I’m currently temporarily staying at the Acorn Community, having just attended the Community Conference (my fourth in a row--see Update 1: The Twin Oaks Community Conference, 9/9/12, Circling Around to the Communities Conference, 9/5/13, and Where's Weirdo?, 9/22/14 for my previous adventures). The big discussion here at Acorn is about children and families. Acorn just got two new kids living here and there are a couple of other families applying. Twin Oaks has had children and families for a while but there haven’t been a lot of children or families at Acorn up until now. So this is a very alive issue at Acorn at the moment.
But the real population explosion that I want to blog about is about all the new communities starting up recently, many of which want to be income-sharing egalitarian communities. There’s one in Vermont, one right on Staten Island (where I’m now living), one in Baltimore, one in DC, one in Richmond, one in Louisa (which would make Cambia the fifth egalitarian community in Louisa County--after Twin Oaks, Acorn, Living Energy Farm, and Sapling), and one folks are trying to start in southern Virginia near the Appalachian Trail (not even mentioned in the article Pax wrote). Most of these communities had folks at the conference.
This is great news for the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (see Egalitarian Communities, 10/22/08), which according to their current website, only has six member communities and three Communities-in-Dialogue. (Two of them, Sapling and The Mothership, also had representatives at the conference. Last year they were brand-new--now they’ve been upstaged by all these new forming communities.)
So this is an exciting time for the egalitarian communities movement I’ll be interested to see where all of this new community building energy goes. Even if only a little over half of the newly starting communities make it, that would still be four new communities for the FEC. And I still want to work on growing another one in New York, and maybe some in other places (like the Boston area) as well. Maybe I’ll be part of one of the new ones next year.
Quote of the Day: “If a community is seeking FEC membership … that community may apply for Community-in-Dialogue (CID) status. For a community to be accepted as a CID, the Assembly need only be convinced that the community is actively working toward meeting the membership criteria, and that there exists a mutual desire for cooperation between the community and the FEC.
“...by becoming a member of the FEC, your community joins a group of like minded yet diverse communities that work together to try to make a better world.” - from the FEC website
