 22, 2017), I published a post that featured a fictional community I called the Totally Utopia Community. This was a post about what doesn’t work in community building, and I said clearly that while Totally Utopia was not a real community, it was based on three very real communities that I felt were ‘nearly identical’ in structure and dynamics to the dysfunctional community that I described. It’s now five years on. What happened with the three real communities that I was talking about?
First of all, I’m going to add a fourth community that was around at that time which I thought was different and now I see as an unfortunately near perfect example of the problem. I will call these four real communities, A, B, C, and D. Here’s what has happened to each of these communities since 2017.
Community A is the one that I know the least about what has happened since. I visited there for a month in 2013. It had (as all of them did) an overbearing guy who was driven by climate change fear to demand everyone change. This guy, in particular, wanted only people who were willing to live in the manner they (he and his partner) demanded–including not only no fossil fuels but no burning wood and getting used to living in low temperature environments (this was a northeastern US community and winters certainly got cold there). I’m really not sure what happened to them. I haven’t really heard from them since. I saw the female partner (who didn’t speak to me) a couple of times five or six years ago but not recently and there is no trace of them on the FIC website. Either they are hunkered down, or on to other things, or just plain gone.
Community B is not doing badly. After many years of it just being the couple and a rotating cast of interns and short-term members (and getting in some good, experienced communitarians who didn’t meet up to the male founder’s standards and were driven off), the founders seemed to have mellowed a bit. While still following their strong ecological standards, they have gotten a few other folks who have stayed on and they have downscaled their community ambitions in order to pursue the eco-lifestyle that they preach and practice. While it’s not the best functioning community, they are doing good work on promoting sustainability and seem to have achieved a balance between living the way they want and allowing others to thrive there.
Which brings me to community C, the one that I did not include in my first imagining because I didn’t see the guy in the community as being as overbearing as the others and I didn’t see them as climate change fear driven as the other three. I also thought they were better at keeping members. I was wrong. They are certainly an ecologically oriented community, and while the guy there doesn’t broadcast climate fear as loudly as the others, what I’ve realized is that they have lost people left and right. Recently, they seemed to have had a really good crew that looked like they might help form a long-term community. I got very excited about the prospect. Then the guy in the couple made it clear what he saw people needing to do, so forcefully that all the seemingly possible long term members fled and once again, just the couple was left. When I was talking with a former communard familiar with the situation, they said they were more hopeful about community C than I was, because of watching what happened to community B, pointing out that it took about a decade but community B is now stabilizing, and maybe community C, which is newer, might do the same in another five years or so–especially if they learned from their losses and relaxed their standards, at least a little.
Which then brings me to community D, one of the chief inspirations for me actually writing the original piece. I think this might be the exception that completely supports what I was saying. I started working with the original couple (who I will call Adam and Eve, as in the original article) and was very excited about what they were doing, even if Adam was very overbearing. I worked with them for a year and a half until I became convinced that (as I have said to many folks) Adam was very good at attracting people and even better at alienating them. I left saying that they would never be able to build a stable, long-term community. I am now living in the stable long-term community that they built, and I still think that I was right and the people I am living with agree with me. The catch is that the community didn’t really start growing until Adam and Eve broke up and Adam (the overbearing guy) left. Most folks here say strongly that they wouldn’t have stayed here if he was still here.
What are my take-aways from this five year observation? I am more convinced than ever that you can’t build a community unless you are willing to listen to and support people. Don’t get me wrong. Climate change is real and very scary but you can’t let that fear drive you and especially excuse not treating folks well. One community seems to be gone or not functioning, the second seems to have mellowed, the third seems to be going nowhere (unless there is mellowing in the future), and the fourth succeeded precisely because the overbearing founder left.
I’ve said that no matter what the mission of the community is, relationships matter. I can’t say it enough. That’s in essence what makes the difference whether the Totally Utopia Community succeeds or limps along or falls apart or fades away. Four communities are a small sample but I’m convinced the lessons are real. Treating folks well is as much a part of dealing with climate change as any technological or behavioral changes.
(The illustrations are the same ones as in the original article.)
Communard Interview #4: Amanda
Amanda is a young visitor to the Acorn Community who is going through the process to become a provisional member. She is an artist, a first time gardener, and a newcomer to community life.
Raven: What got you interested in living in community and how did you find Acorn?
Amanda: I didn’t know about communities until I learned about them through my partner who learned of them through his friends. We were interested in homesteading and learning how to grow our own crops. We actually wanted to do something like WWOOFing or something to teach us farming and community just kind of fell in line with those same aspects. We were just going to try it out. We weren’t really thinking of becoming members. We just wanted to learn for ourselves but once we got here and saw how everyone works together, we realized it would be a lot harder to do that on our own. We decided that we wanted to utilize people working together and just become part of the community instead of pulling back and being by ourselves on a big piece of property.
Raven: Can you tell me about the process of becoming a member at Acorn?
Amanda: Once you express interest in becoming a member, you become a “member candidate”. You have to sit down with each member and have a one-on-one talk with them where they get to express any concerns they may have. This is called doing clearnesses. They get to know you a little bit better. They get to share their side of community life so you also get to know them better. They try to show you what community looks like to them and how they feel this place runs to see if you can fit into the groove. I am still in the membership candidate process but once you finish all your clearnesses with each member, you become a provisional member. Then you have another few sets of clearnesses and they vote on whether they would like you to stay or they would rather you not stay. After about a year, you can become a full member, once your final round of clearnesses is complete.
Raven: What do you like best about communal living and what do you find most challenging?
Amanda: I really enjoy getting to make my own schedule and getting to work in the areas that I want to work on the hours that I want to work. If I decide I don’t want to be awake in the daytime anymore, I can work all night, if that’s what I want. I like that we have big community dinners where people work to make huge meals to feed everyone and then we all sit down and talk about our day and laugh and joke. After that we may have our night on our own or we may have a movie night. I just like the family aspect of it. It feels very familiar, like home, and getting a whole new set of friends is really fun.
What I find most challenging is figuring out who I am once all the stressors of life have been taken away. I don’t have to worry about my job, I don’t have to worry about my house or my car. So now it’s nothing but the bare bones of who I am. I’ve never had to face that before so I’m kind of lost a little bit and trying to figure out who I am for the first time at 30 years old and it’s really interesting. It’s really scary but I know in the end the result is going to be amazing.
Raven: What advice would you give to folks looking to live in community? What things didn’t you know when you started looking?
Amanda: I think places like intentional communities can seem like an easy way out. If you don’t like working nine-to-five or don’t like, you know X Y and Z, you might think, I’m just going to run away from the society and enjoy living in one of these communes, but it’s not as easy as that. I feel like it could be worth it but it’s definitely not easy.
Like I said before, there’s a lot of things you face for the first time when you come to community. There’s a lot of internal things you have to kind of figure out and realign and that process can be confusing and painful. There can be a whole list of issues and you have to kind of figure out how to express yourself in a healthy way without taking your anger and confusion and projecting it.
You have to be ready to live with a lot of people. It seems like an easy concept on the surface but everyone has their own little personalities and everyone’s different. Getting to know how each person works individually is a fun and long process.
In addition, it’s a business and you have to make yourself accountable to show up every day and say I’m going to work my hours and I’m going to be a part of the business and I’m going to help my fellow members of the community because everything you do affects everyone else. You may not realize that but if you slack off or decide you don’t really want to do this, it falls onto someone else. So it’s about doing your part and fitting into the puzzle. It’s about lifting everyone else up with you and taking some of the weight off other people.
It’s really about relationships and how we can build each other up and help each other. It’s all so tightly tied together. You can’t have the business without the garden and you can’t have the garden without the people and you can’t have the people without the business. Everything in community life is important. It’s not just what you want to get out of it but you have to hold yourself emotionally accountable.
It’s easy to be selfish in a place like this because everyone here wants you to express yourself and do the things that you want. You can have huge art night parties and learn hobbies and stuff. It’s easy to get swept away with all the encouragement and just be selfish and focus on yourself. But you need to share your time. You have to be on top of that because you don’t have someone telling you that you have to go to work today and you have to do this or else you’re going to lose your house. You have to be the one who’s doing those things and you have to be in charge of your own accountability.
Raven: Thank you. This has been a great interview. Is there anything else you’d like to share with Commune Life readers?
Amanda: I think when you’re first looking into community life, you have a set of goals that you want to accomplish in mind. I think the best thing to do is just jump into the cold water and take the chance. You never really know what these places are actually like until you get here. There’s no way of knowing cuz it’s individual. Everyone takes something away differently. You just have to put yourself out there. If this is something that you’re really interested in doing, take the chance to do it. If this community isn’t right for you then maybe another community will be right for you. Explore and look around and try different things before deciding maybe this isn’t for you. If there’s anything holding you back or making you scared, just try and let it go. Even if it isn’t for you, you will probably learn a lot about yourself and about your hobbies and your goals. So even if you don’t end up staying at a community, I feel like it’s still worth it to go there and try and grow yourself.
Surprise Cheats!
by Raven Glomus
As I do most years, I put this blog and the Facebook feed on hold for the month of December, so I could travel and focus on holiday stuff. But soon after December started, I looked at the Twin Oaks Facebook feed and Acorn’s Instagram account and saw some things they posted at the end of November that looked very timely and I thought would be quite stale by January. I won’t be traveling until the end of this month and I am not yet really caught up in holiday stuff and I wanted some way to post these few things, like now. So I came up with five “Surprise Cheats” on Facebook–and I am going to post them all here in one swell foop.
Here’s what I posted on Facebook:
Here’s the link to the original post: https://www.facebook.com/…/a.17068084…/4578017185591459/
And here’s how it did on our Facebook feed:
Not bad, and you can see that we got one comment:
Then from Acorn’s Instagram account:
I suppose that this was the least exciting of the Surprise Cheats and it didn’t do that well.
Oh, well. It was out of date anyway. Here’s a link to the original post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CWq-BAplIwE/
Something that always generates interest is repair work. Folks especially want to know how the repairs on Llano at Twin Oaks are going. Here’s what Twin Oaks posted at the end of November:
This did very well:
And it got a very supportive comment from Zamin:
I decided to save the two best (if you consider membership recruitment best) for last. Acorn posted a lovely video from a visitor:
It did pretty well, but I wish more people saw it:
Finally, Twin Oaks is looking for folks. Here’s their announcement about their Visitor Program:
Here’s the link to their 2022 schedule:
https://www.twinoakscommunity.org/twinoaks-visits-60/visit-tour/visitor-program#program-calendar
This also did reasonably well:
And now, as I wrote on Facebook yesterday, we are back on break. See you in the new year.
The Shadow Side of Community, Part One
by Raven Glomus
This post and the next will be difficult to write (and probably read) because I intend to air as much of the dirty laundry of community living as I can think of. This can be seen as a follow up to my post called Lower Your Expectations. While I am all about communal living, I want to be honest here. I don’t want folks getting into communal living with illusions of how wonderful it’s going to be. Communes and communities are far from perfect—and sometimes very far from perfect.
In these two posts, I intend to point out all the nasty things that I know about communal living, all the things I (and many other folks) wish were different, where communities fall down and where they are making some headway on all this. I have to say that with everything that’s bad about communities, I still think that they are an improvement on mainstream life—and many of these problems are things that some communities are really trying to work on. So I will also report on improvement attempts and where I see successes.
In this first part I am going to focus on what we used to call, oppression issues or “isms”.
Let’s start with the most commonly commented on problem in communal life: racism. Yes, there is a lot of racism in the communities and it’s something that is being talked about and worked on. While there is definitely some overt racism in some of the communities, the more common problems have to do with what I would refer to as structural (or institutional) racism: things like microaggressions, cultural blindnesses, and, above all, communities that are structured to accommodate middle class white folks. This is racism that well meaning white folks practice, usually unintentionally. The result is that most communities are uncomfortable for many BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and the communities are left wondering why they are so white.
I do have to say that this is a problem that is actively being addressed by the communities movement. Right now, the Foundation for Intentional Communities is running trainings and panels actively talking about how to take on this issue. Unfortunately, you need to do more than simply take the training and thus movement on really dealing with racism is still very slow. My hope is that BIPOC led communities such as the Serenity Community for Justice and Peace will make a difference in changing this dynamic.
Similar to racism, but much less currently addressed, is classism. Most of the communes and communities are filled with middle class and upper middle class folks and this often makes it uncomfortable for people who grew up working class or poor. I think that an exception to this is the East Wind Community which has a lot of working class folks and more of a working class flavor to it. Unfortunately, instead of this being celebrated, East Wind often gets a bad reputation. This has been particularly true around racism—and there have been more incidents of overt racism there but, as several people I know have pointed out, most of the problems at East Wind are the same problems that have been found at all the communities and folks of color have had the same difficulties at Twin Oaks and Acorn, but because they aren’t as articulate, East Wind has often been singled out. Something that really bothered me at the 2018 FEC Assembly was watching upper middle class white folks lecturing East Winders on racism using jargon and academic terms. It felt quite condescending. Of course, the difficult intersections of race and class are rampant in the society at large and are not being dealt with well at all (look at Trump’s appeal to white working class folks), but I would need a whole piece to talk about this and it would take us far from communal living.
Going down the oppressions, I want to look at sexism and misogyny next. Here’s a place that I think the communes are doing quite a bit better. It’s not as if sexism has been banished or there’s no misogyny in the communities, but there seems to be a lot more freedom for women, a lot more respect for women, and a lot more female leadership in the communes than in mainstream society. In fact I know of several communities that are practically matriarchies—and Twin Oaks views itself as having a “feminist culture”. Again, there’s still quite a few pockets of sexism in the communes but I think that it’s being dealt with a lot better than in society at large. (Note: I am not talking about the awful problems of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault here. I will deal with these things later, in Part Two.)
On sexual orientation issues and homophobia, I also think that the communes are doing better than the mainstream world. Again, it’s not that you can’t run into homophobia in the communes; it’s just a lot less prevalent. I know at least one small commune that’s probably two thirds queer folks—and that’s not to mention the Tennessee queer communities. Twin Oaks also sponsors a Queer Gathering that is a lovely place for GLBTQ(etc) folks in community or wanting to be in community to gather.
Unfortunately, on trans and nonbinary issues, the communities don’t do quite as well. I think overall they are a lot safer and welcoming place than the mainstream, but there is still a lot more transphobia than I wish there was. Some of this is generational, with older lesbians and feminists being uncomfortable with transwomen declaring themselves women. Again, this is a difficulty being played out in the society at large and it seems somewhat less prevalent in the communes, but it’s far from being fully dealt with.
Finally, looking at the “isms”, comes ableism. This, too, is a place where the communes don’t do nearly enough. Most of the rural communes have few accessibility accommodations and are not particularly welcoming to the disabled. The one place that communes do provide accommodations is when someone who is already a member becomes disabled.
This brings me to something that is true of many situations within the communes and many other communities. Once you are there and have become an important part of the place, they will do whatever they can to help it work better for you, but they are not as willing to accommodate someone that they don’t already know. This applies to handicap accessibility, but also explains many racial issues and the problems the communes have with families (more on this in Part Two). It also explains why the communes do better on some gender and sexuality issues.
There have been women as part of most of the communes since the beginning. To the degree they were able to advocate for themselves (and, since a lot of the men were heterosexual, they didn’t want communities that would be all or mostly men), they got the changes that they wanted and needed. In fact, Twin Oaks made it policy to that they needed to have at least a 60:40 ratio between the genders (this was a time when folks only thought of two genders), so they actively recruited women and those women pushed for the leadership of women. Likewise, once there were a number of queer folks in a community, they worked to create an environment which would be welcoming to LGBTQ folks. I am convinced that the only way racial issues can really be dealt with in the communities is when there is a significant BIPOC presence. Twin Oaks did talk about trying to become as much as 40% folks of color, but that hasn’t gone anywhere. As I said, I think that the Serenity Community, as BIPOC led and majority BIPOC, has a better chance of making a difference.
In the next part (next week) I will look at a bunch of other problems in the communes. Again, with all their problems, I think that they’re better than mainstream living. But they’re sure not perfect.
Dealing with Debt
by Raven Glomus
Last week I talked about how the older communes didn’t seem to have thought about the fact that most people don’t stay forever in communities and that you wouldn’t want it to be hard to leave an income sharing community–and the problems that caused, and how the newer communes created Exit Agreements to deal with that. This week I want to talk about another issue that the older communes didn’t want to deal with: Debt.
In my made up story to illustrate the need for exit agreements, I said that the homeless man had no money but no debt. That would be an unusual situation. Actually, a lot of folks come to the communes with a little money and a lot of debt. Twin Oaks’ solution to this is to say that folks either have to not pay the debt (ie, default on it or declare bankruptcy) or not move into the community. At one of the newer communities, at least in one case, the solution was to actually pay off all of the debt for one of the members.
This is a more expensive solution and probably wouldn’t work in one of the larger communities. It also probably wouldn’t work if the community had a lot of folks with lots of debts. But it does illustrate a more radical solution to the debt problem.
The problem is that our current society runs on debt. Student loans alone constitute an enormous amount of debt. It turns out that this past year, US students owed nearly $1.6 trillion in debt. Furthermore, nearly 12 million student loan borrowers were in either loan deferment, loan forbearance, or loan default.
And then there is credit card debt. The outstanding total US personal debt, most of which was credit card debt, reached $998.4 billion in July 2021. There was a $5,525 average balance on credit cards over this year. Once you are in debt, it’s hard to get out of it. Defaulting on loans when you enter a commune is one solution (and it makes sense as a way of just getting out of an horrible system), but when you figure a lot of communards are going to leave the commune at some point, starting over could be very difficult with bill collectors on your back.
Again, I realize that simply paying off debt for every member with it probably wouldn’t work in the long run. But, just like the new communes needed to come up with new policies to deal with folks leaving, such as Exit Agreements, we need to figure out more possible solutions to folks in debt–because there’s a lot of them out there and, if communities are going to offer real alternatives, dealing with debt is something, especially for those who are trying to start new communities and find folks, that is going to have to be built into the new community’s policies.
Thanks for reading! This post was made possible by our patrons on Patreon. The Commune Life team works hard to bring you these stories about our lives in community, and that work couldn’t happen without support from our audience. So if you liked this article, and want to help us make more like it, head on over to https://www.patreon.com/communelife to join us!
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Montana Goodman
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NorthernSoul Truelove
Oesten Nelson
Paxus Calta
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Raines Cohen
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Suzi Tortora
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William Kadish
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Thanks!
Turnover
by Raven Glomus
I’m surprised that I haven’t written on this before. In fact, I don’t think that we’ve published anything directly about it on this blog. (And WordPress informs me that this is our 700th post!)
Very often, when I talk about my communal experiences, I talk about Common Threads, the income-sharing community that I helped start in the 1990s, and how much I have learned since then. One thing I share with folks that are talking about starting a community is how often we thought that we were failing because every year of Common Threads’ five year existence, we had a somewhat different crew of folks. Our core (Susan, Robert, and I) remained the same, but people kept moving in and out. We couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t hold onto members.
Since that time, I’ve lived in three or four co-op houses, a couple of different communes, and one large, complicated community. I’ve also visited a bunch of communities and keep decent tabs on several. All of them experienced (and, if they are still around, still experience) regular significant changes in their membership. As they say in the computer world, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”
How it works is that many folks think that they would like to live in a commune or some other type of community. However, when they actually try living in one, they often find it’s not what they expected. Other folks may know what they want but find that a particular community doesn’t meet their needs (after they’ve tried it for a while) and decide to move on. Still other people live happily in a community for quite some time and then they change. They decide that they want to do something that they can’t do in the community or it no longer meets their needs. Whatever the reason, the majority of folks who join a community decide to leave at some point. (There certainly those who join long lasting communities that live in them until they die. That’s really just a different way of leaving.)
The result is that almost any community has people regularly leaving. If they are good at recruitment, they will also have new folks coming in and, hopefully, the number coming in balances the number leaving, in which case the community is more or less stable. All this is to say that turnover is just a part of community living.
Many of the newer communities have started to plan for their members leaving at some point and design exit agreements (which I plan to write about in the near future).
Right now, many communities are still recovering from the pandemic where they lost a lot of folks and had problems and concerns about bringing in new folks, with the result that they have fairly low membership. Now they are actively seeking folks.
I knew that both Twin Oaks and Acorn were looking for people, but I was surprised when Paxus published an article on doing a Meet the Communities at the next Quink Fest. There were eight Louisa County communities listed—-nine if you consider Magnolia separate from Living Energy Farm–and they are all looking for people. (For those unfamiliar with Virginia geography, Louisa County includes Louisa, Mineral, and Cuckoo.) All in all, there are sixteen communities listed as presenting at this event–plus the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (representing the secular income-sharing communities of North America) and the Foundation for Intentional Community (which includes over a thousand communities, most of them in North America or Europe).
If you are interested in joining a community, this is exciting news. Take a look at Paxus’ piece. This might be the time to make turnover work in your favor.
____________________________________________________________________________
Thanks for reading! This post was made possible by our patrons on Patreon. The Commune Life team works hard to bring you these stories about our lives in community, and that work couldn’t happen without support from our audience. So if you liked this article, and want to help us make more like it, head on over to https://www.patreon.com/communelife to join us!
Deep gratitude to all of our patron communards:
- Aaron Michels
- Brenda Thompson
- Cathy Loyd
- Colby Baez
- Heather
- Janey Amend-Bombara
- Jenn Morgan
- Joseph A Klatt
- Kai Koru
- Kate McGuire
- Kathleen Brooks
- Lynette Shaw
- Magda schonfeld
- Michael Hobson
- Montana Goodman
- Nance & Jack Williford
- NorthernSoul Truelove
- Oesten Nelson
- Paxus Calta
- Peter Chinman
- Raines Cohen
- Sasha Daucus
- Suzi Tortora
- Tobin Moore
- Warren Kunce
- William Croft
- William Kadish
- William Scarborough
Thanks!
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