Parts I-IV transcribed by Marsha Ostrovsky
Part V transcribed by Anne Ennis
In some ways what we do in the Fellowship, if someone says, I want to start a community -- our first job is to pour a five-gallon bucket of cold water over their heads. We try to talk them out of it, because it's harder to succeed at that than it is to make it successful, joining an existing one. Thank God some people don't listen to us and insist on starting one anyway, because we need more communities. It's just harder to succeed.
I want to talk about, I'm identifying people who start a community are what I'm going to call a pioneer profile. They have to be pioneers -- there's certain things you have to do to start -- versus what you'd call a settler profile, what that looks like, meaning being part of an ongoing, functioning, healthy community. Let's walk through this list a little bit. A pioneer profile. You're going to need to enjoy starting things and the challenge of that. There's a chaos that goes with that. There's an unsettledness. There's a wide openness. There's an opportunity, a blank slate. You wake up in the morning, Oh boy, I get to create, rather than, I have no idea what I'm doing and there's so much to do. So does that feel overwhelming or exciting? Those are important elements. You need to have enthusiasm for being creative to be a successful pioneer.
That's not necessarily what you need to be a successful settler. You've got to be very committed to actualizing things, not just talking about things. You have to be willing to implement, you've got to roll your sleeves up. You've got to do the things you talk about. It doesn't mean you don't talk about it. You also have to do it, because there's very few people in the beginning to do the work. It's not just, Oh, I'll manage it from a desk and everybody else will do the work, no. You've got to have doers to make the thing happen. And there's a number of communities who have a great vision that fail because they don't have enough doers. You've got to have doers. Whereas you can have fewer of those roll up the sleeves and do people when you're in the maintenance mode. But in the beginning you've got to have that down.
Now, the interesting thing is, you can have that dynamism in the beginning phases and a willingness to jump in because you've got small numbers. It's got to happen now or you'll lose the inspiration. You can be celebrated for your decisiveness and creativity and your get-it-done nature, and then get creamed for that same quality once you're in the settler stage, because people will want to slow down and be clearer about it. Did you check it all out with everybody? Whereas there's very few people to check it out with at the beginning. And if the thing will die if you don't do it sometimes. Later on, that same quality will not be celebrated. You have to understand that that's going to make a shift.
There's going to be a need among your pioneering group that some portion of those people are inspirational, not just through their actions but by their personality. They're going to have to draw people in. People are going to want to live with that person or these people. There has to be a quality not just that I have, it's something in writing that's good, but there's actually going to be a personal connection that people will want. I want to be with that person. There has to be that dynamism. That's not as important in the settler phase, but in the beginning there needs to be a charisma. Not in every person, but it has to be present in the group in order to make that carry through. There needs to be a stubbornness and a dynamism and a willingness to labour in the chaos in the beginning. It's not necessary later. You have to ask yourself is that present either in yourself or in your group in order for this to succeed. Get that? All right.
I'm going to move on a bit and talk a little bit about what I call "queen bee syndrome". There's a particular challenge to cooperative leadership. Communities are cooperative ventures. They're not just business ventures. There is a business aspect, but there's a way in which you're trying to do this, building a relationship that's a cooperative dynamic. Now exactly how you make decisions could look different ways. Essentially, though, communities are cooperative ventures. That means you're trying to do something together. It's not done to people, it's done with them. You have this dynamic thing. So again, this is another version of, what is inspiring at the outset about being a leader, and your dynamism and you're getting stuff done -- I think, Thank God you were there to get stuff done -- you need to be able to let go of some of that as you move to a more stable position into the ongoing settler phase. It's got to be possible to create room for other leaders to come forth. If it remains you, it's going to get brittle. You're going to have to be able to let go and expand in a way that it will be you, maybe, or a very small number of you's at the beginning, and then as you get successful, you have to diffuse that. You have to plan your exit as a leader.
If you're reinforcing it and nobody's ever quite good enough to replace you, it's gonna not work. Then you're not going to have a stable community. People could be very good at the front end and not so good at the back end. There are any number of stories in the communities movement of ousted leaders who were essential to the startup of the community and who couldn't make the transition to the shared leadership that was necessary for the stable phase. So you have to understand what do I need if I'm going to be in a leadership position as a starter -- and you're going to need to be. Starters have to have leaders. You can't just say, I'm going to build a community and wait for the leader to build it for me, that's not going to work. You're going to have to be in a leadership role and you're going to have to figure out how to plan your transition. Does that make sense?
It's harder because the kinds of rewards you get in the regular society for business success -- you can get the salary, get the car, there's all these perks and recognition and celebration – and you can be a leader forever in that model. You have to make a transition to be successful in cooperative communities. You can't stay in that same place. A lot of groups get started and not understand that's part of the deal.
One of the reasons that I think it becomes imperative to start a community rather than join one is because you're location specific. That is, there are people -- maybe you need to care for your mother and she's nearby and you can't be physically be apart from her -- that's fine. I'm not here to talk you out of your equation and what's important to you. Or there's a climate need -- you've got to be in a place that has a certain humidity or temperature range because of health reasons or whatever. For whatever reason, you have a narrow range of options that are going to really work for you geographically. And there's no place in that circle that works for you, to join. So if you want community you're going to have to manifest it there. Sometimes that's part of the deal. The wider the range you can have about what can work for you -- pare it down -- what is essential to me and what do I want out of the community experience... The wider that range, then the more likely it is that you'll find something that's out there already that can work for you. And maybe you don't have to start it.
What are the things I need to face when I think about joining a community, not necessarily starting one? This is true for both. There's many spectrums that you can look at with values. Let's suppose -- one of the key questions any group's got to face -- what makes a group an intentional community is that you're specific about why you're together. You have certain values you stand for and you're looking for people who agree with those values. And you want to make a life together around people who have that agreement. So you'll have a number of common values. It won't be an infinite list. Maybe there's six or ten, whatever. So let's suppose one of them is this one I just mentioned about environmental consciousness. These people here, they live on tree bark and air. They have no impact on the environment at all. That's extreme. Minimal impact, total minimal impact. And over here is everyday life. We're not paying any attention to environmental consciousness at all. We live our life. We all have three cars. We drive everywhere. We all have maximum packaging on our food. No consciousness and extreme consciousness -- whatever that means. Suppose you're looking at this as a continuum about environmental qualities. So you've got this band. So suppose your community talks about it and you decide, Well, where we are is here, somewhere on the spectrum. And we can define what we mean by that. Like we have 0.5 cars for the number of members we have. We carpool everywhere. We never drive anywhere unless there's three people in the car. We recycle everything. Whatever that means. I don't need to get into the details. But you've thought about it, you've had a conversation, and you think you're here.
One of the things that's important, first of all, is defining where you are, where you want to be. But there's another question that groups don't often really think about that's very important when you're talking about whether you're going to match up with people. In addition to where on that spectrum you are, you want to look at how much flexibility from the ideal you can tolerate. The point being that very few people are exactly at this place on the line, and you don't need everybody to be identical. That's an impossible standard anyway. What you want to know is where somebody else is, do you overlap in your tolerances? Do you have sufficient deviation that you overlap? Because if you do not – if somebody else who's thinking about moving into your community is – you may have eight other values that you match up on, but they're over here and their range is like this. You don't have an overlap. I will guarantee in that situation you will irritate each other because nobody will be comfortable wherever you are. One person will be too far to the right, the other's too far to the left. You need to know whether there's an overlap of tolerance on an issue.
If you're interested in the thought of living with other people, you need to know what's crucial to you, and right now you may get it that it's an important question but you don't know your answer. Then I would say the very best strategy for exploring that is to get the directory, look at who's out there, try to find the descriptions and the values that these groups stand for. Find a group near you that's doing something that's pretty close. You say, This sounds good to me. I'm drawn to this. I have a draw to this. Spend time there. Go visit them. Don't sell your house. Don't quit your job. Find a time to go on a vacation or on a break or something. Low risk. Ask to visit. Don't just go there for an afternoon. Spend a week there. And then notice, Do I like it or don't I like it? Listen to your belly, not just your head.
You have to live in a place to know. Well it's like vacationing. Every time I go somewhere, Oh! I want to live there. I'm moving there. You really have to live in a place.
Well spend time and then notice your responses is what I'm saying. And then you'll find, what you'll find is probably shifts in two directions. Things you maybe thought were important. You know, suddenly it's like you know what, that really doesn't matter that much to me. Or the reverse. It may turn out that you really do care about where they squeeze the toothpaste. So now you know. So now you know what questions you need to ask when you're screening for fit.
They don't come to boondocks of Missouri unless they already like our values statement. They don't just wander in off the street. So that part's usually already solved. If they didn't like what we stand for, they wouldn't even show up. But what we screen for after they come is mostly social skills, communication skills. The things you were mentioning. How well do they listen? How do they handle critical feedback? How do they solve problems where there's non-trivial differences? Those kinds of questions. How do they relate to conflict? How do they relate to emotional sharing? Those answers are crucial to us. We figured if you don't have a certain skill -- maybe we'd really love to have an auto mechanic, so we said, Do you do auto mechanics? That's not that important. You can learn to do auto mechanics. But we find it's harder to learn good communication skills if you don't come with them. So that's what we screen for more than anything else.
In our case, we make sure that people who want to live with us attend a meeting of the community. Then we can ask them what they saw or how they experienced that, and that tells us volumes. We've learned to be able to sort people ninety-nine% accurately after one meeting just by having them tell us what they saw and what they experienced out of that meeting. We've been at it for 35 years, so we've got a lot of experience at this. We didn't start that smart, but we got smart. And so for you as a seeker, or for anyone in the audience, thinking about whether this is a good fit for me, I would do the reverse. I would say, I want to see a meeting. And if the group says, oh we don't let visitors see a meeting, that would be the wrong answer for me. It's like, why wouldn't you want me to see the meeting? I promise to just listen and not jump in, but I want to see your dynamics and how you work issues. That would be very important to me as a prospective.
How much do you want to be in each other's lives? Communities are in a wide spectrum around that. So under the title of "intentional community", there's many, many offerings. There are communities I know that for years, for more than a decade, met on an average more than five hours a day to talk about dynamics in their group. I'm using that as an extreme end, that's how far -- and they loved it, they did this on purpose. That wasn't going to the salt mine. They loved that. That was called Ganas, in Staten Island, New York. And they don't do it quite the same way. But for more than a decade that was their life. Very much involved in each other's lives. I know groups that have a potluck once a month, and they call that intentional community. Very loose knit, very low volume of interaction. They share property taxes, they have some common roads and stuff, but people live their own lives, their own economy. They're kind of neighbours in a friendly neighbourhood, and they call that intentional community. So I'm using that as two extremes. They have very different answers to How much am I in each other's lives? And you need to personally answer what is your answer to that question and then try to find the fit with the place that you're looking for, or the place you're trying to start.
This is a very important question. A lot of groups forget to answer that. I know that some groups -- and it's tragic in some ways -- they get all involved in design and financing, and then they build the houses. You know, multimillion dollar projects. And then from that say, Okay, we'll eat dinner together every night. And then they go, Whoa, I was thinking maybe once a week. They had different answers and they forgot to ask that question. You don't want to discover that ten million dollars later. That's an early question, not a late question. But you don't always know you should ask it. Our job in the fellowship, if you will, is to know what are the important questions to ask. I mean, there's lots of answers. But if you don't ask certain questions, you can be certain that the ambiguity will bite you in the butt. You'll have a problem. So I'm trying to give you some sense of what those are.
This is a trap a lot of forming groups get into is that they think, Okay, I want to start a community. I'm not so foolish as to do it by myself. I need help. I know that. So I will wait until the others come and we will collectively define the vision and the mission and the structure. Because that will be important for them to have a sense of ownership. They want to be on the ground floor -- that's an attractive thing. But the problem is you'll never succeed because people don't know what you stand for. That's the trap. The key is to put out the clearest message you can about what you want, and then be as clear as you can about your flexibility. You don't have to be inflexible. If it's negotiable, then negotiate. But don't hide. Don't sell out to get somebody to join you when you really don't join them in that thing. You have to know where your boundaries are. And be honest with it. You know, you're a great person, but this isn't a good fit for us to be on the same project. The universe may be telling you, You know what, this isn't going to work. You aren't going to get what you want. And then I'm sorry, but that may be the answer. But you might as well know that rather than try to pretend to put the square peg in the round hole. That's not good.
So I would say if they have issues -- Oh, you're the dictator. I would say, No, I have a vision I'm trying to inspire and here's where I'm flexible and here's where I'm not. Join or don't join. And then your action will tell whether you're a dictator. In other words, how well you creatively disagree with people. Do you always have to have your way? You're going to find yourself alone eventually if that's your position. There are some communities that function simply on force of personality. And individual could be so attractive that people want to be with that person. And there are models of that. We in the Fellowship believe as long as consenting adults are making the choices, it's like they can do whatever they want. Just be honest about it is what we say. And then let people sort themselves out however they want.
One of the key challenges in communities in general is having a healthy model of leadership in a cooperative setting. And I don't mean the cases we were just talking about where the group agrees, one person decides. I don't have any animus about that. If that's what you want to do and everybody's on board, that's fine. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a group that's meant to have, they're trying to have, a cooperative leadership where everyone has a say. Suppose they're working by consensus. There is a mistaken view, in my view, that consensus, or everyone has a say, means no leaders. That'll kill you. That's ridiculous. Everybody isn't equally articulate, everyone's not equally skilled. There's all kinds of reasons why equal means opportunity in say, but it doesn't mean everyone has equal weight in a given situation. It'll change depending on what the topic is or what the area is. It's probably not good if you're relying on a single person over and over again. However, what we tend to do is we all come into the cooperative experience out of an adversarial hierarchy culture. We all have personal experience of leadership abuse. And so we bring that abuse into our cooperative experience. And we're very leery of people who are in leadership. Why are they stepping forward to be in that leadership? And we tend to be very good in the cooperative movement at lopping off the heads of our leaders. There tends to be all the responsibility and none of the rights that go with it in a traditional culture.
So what happens in that environment if you don't think about it and work on this issue -- some do, but your community experience is not unusual, what you're describing -- what they then do is they develop passive leaders who don't become dynamic because the dynamic people get creamed. To be a leader and step forward and raise issues, ask hard questions, is the same as wear the shirt with the bull's eye on it. You're going to get arrows. You're going to be plucking out arrows all day. And you're not getting celebrated for it. You're just getting creamed for it. All right. So what happens in that culture over time is the leaders get more and more passive. They wait, they have meetings, they do polls, they see which way the wind is blowing. Everything is very cumbersome and changes becomes harder and harder to make because change becomes suspect. Whereas, ironically, they started out with we're going to create something different. But then the culture becomes, Over my dead body will that happen again. And a lot of it in my view, my analysis of it, is they've not solved the leadership question of how do you develop healthy models of cooperative leadership. Because you can't give up the right to criticize the leader. That has to be okay. However, there also has to be a balance of appreciating and supporting the leader when they're operating within what was asked of them and what we want. And communities tend to be really bad at that. That's a broad stroke and there's counter-examples. But this is a real challenge in the movement. We will not create dynamic social change in the world unless we solve the problem of how to have healthy models of cooperative leadership.
So the challenge that I mentioned at the very beginning around this is that, what you are celebrated for in the beginning may be something you're criticized for later on, when you move into the settler phase. So you need to think, right from the outset, if I'm going to help start a community, can I make that transition? Can I get myself out of a job in a way that the community's still vibrant, new people have stepped forward, and I can step back? How will I handle transition? So don't go into it without an idea about how you're going to do that later. Otherwise you'll paint yourself into a corner. And that's not going to be good.
Or, the other side of it is -- and this gets back to the question of screening, thinking about communication issues -- when you go around, one of the things I would look at as a key litmus test, and it gets back to the comment over here about the communities in New York, is how does the community handle power issues? Do they even talk about it? Or is it more like, Oh, we don't have leaders here. That's a bad answer. Or, We have no power issues. Well you're not paying attention, as far as I'm concerned. Everybody's got power issues. The question isn't whether you've got them, it's how well you deal with it. And one of the questions is, Can you talk about it? Is there conversation? What is your understanding of power in this community and how it will be used? There will be a power gap. Any group of any size is going to have a power gradient on different issues. It could change and the complexity and so on. But how do you talk about it, how do you work with it? But if they don't talk about it at all, that's a bad sign.
A leader is someone who is inspiring and helps focus energy. Leadership can show up in, the group you're talking about, who's good at vocalizing the conversation or who's asking the right question? That's a leadership function. Now there's a leadership in the sense of someone who energizes the group to take action or invites it into... This is okay… There's always a choice point when you're making a decision. Have we gathered enough information to act? At what point do we know enough? Because you never know everything. You have to decide when do we know enough to act. The person who leads, there's a leadership function to bringing them into action. That's a step. I'm not talking about abuse here, I'm just pointing out that's a need. The group can't just sit around waiting for somebody else to step forward. Somebody's got to take the first step. That's a leadership function. And that can also be around, There's an energy aspect of this. The people who help the group feel together, cohesive, help the flow and the connection, which is different than the decisions and actions. That's also a leadership function. So the inspiration is a big piece. Sometimes it's through doing. Sometimes it's through speaking. Sometimes it's through a way of being. All these are leadership aspects.
You have a choice of the kind of problems that you're going to find when you do join or starting. So let me just lay out what some of this stuff is. If you start a community, one of the advantages you get is, Hey I don't have to worry about whether I fit in. I could do it my way. If you're inspirational and there's a small number of people, you have a large say in how you set up the community, how you structure it, what your answer is to how much I want to be in each other's, people's lives. You can make it your way. The flip side of that is you've got to do everything. It's a very small number of people who've got to make it all up. The good news is today, with the Internet and all the information available, there's a lot of models out there. So you can use somebody else's answers as a point of departure. You don't have to start with a blank slate. So there's help. However, you've still got to come up with answers for everything. And of course if you join something, they've already got answers. You don't have to solve those problems so long as you think they have a reasonable answer for you, for that. But you don't have to make it up.
Here's some more. A disadvantage of starting a community is that you have to make a culture from scratch. You're making up something that's different from a traditional choice and you've got to create it. If you join a community, the challenge is you have to adapt to the existing culture. You can make changes over time, but it's a very poor idea to think, Okay this is good raw material. I'll join here and then I'll change them to my way of thinking. That's a bad strategy. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it's a setup for being disappointed. They're not looking for you to save them. They're looking for you to join them as a community. So you're going to have to adapt. That's a different challenge than making it up from scratch. So you can pick your poison. I would say one of the key questions for whether or not it's a good fit for you to start a community is, do you feel like you've got to do it?
I was telling a story about my wife, Ma'ikwe, and she felt for ten years she had to do it. I made no attempt to talk her out of it. That was in her to do it, she needed to try. She's over it now, but for that time -- and like I say, it's a good thing there are people who want to start a community because we need them. However, it is a daunting task, and there's a lot of failures. I mean, I want you to be really serious about it. Do you feel compelled, is a serious question if you're going to start a community, because you're going to need that drive to carry you through the hard spots. On the other hand, the challenge for you if you're joining a community -- see, there's two main questions you're trying to solve. This book and the work that the fellowship does is great for one part of it, which is What do they stand for, What are they trying to do in the world? This tells you that. But that's only part of it. The other part is, do you like the people? Is the chemistry right? This book won't help you at all with that part. That's where you have to go and visit and spend time. Am I drawn to these people? Or this is doing nothing for me. That's an important question and this won't help you with that.
One of the things that you're going to face when you start a community is that you're not going to have a break at first, for a while. Maybe years. You're just never off duty. You've just got to be thinking about making that thing happen and every person in that small group, that's a founding group, is crucial to actually creating a successful group. On the other hand, if you join a group, you have almost no power at the beginning. There might be some exceptions, but it's like you're the new kid on the block. It's like you don't know anything. You don't have any credentials. And so it's going to take you a while to build to a place where your say has got more weight and you've got more influence. So are you willing to wait? You've got influence right away in a starting group. But you have to do everything. And then in the new group you've got the benefit of something that's already existing, that's already a proven thing. However, for you to have influence and actually be able to be a voice for change and improvement, you're going to have to wait.
When you start a community, one of the advantages you get is that you start with people you know. When I started Sandhill -- I was part of the group, there was only four of us -- my vision was, I don't want to join with some strangers, I want to start with people I know. That seemed obvious to me, and that's an advantage. You already have some background, you have relationship, you have nuance that you get to work with immediately, right out of the block. Where if you join an existing group, these are people who are unknown to you. You're going to have to do the investing to find out what are my potentials for close relationships and building the kind of connection I'm hoping for. It was much more attractive to me to start with people I know. The other advantage, though, that I wasn't thinking of so much to begin with back 35 years ago, is that you get to start with a structure you know. There's a thing in place. You get to look at it, experience it, and if it's a good fit, it's like, I can thrive in this environment. And if it exists, you get the benefit of that, of vibrant, existing culture that's in place, that's already, by your own estimation, a good fit for me. That's a big one, that's a big start. So that compensates for the fact that the people are new. You have to decide what's more valuable.
You might think, well where does somebody like me stand who's overlooking the whole movement. And what do we need societally? It doesn't really matter. You can't really make a bad choice. We need more communities, and we need more robust communities. So wherever you are, if this seems like a good fit for you, do it as far as I'm concerned. I don't think there's a good and bad here. It's just that you're more likely to have trouble getting to a successful ending with a start than you are to have a happy life by joining an already thriving community. You're more likely to not get to the finish line starting a community. There's more stumbling blocks to successfully building a vibrant community from a start than there is adding your good energy to an already existing, healthy community. We need both, so you can't make a bad choice in terms of the world's needs.
Any idea of the failure rate?
I think, I do. My off the cuff remark is it's like starting new restaurants. That it's most of them don't live to see their second birthday. There's a lot of failures. Now, there's mitigating circumstances that make the success rate better today. Two things in particular. One is, in this world of the Internet... When I started in 1974, it was a totally different world. It was very hard to find out what was out there. Or how people were doing what they're doing. Today it's pretty easy to find out. Just spend time at a keyboard. You can ask questions. There's all kinds of documentation. So there's a lot of models or templates that have been successful available for you to look at. There's things like these books that didn't exist then to help you think about the right questions. It doesn't mean you're going to have good answers, but it does mean you're not so much in the wilderness. So there's much more information that's helpful available today, and that helps a lot.
Now the other thing is, the culture's changing and that's there's more openness to ask for help today than there was a generation ago. For instance, one of the things I do, and I worked with Joel's group several years ago -- interestingly, in this room, about five years ago, that's kind of eerie -- I am a process consultant. I work with groups around how to get the good stuff and not so much the bad stuff. What does that mean? What are these key questions? How to navigate tension in the group. I'm doing a workshop this afternoon on conflict and what does that look like and how can that be actually a good thing rather than a problem? Anyway, I do that work, and so when I started doing it, it was kind of exotic and unknown to be a process consultant in the cooperative world. Now there's a lot of people that put out a shingle in this area and it's not unusual for groups to think, Oh, we can ask for help. We don't have to do this on our own. Whereas a generation ago, people didn't ask for help. Today, they do. There's a willingness to learn what others have already learned rather than reinvent the wheel. That better culture makes it more likely that groups will have soft landings rather than crash landings. For both of those reasons I think there's a higher success rate today than there was. But there's still a lot of failures.
So let's take the second question, what the overall movement looks like. I think the best way to put this out right now is, the directory that is in print on the back table came out in 2007 and it lists...840, something like that, North American intentional communities. The one we're going to print in September, 2 years later, was going to list 1400. Now a lot of those are new ones and doesn't necessarily mean stable, but we've never seen in the 22 years that we've been chronicling this and managing this field of information such a large jump so something's going on. I think partly it's a response to the economic conditions but, it's more complicated than that. We would say, our take on it is, there was a wave of interest in intentional community, again a lot of this is anecdotal broad strokes, '65 - '75 is the surging time, this is the Age of Love or whatever you want to call it, there's a lot ofanarchistic things. I mean my community and Caroline's were just starting in the tail end of that wave, '72 in her case, '74 in mine, Harvey's was started in '74. We were all contemporaries...
From 1975 - 1990, there was a drop in interest, doesn't mean there was no interest, just was a lull, it was a decrease. And then around 1990, things picked up again; we are still in that wave. There was a plateau I would say around 2000 where we weren't seeing the increase we were but we weren't seeing a decrease, it flattened off, and now we've gone up again. So we are still in that wave in a second surge of a long wave, 19 years is a long wave and it doesn't look like it is decreasing, it's increasing right now. Now, what does that mean? You have to keep in mind... reality check. The number of people that are currently living in a self identified intentional community of some form represents a hundred thousand people, that's our guess. And if you think of a country of three hundred million, that's three-hundreths of one percent, it's tiny. If we double, we're still tiny. Contrast that with say, Israel, where the kibbutzim are shrinking, but they still represents about 2% of the population; that's way different than three hundreths of a percent. That's one hundred times as much of a percentage of the population. In Israel, everyone knows about kibbutzim, I mean, it is a non-starter. In this country it's like, What, they still exist?!
I mean basically, we are a blip, we are not even a category on the census forms. However, we think we are very important out of proportion to our numbers because we are the harbingers of culture. We safeguard it, we are the incubators, we are the laboratories where we work at these issues: What does it actually mean to cooperate? How do you actually do that? And that's relevant, not just because that so many more people are going to live in intentional community, because if you ask that question instead to just anybody on the street -- this is not a random sampling -- you ask them, "Do you have as much community in your life as you'd like?" Not intentional community, but community, now you have an audience of a hundred million. Very different than a hundred thousand and that is something that we can speak to. We are important because we are the models for which that one hundred million are going to succeed or not succeed, by finding the better world they seek. We have the tools for inspiration to make that happen and that's our legacy, something we bear that proudly. Even though our numbers are very small, we are important to the future.
