Posts Tagged ‘communes’
Friday, October 30th, 2009
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Communal Living: Love thy Neighborhood, an article in the Guardian this week, describes the many advantages of co-housing/communal living and shares resources with individuals seeking community in the UK. Reporter Miles Brignall profiles the recently formed Lancaster Co-housing project.
Share your car, share childcare costs, share energy bills, but still enjoy the privacy of your own home. Welcome to the new age of communal living.
Read the full article here.
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Written by:
molly
Friday, October 9th, 2009
A recent NY Times article profiles several urban households that are currently forming small collectives. FIC's Laird Schaub shares details about the recent surge in community.
JOHANNA BRONK wants to make communal vegetarian meals and keep chickens. Mariel Berger hopes for social, artistic and political collaborations. Harmony Hazard is into hula hooping, book groups and anarchism....The impetus for the group home or collective they hope to form is less about finances - though it is true that pooling resources yields better real estate - and more about community building.
Read the full article here.
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Written by:
molly
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
The Times Online and the Sunday Times (of London) carried an article on both the utopian and the practical aspects of community living. The article features an existing co-housing developments in the UK, Community Project of South Downs. Benefits such as shared child rearing, help in times of health crisis, and shared resources are mentioned. Some drawbacks of life in a co-housing development are also mentioned, such as additional planning required for new development. The Times writes:
Visiting the Community Project on a sunny summer's day, it is easy to appreciate the appeal. The setting is idyllic - the buildings look out over a green valley, narrow paths wind between rambling undergrowth and abundant vegetation, while three horses in a paddock swish their tails lazily against the flies. Come teatime, the place is swarming with children conducting water-gun fights and larking about.
"It's awesome for kids," says Jed Novick, 49, a lecturer in journalism who moved here two years ago with his wife, Gilly Smith, 45, and their two daughters, Ellie, 12, and Loulou, 9. "They have such freedom and independence here, within safe walls."
Such a lifestyle appeals to many people, and the article also mentions the potential for the development of more co-housing projects in the future. A training center for would be co-housing founders, Threshold Centre at Cole Street Farm. The Times writes:
Fancy the idea of living communally? You could always found your own cohousing community. Alan Heeks, an ex-businessman with an MBA from Harvard, set up the Threshold Centre at Cole Street Farm, near Gillingham, Dorset, with a group of six like-minded friends in 2004, and runs regular workshops for those interested in cohousing. The basic principles are the same, although there are differences: the eight members share everything from home-grown vegetables to the washing machine, and are required to give 5% of the value of their property to the project when they sell.
Given the balanced article, I am suprised at its name, "Cohousing is the new name for commune living". Perhaps "commune" isn't such a charged word in the UK as it is in the US?
Read the full article here.
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Written by:
erika
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
InsideBay Area.com has an article about a group of communities that formed in the hills near Palo Alto, CA in the late sixties and early seventies with such names as Struggle Mountain, Rancho Diablo, Earth Ranch and most famously, "The Land". Most of these communes disbanded in the 70s but members reunited this year for the a 30th anniversary party.
War resisters, Vietnam veterans, 15-year-old runaways, lost souls, upper-class refugees looking for something "real" - these were the people who created The Land's warm embrace and gentle, conscientious lifestyle of simplicity starting in 1971. Singer Joan Baez helped establish the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence there in 1969. She and her husband, David Harris, a celebrated war resister who went to jail for refusing to serve in Vietnam, lived at Struggle Mountain, a commune that still thrives on upper Page Mill Road.
"We were nonconformists. We didn't want to wear suits and ties. We were against the war, we were against capitalism. Everyone wanted a back-to-nature experience, even though most people came from an upper-class experience," said Burns. "We're not living in a community like that anymore. If we had a chance to, I think a lot of people would go back."
They lived without electricity, cut wood to keep warm, and took water from a pure, sweet-tasting natural spring that flowed from the roots of a Bay tree. The front houses near the main barn did have electricity and running water.
Decisions were made by consensus. Residents operated a "cook house" and baked bread, kept chickens and horses. Food was easily earned though a co-op arrangement with a local market. Artisans painted stained-glass windows for the cabins, which were built from recycled wood. A group of men ran a shop where they struggled to keep their old cars, backhoes and tractors alive. They printed their own newsletter, "Barn Talk." They sent their children to a nearby school.
Some of the ideas they embraced, such as recycling and using compost to fertilize their gardens, were ahead of their time, said Thyme Siegel, who lived on The Land. "We lived lightly on the earth before it was a concept. We used gray water, we recycled. We thought we were the village of the future," said Siegel.
As a personal aside, when I was in college, living in a student co-op at Stanford, a former resident of one of these communes spoke to us and was describing how hard it was to get everyone together to make decisions, saying "To them, the revolution meant 'no meetings'". I'll never forget that quote, and it runs through my head every time someone complains about too many meetings.
One of these Palo Alto Hills communities is still around:
The last remaining commune at Struggle Mountain today includes 10 residents, including some boarders who help pay the rent. They eat together less often than they used to, and many have jobs outside the commune, but they still make decisions by consensus. It's a touchstone for an entire generation and a place for artists and musicians to share their work, said Mark Schneider, a longtime resident.
Read the whole article about The Land and other Palo Alto communes
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Here's an interesting one from Investment News: a very successful financier who says "his best business lessons came from a commune".
Malon Wilkus now manages a $21 billion private-equity firm but he got his start at East Wind, an income sharing commune in southern Missouri.
Returning to the United States and college in 1974, he joined the East Wind commune in Missouri.
"I think my parents were distressed by that," Mr. Wilkus said ruefully. He spent the next nine years at the commune, where he made hammocks, sandals and nut butters that were sold to food co-ops and Pier 1 Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas.
"I learned most of what I know about business today from that experience," Mr. Wilkus said, explaining that he grew to understand the motivation of customers and investors.
In 1983, he left the commune for a job in marketing at the Calvert Group, an asset management firm in Bethesda, where he learned how to gather assets.
Three years later, Mr. Wilkus launched American Capital from the living room of his two-bedroom condo, which he shared with his wife, Susan, and their three children. He got a $75,000 loan from people he had known from his commune days and maxed out his credit cards for an additional $75,000.
Initially, American Capital focused on helping workers at small- and medium-sized companies acquire their employers by using employee stock ownership plans.
In 1997, he took American Capital public as a business development company, offering debt financing or taking equity stakes in buyout situations. Today the company boasts 700 employees with offices in 13 cities around the world.
"We built a private-equity firm that the average American can invest in," Mr. Wilkus said. "We've democratized private equity."
Its not often you hear stories of a former communard turned high-powered capitalist but he is surely not the only one (maybe just the only one willing to admit it).
Read the entire article
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
 Meredith Medland of Living Green interviews Diana Leafe Christian on the subject of Ecovillages and Intentional Communities in this 24-minute podcast.
Diana was the editor of Communities Magazine for 14 years and is now the editor of the Ecovillages online newsletter. She is the author of two books Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community and Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities.
Diana shares her immense experience of community living and the communities movement in this interview. Here's some highlights:
I feel like I'm in a network of a lot of brothers and sisters and cousins. I feel like I'm living inside of a family of likeminded people going towards the goals of learning how to live more ecologically and economically and socially sustainably, and also we're learning, we're teaching what we learn to others through classes and workshops.
I got interested in intentional communities because I, like thousands and thousands of people across the country, this is in the early 90's, I began to feel like something was missing and I finally could feel my way to identify that what it was, was community.
Diana goes on to describe "13 kinds of Intentional Communities" including ecovillages, cohousing, communes, christian communities, other spiritual communities, retreat centers, student co-ops, and more.
She even explains how to find the community oyu are looking for:
Well, when you're checking communities out on the internet, and the website you need to know about is directory.ic.org, where you can look up any community by its name alphabetically or you can go to any state or province or country and look up the community. It's North America based, so you'll find most communities in the US and Canada, and then you can read the listing about the community and you can read their website if they've got one. Here's some things to look for: does the community have a lot of people? Do they have land and have they been there for a number of years? That tells me that they actually exist as a community. Read their mission and purpose. Is it in alignment with yours? Could you make a living there? Is it in the part of the country that you're interested in? Is there internal community finances, one that you like, income sharing, independent income? How would you make a living? What are the annuals dues and fees? What's the joining fee? How can you, can you afford it?
Diana gives a vision of the future where community is much more common:
Meredith asks: If you look ahead thirty years from today, what kind of transition and awakenings and new emergings do you think are going to be happening in the co-housing and intentional communities based?
Diana Leafe Christian: Well I think that many, many more people will be living in various kinds of intentional communities, including ecologically oriented ones like Eco Villages in cities and towns out in the country, I think that income sharing communities and independent income communities will be everywhere, and food co-ops and worker owned co-ops will be everywhere. People will be getting around I would say by bicycle and donkey cart and not using petroleum and using all kinds of transportation methods from olden times, people will be growing their own foods in urban areas, on their rooftops, on their balconies and in public parks in the median strips just like in Havana today, and people will be growing most of their food in towns and in rural areas because of the industrial shifts without petroleum.
This podcast is a great overview of intentional communities and a great listen. There are also a ton of community resources in Diana's bio on the site.
Listen to the Ecovillage interview with Diana Leafe Christian (also includes a full transcript).
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Related Posts Tags: cohousing, communes, Creating a Life Together, Diana Leafe Christian, ecovillages, Living Green
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
NPR recently did a three part series on a spiritual community from the 60s called The Source. The Source originated as one of the first natural foods restaurant and grew into a spiritual commune with an ex-marine turned charismatic leader called Father Yod.
Founded by ex-Marine Jim Baker nearly four decades ago, the restaurant quickly drew Hollywood's creative elite; John Lennon, Warren Beatty and Paul Mazursky were regulars. Other young men and women from across the country flocked there in search of something "cosmic," and many never left.
Before and after hours, in meditation classes, Source employees were becoming a spiritual family.
Eventually, around 30 staff members and regulars moved into a mansion together in Griffith Park. In their first year at the "Mother House," the family expanded to nearly 200.
Baker, too, was transforming, from his old self to spiritual leader Father Yod. It was the dawn of a new way of life.
The three part series includes over 20 minutes of audio as well as a slideshow and some interesting notes from the reporter who got swept up in the Source reunion:
Even after the Source reunion I'd attended was over, I couldn't wake up after sunrise. Alone at home, I took up the predawn meditation routine Father Yod developed in the '70s: breathing exercises, followed by chanting and a carefully brewed cup of coffee. After a few weeks, I started noticing a shift in my mental state. Father Yod's teachings unexpectedly began to resonate. Suddenly, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to stop eating meat. So I did.
All in all a fascinating look at communal history.
Listen and read the NPR story on the historic commune The Source.
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
Baby boomers are looking at moving into shared living and communal living according to the article Boomers go back to the commune in retirement on BankRate.com. Normally when a headline has the words 'commune' and 'boomers' in it they usually mean cohousing but this article is really about income-sharing communal groups.
FIC's directory lists about 100,000 people around the nation living in some form of purposely organized community, of which, Laird Schaub says, about 1-in-7 to as many as 1-in-6 fulfill the income-sharing requirement that technically defines them as communes. Two-thirds of these communities, he says, are in rural settings.
The article goes on to discuss a forming community, Heliotrope, being started in Oregon by a couple that used to live at Church of the Golden Rule community in northern California.
A grandfather of six whose resume includes stints as an artist, cook, greenhouse constructor, organic farmer and teacher, Burns says he envisions fellow Heliotrope residents as "average middle-class working people whose lives won't be a whole lot different than the way they live now, except that everything will be shared."
The article also discusses non-income-sharing options and highlights the efforts of the National Shared Housing Resource Center and the efforts of a real eastate broker who helps seniors find compatible cooperative arrangments.
Jim Parker, broker-owner of Access Brokerage Real Estate Services, has been looking into types of communal living at the request of a number of people in their mid-50s who have come to him with questions about the possibility of trying this kind of living arrangement as they age.
"A lot of people end up single in retirement," he says. "They may not be well off enough to just go out and buy a house, and they're looking for other choices besides renting."
For these folks, Parker says, some kind of communal arrangement is a practical alternative.
Read the Commune article at BankRate.com
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Related Posts Tags: aging, communes, Income Sharing, seniors
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
An article posted on the Huffington Post, a progressive news and blog aggregator, suggests communes and cohousing as an option for the current generation's economic and social woes. Looking closer it seems this article comes from Good Magazine.
If it sounds as if I'm calling for a return of the commune, that's because I am--or at least for some alternative to the arid emotional deserts that are our oversized, empty homes. Imagine friends and families living around a courtyard, occasionally sharing meals and keeping an eye on the kids. Cohousing--a movement that's taken off among boomer retirees--aims to do just that. It should go without saying that this way of life has massive environmental benefits. But the case is strong enough if we stick to the question of our cultural and emotional environment.
There are good comments on the article at both sites so its worth checking them both out.
Read the article at Good Magazine.
Read the article at Huffington Post.
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Monday, January 14th, 2008
Indy Media of New Hampshire has a great article on a variety of communes in the Green Mountain area over the past few decades.
Read the article.
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
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