Fellowship for Intentional Community - Communities Directory: The Guide to Intentional Community & Cooperative Living

INTRODUCTION 1 Welcome
3 How to Use this Directory
6 In Print, Online, and Why the Communities Directory Needs Your Help
7 Acknowledgements ARTICLES In Community Intentionally
14 Red Carpets and Slammed Doors
19 Words of Experience: Starting a Community
22 Common Fires Top Ten Hard-Earned Tips for Community Success A Useful Tool for Founders and Seekers: Spectrums
29 Cults and Intentional Communities: Working Through Some Complicated Issues Finding a Healthy, Happy Cohousing Community that Fits Your Values Off-Grid, and In Community: Tis Easier to Find than to Found
36 Leaps of Faith
40 Building Community and Learning from Failure MAPS About the Maps
44 Worldwide Intentional Communities Maps
60 Key to Communities by Country/State/Province CROSS-REFERENCE CHARTS About the Cross-Reference Charts Communities Cross-Reference Charts
COMMUNITY LISTINGS About the Community Listings
150 Community Listings
399 Forming Community Listings RESOURCES About the Resources
566 Community Search Resources
567 Books and Videos
571 Communities Magazine Issues
576 Legal Structures for Intentional Communities in the US
587 Buying Your Community Property
591 Sustainable Living: Energy and Climate Change, Natural Building, Renewable Energy, and Permaculture
596 Community Education Resources
601 ResourcesforFacilitation,ConflictResolution,GroupDynamics,andOrganizationalDevelopment
602 Organizations and Events for Community and Cooperation Can We Help You Find Something? T hank you for picking up this copy of the Communities Directory, published by the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC).

If youre reading this, youre probably in one of three groups of people: 1. This whole intentional community thing is brand new to you. Youve probably heard about the communes in the 60s, or maybe the back-to-the-land movement, but until recently, you didnt know anything like that still existed. 2. Youre vaguely familiar with intentional communities. You may have gone on a tour of one or two, read some articles, visited some websites.

You defi nitely resonate with the concept and youre either satisfied with appreciating them from afar, or youre interested in finding out more. 3. Youre very familiar with intentional communities. Youve visited a few and have friends in one or more, or you lived at one or more for some period of time. Youre aware that there are a number of different kinds of intentional communities, and this isnt the first time youve heard of the Fellowship for Intentional Community. No matter which category youre in, youll get something out of reading the Communities Directory.

Browsing the listings, charts, and maps is fascinating whether your interest is academic or pragmatic. Likewise, the articles can be practical guides for living in a community, a captivating accounting into this strange yet reassuringly human world, or useful perspective for whatever kinds of cooperative, community-oriented work you might be doing. What Is an Intentional Community?
The FIC defines an intentional community as a group of people who live together or share common facilities, and who regularly associate with each other on the basis of explicit common values. In other words, its a group of people who share things because they want to live a similar lifestyle and pursue a common ideal or vision. Conjure up your image of a traditional village and youll have an idea of what a lot of people are going for. Obviously, in our modern world, its a lot more complicated than traditional village life, but the aim is to have an integrated, interconnected, interdependent life with others that provides social and economic benefit, as well as a place to live out other values, such as sustainability, social justice, or spiritual/religious tenets.

Intentional community is an inclusive term that isnt owned by anyone. Anyone who wants to identify as an intentional community is free to do so, and some groups that we would identify as intentional communities dont choose to use that label. Intentional communities come in a wide variety of forms, and theyre all welcome to list themselves in the Communities Directory provided they dont do two things: 1. They must not advocate violence.
2. They must not restrict the ability of their members to leave or to contact people outside the community. Globally, there are thousands of intentional communities, with hundreds of thousands of people who live in or have lived in them, have spent significant time in them, or are strongly affiliated.

There are also numerous organiza tions working to network and support these communities. This constitutes a movement, which we usually refer to as the Communities Movement. Stepping into the Communities Movement is like visiting another world or a parallel universe. As some communards like to say, riffing off the popular protest slogan from the early 2000s, another world is not only possible, its happening. And, as youd expect when visiting another world, its not uniform. There are an incredible number of different kinds of communities, from rural to urban, from secular to religious, from small collectives of a handful of people to communities of hundreds, from consensus decision-making to charismatic leaders, from Luddite to technophilic, from income-sharing to individual financ es.

They come with various labels: cohousing, ecovillages, communes, and co-ops. These labels tend to indicate certain things, particularly about ownership, but also about how they prioritize their core values, as well as cultural and organizational affiliations. What Is the Fellowship for Intentional
Community?
The FIC works to develop and promote intentional communities and the evolution of cooperative culture. Our job is not only to provide the tools and resources necessary to successfully create and live in intentional communities, but also to act as a hub in the movement, to foster the connections and relationships that help individuals and groups feel that they are part of something larger and have the moral support necessary to do what often seems like the impossible work of creating community. In addition to the Communities Directory, the FIC publishes