Intentional Communities

The key word in Intentional Communities is 'intentional'. It means that people have decided to live together, have chosen to live together. Intentional Communities are often households or clusters of households that are tied together by a common project. There is a large spectrum of intentional communities, ranging from very communal (see my next post for a little more on this--I will also have an upcoming post on Egalitarian Communities, which is a name that many of the more communal communities have taken on) to co-op households (both a form of intentional community and a form of cooperative--see my last post for a bit on this--these are popular with college students as well as young adults in their twenties and thirties) to cohousing (sharing some common areas but having private households--this is currently the fastest growing form of intentional community--popular with somewhat older adults, particularly adults with children and those over 55) to ecovillages (these are the hot new form of community, incorporating sustainability into the mix, and can overlap with other forms of community, particularly both the communal and the cohousing). Land trusts are also sometimes seen as a form of intentional community.

Intentional community is a way to live deliberately with other people. Intentional community gives us a chance to practice what we preach, to try living harmoniously, compassionately, ecologically, simply, sustainably, equally, the whole nine yards. It's a way to have people around that you can talk with, share ideas with, work together with, build with, connect with, and sometimes just get a sympathetic ear from.

It is also a challenge. It's easy to imagine perfect communities in your head, but real communities--of all types, but particularly intentional communities--are messy places where people discover that it's not easy to live with other people, particularly those different from you. And in intentional community you soon discover that everyone is different from you. (You've all agreed that you're interested in, say, compassionate living. Suddenly you discover everyone has a different idea what 'compassion' means--and you are finding it hard to be compassionate with someone who likes to leave their dirty dishes in the sink or play their music loudly or invite lots of people over without warning. Unless that person is you and you are wondering why no one has room in their hearts for your idiosyncrasies.)

If it sounds like I'm talking from experience here, I am. But I still live somewhat communally and I still want to live more that way in the future. Why? Because I weigh the benefits I listed two paragraphs above against all the difficulties and I've decided it's worth it. And I also live in community because intentional communities are laboratories for social change. All the things I've talked about in my blog so far, generally apply to group living.

Now, I don't believe that everyone should be living in intentional community, but I do think a lot of people would benefit from it--particularly since there are enough varieties of community that it should be possible to meet a variety of different needs. Also, if you are interested in social change, and want to try living it, rather than merely theorizing about it, intentional community is one place to start.

For more on Intentional Communities check out the Fellowship of Intentional Communities. They publish a Directory of Intentional Communities (both a web-based version and a print version that you can purchase from the website). For more on co-op housing, The North American Students of Cooperation is a good source of information. The Cohousing Association of the United States website is a useful place to search for more info specifically about co-housing. For anyone wanting to know about ecovillages, the Global Ecovillage Network might be a good place to start. More on community land trusts (a way to share land, if nothing else) can be found at the National Community Land Trust Network. And if you are interested in the more communal variety of community, (I will be posting quite a bit more on it later) the Federation of Egalitarian Communities is a good place to start.


Quote of the day: "In the analysis of peace, oppression or ecological issues, you need always to consider how your actions impact on others. In community, you must do the work of learning who other people are and how they see things differently, and honoring that, so that you in turn will have your views honored. That is group work, and it is essential for world peace. The same is true for oppression issues, and for how your use of resources limits or enhances others' use of resources. You have to build up from small units; you can't leap to the national or international model without knowing how that works in a group of eight or twelve. Communities I know are doing this work, discovering how groups can get to know each other well enough to function in healthy, non-exploitive ways." - Laird Schaub
Word (or phrase) of the day: Civil Society
Hero(es) of the day: Robert King Wilkerson