Sharing & Caring | Choosing to Live in Community

Laird Schaub

transcribed by Marsha Ostrovsky

My name is Laird Schaub. I'm 59 years old. I live at Sandhill Farm. It's an intentional community in northeast Missouri that I helped found in 1974.

My interest in community goes back to my time in college, my dormitory living at Carleton College, a small liberal arts school in southern Minnesota. Everyone was required to live on campus in those days. I'm not sure if it's still true. And I found living with peers in dormitory living to be very stimulating. Although we didn't pick each other, what we shared in common was SAT scores, which is not a very smart way to pick who you live with. However, it was fun and I found that good questions were asked. I went through a period of maturing during those years. Both because of the age, seventeen to twenty-one, which would be true for anyone in that age bracket. It was also 1967 to 1971, which was a time of tremendous social unrest on campus. A lot of it was in connection with protest of the Vietnam War in those days. So there was lots of questioning, lots of looking at who you were, where did you come from, where did you intend to go, and wondering what your path would be. I cherish my school years principally for what happened socially rather than academically.

And when I left school I found that my life had slowed down. I worked for the federal government for 2 years in a job for the US Department of Transportation. And while I liked my job and got along with my boss, I was exploring whether a career path with social service work in the government would be interesting for me -- which I decided wasn't. But I was glad for the experience, and I felt that though my life had slowed down and I had lost some of that stimulating edge that I had in college. So community was the end result of a search to recreate what I had found in college without going back to school. How could I get, be in that environment? Intentional community seemed to offer the promise of that. In a way I'm still in it today because I found what I was looking for. A combination of stimulation and support. So on the one hand you were getting asked questions, your edges were being pushed, and it was being done by people who cared about you.

So, building on what I just said around having identified I wanted to recapture that feeling I had in college. I went back to the people I was in college with. There was a group of about twelve of us who met two years after graduating to talk about what could we do together, what would make sense. The traditional path is to think about what it is you want to do in the world, and then build your social support group around that. Perhaps you would do that with a primary partner. However, generally your friends network would be... you either maintain them at a distance or you create new ones in place, in alignment with your job or career. I started to rethink that after two years in Washington, D.C. and thought maybe I should start with the people first and then create the work around that. So I went back to the people I already knew, people that I'd already had connections with and that mattered with me. Out of a group of about twelve, there were four of us, two couples, that were interested in trying to start a community. I had the sense that the other eight were interested enough that if we succeeded in what we did that some of us might join us. It seemed like far and away the smarter idea was to start with the relationships you already had and then create the community from that. I'm not sure that's true, but that was the thought at the time.

I never seriously considered joining an existing community. I just thought it would be easier to get what I wanted by starting my own. I think that's pretty na•ve, because I think starting a community's hard and there were so many challenges I had no idea about. In some way we succeeded simply because we were both stubborn enough and lucky enough and we didn't know what we needed to know. So we weren't overwhelmed by all the challenges just because we didn't know what we were getting into. We managed to overcome the obstacles frequently enough that it sustained us. Then we look back and you see all the different challenges it represented. It looked foolish that we tried to do what we did. But we're lucky enough to succeed anyway.

So the four of us, the two couples, started Sandhill in 1974, and one of the first shocks we ran into was we did enjoy the life and it was this great thing we were hoping for, and nobody that we knew joined us. They would come and visit and they maintained the friendships. However, we got no growth at all out of the existing relationships we had. We had to face this crisis of, if we were going to grow, we had to open ourselves up to strangers, and that was a shocking revelation. Now it seems normal, but back in the mid 1970s that was not what we had in mind.


Well, we have different answers to different parts of how we set up the culture to the community. When it came to economics we were using Twin Oaks as our model. Kat Kincaid had written her book, A Walden Two Experiment, by that time. It came out in 1972. In fact, that was an important piece of literature to get me on the path to considering intentional community as a lifestyle option. That book came out and was excerpted in, I think it was the February issue in 1973 of Psychology Today. I ran into that in a public library, and that really gelled for me: Oh, this could be a lifestyle that would give me the thing that I didn't have after leaving college. I was living in D.C., working with the federal government, and then I went on a field trip with a Unitarian Church group. I wasn't part of that church group but I knew people in it. They wanted to do a trip to Twin Oaks, which is two miles south of D.C, as part to explore the extent to which they were an intentional community as a church group, or a community. I tagged along a day trip and visited there, and it all helped reinforce for me my interest in that kind of life.

They were doing income sharing. That made a lot of sense to me. It wasn't something that I'd had any experience with or had explored, so that idea sold to the two couples that got started. So we started with incoming sharing. And while that wasn't a deeply examined assumption when we got started, we all agreed to it. It's worked well enough for me and everyone that's lived at Sandhill. We've never seriously questioned it since then. So in some ways it's just emulating a model that was already out there and was inspirational. We've continued it because it's worked. Now, when it came down to the economics, we didn't have any clue at all when we bought the land how we would make the money. We had enough savings to buy the land outright and then to also renovate a farmhouse on the property the first summer so that we had enough housing that winter for the two couples. We re-roofed the house, rewired it, and all those kinds of things, but we had no clue really how we were going to make money.

We did a little part-time work for the neighbours. That wasn't very remunerative, but it got us more connected in the local town. It was only be degrees that we got involved in agriculture. And then in the early years one member at a time would occasionally hold a job. Sometimes it was teaching in the area, somebody worked in the local planning agency for a time. These are jobs that might have lasted for several months. I don't know that any of them lasted for more than a year. So there was a little bit hit or miss doing either part-time things or filling in jobs for several months in a row before stepping back from them. Always the money earned by the individuals went into the common treasury. Gradually we started making money through agriculture. We started farming, developed the community as an agricultural farm. We did our own gardening. We would sell surplus food. We would make food products and the number one product for income agriculturally, traditionally, has been sorghum, which is a traditional sweetener in the Midwest and the South. We began in 1977, so that would've been three years after we moved there. And now about one-third of the community's income comes from that one crop of sorghum. So we started that fairly early, but that was still three years into it.

When we got there, we didn't have an idea of what we were doing. So the economics, that is the base in what the work would be, has evolved over the years and was not at all clear at the outset. It wasn't part of the essential dream, how we would do that. Now it's become important to us that we make our money in ways that are consistent with our values, so that doing it with food has been important because we believe in trying to steward the land in an environmentally sustainable way. That means we produce crops in such a way that we're not degrading the soil, but we're maintaining it or increasing its vitality for future generations. And we're able to the do sorghum and our food production in that way, so that feels very consistent with our core value.

The other work now, today, I'd say 60% of the community's income comes from three things. One of them is two people in the community -- I being one and then another member of the community -- do part-time work for the Fellowship for Intentional Community. We do administrative work for that network/organization. I serve as the executive secretary, which is the main administrative function. Another person does the mail-order fulfillment and runs Community Bookshelf in our Missouri office. Both of those are part-time jobs. In addition, I do work as a process consultant, where I travel around the United States and help groups, essentially cooperative groups and nonprofits, about how to function better. How to get along better. How to have better meetings. How to solve problems well together. How to get more of the good parts and less of the bad ones. Then there's another member who does organic inspecting. He travels essentially throughout the Midwest, mostly farms but also processing facilities, and he writes the reports upon which certification is based, or denied, depending on how well they match up with the standards for that certifying organization.

Now those are two good examples of people who do work away from the farm, not because we want to get away from the farm -- that is, I travel to other groups and Stan does the organic inspecting -- because we really like that work and it's an extension of our basic values of trying to promote a cooperative lifestyle throughout the country and one that's sustainable. Stan is a farmer and he's the one that runs our farm at home. He grew up on a farm and he's very excited about our sustainable values and how we do agriculture. Being an inspector of organic operations in different parts of the Midwest means he has the occasion to talk to people about the practices and help them become more sustainable too. So it's extending what we do at home to the people around us and in the area. Similarly for me, although the scope is a little bigger -- I work nationally. In fact a lot of my work is on the coasts rather than in the middle of the country. I'll go to wherever the work is. I am taking what we're learning in intentional community about cooperative group dynamics and making that available to people. So it's the same kind of making available to others the product of what we've learned.

Now there's two aspects. I talked a little bit about our economic arrangements and how we started with that without -- that is, we had a model of income sharing but didn't know how we were going to make money at first. We very quickly... we've always had the model that we would be the kind of community where we all were participants in decisions making. That is we didn't have a central leadership. Every member would have a say in what we did. We agreed at the outset that we would make decisions by consensus, though we made that decision naively. It wasn't because any of us had any had any background in it or knew how to do it. There are many, many things at the outset of our community that we simply jumped into without knowing what we were doing. And then over time we solved enough of the problems quickly enough that we survived and we got to the next level. So today we have a much clearer idea of what the social commitment is, the importance of working through issues that come up. The importance of being available to each other emotionally and not just rationally. The importance of trying to create the best quality life we can for each member as long as we're not violating the basic values of the community. Those kinds of things were not clear to use at the outset. And now they're central to who we are and how we screen people for fit.


You're asking about how does someone find social fulfillment in a relatively isolated community in northeast Missouri with small numbers. Sandhill is a small community by chance, in that we would like to think of it as an intentional family rather than, say, a village. That means we can have daily contact with everyone else. We eat dinner together every night. You can find out the rhythms of what each person is doing, what their mood is, what they've been into, what they've been excited about, what they've been challenged by during the day. We want that kind of rhythm to our lives. There's an intimacy to it, there's a comfortableness and it can be done a lot informally on that basis, all of which suits us very well. There's also a fragility, though, with small numbers. It means that the pool of people available for deep connections, including partners, if that's an interest -- which most people have -- that is limited.

And so there's the question, What is the quality of your life? Now there's a number of things we've done over the years that have helped with that. However, I have to admit that some people have left after otherwise really enjoying Sandhill because it is too isolated or the pool of connections is too small. We do not tend to get a lot of sustenance, certainly from a cultural basis, by building connections with the neighbours. Now there are some important and nontrivial relationships that we have locally. However, they don't tend to extend over broad value lines. We have commitments to be engaged there with each other, caring for each other, liberal political views, which tend to be very different from a large portion of our neighbours. We're not in an antagonistic position around that. However, it's not a sense of joy or connection or fulfillment for most of us.

So the couple things that we've done, there's two main strategies. One of them is... a big thing happened for us about twelve years ago, maybe fourteen years ago, when Dancing Rabbit was looking around for a place to locate. They had given up on California, where they were formed, as a site because of cost of land and because of zoning restrictions. It was very prohibitive to be innovative in construction, in energy use, in California. And the land prices were exorbitant. They were essentially able to buy land in Missouri that was just as fertile and maybe more so than what they would've been looking for in northern California at one-tenth the cost. You just move the decimal point one over. So it was huge capitalization advantage, in addition to which, in our county -- this isn't true just everywhere, and there are some other spots in the US -- there's no zoning. So that meant they had no restrictions at all on how they wanted to build. There is zoning in the county seat of Memphis, but in the rural parts, which is where we are, there are no laws or approval they needed to gain. Some laws tend to be in place to protect property values and they tend to be anti-innovation because people are worried that new will translate into exotic and problematic, and then people won't be able to sell their property for as much. So they wanted no part of that, so being neighbours to us was attractive.

This was of course a new project and it was uncertain how they were going to succeed. However, we made a pitch that we really wanted them as neighbours. That, along with the advantage of low-cost land and the zoning freedom, was attractive enough that they decided to settle as neighbours. The land they bought was purchased in 1997, so they've been there twelve years, I believe. They're now a village approaching fifty people. And so they've become an increasingly important source of increased social milieu for us. We have potlucks every Tuesday night, alternating between our place and theirs. In addition, a third community of Red Earth Farm, which is about four or five years old now, neighbours Dancing Rabbit. So now we've got a pool of about sixty people in three communities or so and we have many relationships that cross the community lines. It doesn't really matter to us. You're friends with who you're friends with. These are people with whom we have a strong value match. Now we're approximating the same kind of social opportunities you find in a large community because if you have a common interest -- whether you want to quilt together or sing in the choir, or you have an interest learning Japanese -- whatever that thing is, you're likely to find two or three other people who are very keen on that. And you don't have to go to St. Louis to find them. Nor do you have to just hope for the accident of that in a small group. So that's one strategy that we pursued intentionally and it's paid off very well.

And I think now we're a very attractive neighbourhood that will probably attract more communities to be nearby, because they will also instantly have the benefit of this greater network and they will have the benefit of instant good public relations we've been able to build up over thirty-five years. So when Dancing Rabbit moved into the neighbourhood and tried to explain to people who they were and what they were trying to do, mostly they were getting quizzical looks until they told people, "Oh, well we're like Sandhill." And that was when people said, "Oh, okay." And that was enough, that was the golden ticket to get off to a good start. We didn't have that advantage as the first community in the area, but over time we've gradually built those good relations that Dancing Rabbit was able to cash in on. That's one strategy and it's worked well. We didn't begin that process until we were 20 years in. That meant there were a lot of years we didn't have another community to drawn on and we were much more isolated.

The second strategy is one that I've pursued, where my interest in outreach in trying to do social change work and spreading the benefits of what I thought we were learning in intentional community, meant that I needed to go on the road. If I just waited for people to come to my community and visit and found what they were inspired by example, which we do do -- that's a very minimal amount of contact. We're out of the way and not on a major beaten path. Northeast Missouri is not a hotbed of alternative living in the country. There are such spots in the US, I think about pretty much anywhere from northern California all the way up to Vancouver, B.C., all along the West Coast, as a density. You can look at western North Carolina. You can look at central Virginia. There's New England, there's pockets. Around Madison, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. There's different places... Ann Arbor, Michigan... you will see concentrations of alternative living. Northeast Missouri is not such a place. Although it's becoming more so, simply by virtue of what the three communities have now created.

My strategy was to go out, and while it started gradually, today I'm on the road half the time. Some very important people in my life, in terms of personal connections and sustaining relationships that add up to a quality life, are based on people that I see not in northeast Missouri, but see in my travels. That would include my fellow board members in the Fellowship for Intentional Community. It includes a lot of the clients that I work with in group dynamics. And now I teach facilitation, and so a lot of my ex-students become friends. So I have a very rich network, only some of which live with me in northeast Missouri.


The Fellowship for Intentional Community, in its current incarnation, got started in 1987. I was there at the beginning of that. There was a forerunner organization called The Fellowship of Intentional Communities, plural, that had started in the late 1940s. The roots of it were World War II conscientious objectors. They tended to be religious-based objectors, pacifists, and they were part of a number of communities based in the Ohio Valley in the mid-Atlantic states. They got together to talk about what could be done to eliminate the occasion for war as a solution to international problems. They objected to war. They went to jail over it in World War II. They were out of jail now, in the 1940s, and wanted to talk about that. I don't know that they got anywhere in particular in a program at that time. However, it became an opportunity for Fellowship to talk about what their experiences were in their communities, and then over time it tended to die out.

By the late 60s or so, the only remnant of that organization was a loan fund that had been capitalized by a donation by someone to be a revolving loan fund for community business. The administration of that loan fund was the one remaining project of the forerunner organization. Then somebody had the idea to use some of that money from the loan fund as a grant to try to revitalize the idea of having a network organization that could do many more things. This was then a completely new cast of characters. While some of the people from the original organization still were around, they weren't actively involved in community networking anymore. None of them were present at this revitalizing meeting that took place in 1987.

That group then changed the name from the FIC, that was Fellowship of Intentional Communities, to Fellowship for Intentional Community, expressly opening the door for those that supported what intentional community stood for, however, didn't live in those communities. And it's been, a majority of our membership has been people who like the model but don't live in it. That's been an important distinction for us to be open to not just people doing it. The program of the original group was basically people who had been involved in outreach and networking, regionally or in piecemeal way all around the country, and could see the possibilities of a national umbrella organization. That was our dream, and our intent always, from the beginning, was to not promote any kind of intentional community. It was intended to promote cooperation and to make available information about who was doing what of all kinds.

There were only three caveats that we had to participate in FIC. One was that you didn't advocate violent practices. Very few communities say they do that; however, some are accused of it, so that becomes an important thing to discuss and examine if it comes into play. That would be number one. Number two was you didn't interfere with individuals' rights to leave a community or disassociate freely if it was no longer fitting for them. You could have criteria for how somebody joined, but if somebody wanted out, that it was okay. Again, this isn't something people say they do; however, there were concerns about the possibility of what might be called cult behaviour. But whether that's brainwashing or manipulating people or making or putting up obstacles in some way, whether it's physical, economic, or psychological, it would make it awkward for someone to leave the group. And the third piece was to be accurate and honest about how you portrayed yourself, so that you didn't say one thing and do another. So if we were providing listing information about a group and there was somebody saying, "Whoa, it's not that way!" then the group was answerable to explain what the gap was about, correcting it if there was a mistake or satisfying the complaint. Or sometimes there's a misunderstanding, and we have to navigate that. So that gave us a basis for conversation if there were complaints.

In that context then, as long as consenting adults are upfront about what they're doing, it's a matter of people sorting themselves according to what's out there, not us telling them what to do. We never intended nor have we ever acted as a "good housekeeping" seal of approval, saying these communities are okay, these are bad. We just say, "This is what's out there and sort it out for yourself." Go and visit them, find out if it's a fit for you, and make your own decisions. We don't tell communities how to operate and if they want to participate they let us know. We also don't list any community that doesn't give us express permission to do it. At any given time, we may have a sense of three times as many communities out there as we list in our book and online, because we never publish information unless the community tells us they're okay with it being published.

There's a variety of reasons why those two-thirds decline. Just to give you a hint of what that means. In part it could be disorganization. There's a lot of groups that have an identity as a community but they don't have any person or a cohesion sufficient to commit to responding to inquiries, and we don't want to invite a lot of people to look at things that then they don't get a lot of answers about. So if they aren't willing to make that commitment, we don't list them. Sometimes they are discouraged and in disarray, so it's questionable whether they'll continue. Sometimes they're in disarray because they're just getting started and don't want the responsibility of handling inquiries from strangers because they're still trying to digest the dynamics they've got with the people that have already been identified. Sometimes their mission or purpose in life is exotic enough that they're afraid that attention from strangers will be more problematic or critical or won't be positive. I don't mean necessarily illegal activities, just ones that are unpopular, and so they want to keep a low profile. Sometimes communities consider themselves full, and they'd prefer to grow very organically and slowly from the network of people they already know and don't want to be bothered by strangers. And they don't have a mission to necessarily witness or make themselves available to strangers to see what they're doing. For all those reasons, a lot of groups decline to be listed.

The primary mission at the outset for the Fellowship was to gather that information and make it available. The first project we undertook was the creation of the communities directory. The first one we did came out in late 1990. We've now produced five, and this summer we're in the process of producing our sixth book. We've also, two years later -- that would be 1992, we became the publishers of Communities Magazine.

So we've been publisher now since that time. Our first issue came out in Ô94, so for the fifteen years it's been a very reliable quarterly. So that's another major way in which we get information out. When the Web became available, we got involved as early as 1994. We got our web domain. We got in early enough that we have a two-letter domain name. Those are long-gone now: ic.org. That's become, from a novelty fifteen years ago, it is now far and away the number one way in which we transmit information and people find us. So we have the directory information available online, and many of our other resources are available there. The other main program activity that the Fellowship does is that we're sitting here in one of the rooms at Rose Hall in Kimberton Hills, which is a Camphill community 30 miles west of Philadelphia. We have our organizational meetings twice a year. We move around the country where they're located. And frequently, maybe about half the time or a third of the time, we will try to do an event in conjunction with our organizational meetings, taking advantage of all of our staff being together, who are experts about community, to do workshops and presentations which the general public is interested in. We had a one-day event here at Kimberton, in this hall, and people come to get information and inspiration of community at these events. So that's a live way that we distribute information, not just through the Web and through our publications. It gives people a taste as well as information about community.

We see ourselves as brokers of information about community of all kinds. It used to be focused strictly on intentional community; however, five years ago the Board made the explicit decision to expand our mission beyond that to providing the tools for creating community where you are using what we're learning in the intensity of intentional community and making it available to people in neighbourhoods, in workplace, in church groups, or in other nonprofits who want more sense of community but who may never seriously consider owning property jointly with somebody else and forming an intentional community. The hunger for more connection, neighbourliness, security in one's life that was characteristic of old-style communities is very prevalent in today's culture. A lot of people feel there's been a degradation of community, of connection, of safety, and they would like to go back to what was characteristic earlier times. However, when they say they want, they don't want to go back to the social hierarchy of those times, or the patriarchy, the caste systems that existed in times where that community was strong. They want it on a more egalitarian basis, where everyone's got a say and there's freedom to choose what aspects you're connected with. So we're trying to figure out how to get the good parts of what came from the past and put it into a new social context.


My experience with intentional communities is broad. However, it's overwhelmingly focused on the United States. I have traveled abroad a little, and I have visited some communities abroad. I'm aware of literature and of course have many friends who've traveled abroad. So information is softer and more secondhand and less sure of my footing, although I'm quite confident of my footing in the United States context. One thing that stands out about the United States is there is no state-supported effort to build communities in a direct sense. Now there are communities that have been successful in getting federal or state money to support certain kinds of experiments, especially technological ones that they get grants for, energy efficient experiments or construction. That generally though means that they've got support to do what they wanted to do rather than they've changed their program to fit where the money is. So I think it's not really been... The money available to support what they're doing hasn't caused them to change what they do. It has made it possible to experiment with what they wanted to do.

There is no money to create state-funded or federal-funded communities, to my knowledge, in the United States. This is all done privately. Now it is much easier, in general, to buy private land and establish communities on them... It's easier to buy land, is what it is, in the United States than it is in many countries. Therefore, if what you want to do with that land is create a community, that's not necessarily an economic barrier. You still have to figure out how to pay it off. However, it's still a doable thing. Now today it's harder than it was 30 years ago, which I mean is the real dollars it takes to buy the land. Land has gone up faster than inflation, is what I'm trying to say, so the amount of your purchasing power it takes to buy and finance the mortgage of a piece of property is a bigger hill to cross or hurdle to jump than it was 30 years ago. However, it's not uncrossable, and it is much more difficult, in my understanding, in other countries.

There was a big surge, for instance, in Germany with certain community experiments because of relatively inexpensive land suddenly available through unification with East Germany. So you'll find a number of communities located on land there. ZEGG (Centre for Experimental Cultural Design), for instance. They have taken over a facility and reclaimed one that was a former Stasi training facility -- which is the East German secret police -- when that all was disbanded. So talk about the challenge of changing the mojo of a piece of property. It boggles the mind. However, there were opportunities available in the early Ô90s just because suddenly all this stuff with the depressed economy was available and there was this pressing demand, because it was so hard to buy land in West Germany. However, that's a one-time thing, and so it is very daunting for European communities to control the land or be able to finance it. However, there is state interest in supporting some of those experiments. And I don't know all the details of that. I can't speak responsibly to it, so I'm not going to attempt to.

In the United States then, I would say there's a higher concentration of intentional communities, to my knowledge, in the United States than in any other country -- excepting, perhaps, Israel. It's hard for me to get a good grip on that, because there, right from the beginning, there was state support in supporting the kibbutzim. Kibbutzim membership is declining today. However, it still probably represents about 2% of the Israeli population. In the United States, the FIC thinks there's about 100,000 people that live in some form of self-identified intentional community. In a country of 300 million, that means 300 hundredths of 1%, which means it's one one-hundredth as likely in the United States that somebody lives in intentional community as lives in one in Israel. That's a huge percentage difference. In Israel, everyone knows about kibbutzim. They may not live one, but they know about it. No one is ignorant of its existence. In the United States, it's still common to talk to somebody on the street and they don't have any idea that intentional communities exist. It might be a vague memory of, Oh, that's something that happened in the Ô60s, wasn't it? That kind of thing. It's not unheard of that you run into people that know about intentional communities, but it's still an undertold story where are our numbers are that small.

There are certain possibilities in the United States, and perhaps Canada as well, but I'm less sure of my footing in talking about Canada, that have supported some kinds of intentional communities historically, especially religious groups, which far and away are the longest lived ones from a historic perspective. I'm going to get back to this question of how that works in a minute.

I want to frame though that one of the things that's special about today's intentional communities movement is the explosion of secular groups, as many, many of the new starts today don't have a spiritual focus. That is, they're not asking for an alignment of their members with a particular spiritual path as a condition of membership. They're not anti-spiritual, it's just that's not what they're focused around. To be an intentional community, you just have to have some sense of common values that you're looking for alignment with. Those could be spiritual. They might be economic, social, political, environmental, psychological, or any combination. It's just that today there is a large fraction that is secular and is not spiritual. Now with the spiritual groups, ones that are avowedly religious, there's the opportunity to be recognized as a religion in the United States, and I'm not sure about how this works in Canada, but under that there are certain relief available to those groups in terms of tax benefits. For instance, their property might not be taxed, and that might be done on the state level. Income taxed might be handled differently and much more easily.

For income-sharing groups in the United States, whether they are spiritual or not, and there are both, there is the possibility of relief from tax burden available through the IRS. There's a relatively obscure tax code called 501(d) -- it's not used by very many groups. But it was made explicitly -- this was in 1954, the last time the tax code was overhauled, to my knowledge -- they created this category to recognize the economic arrangements of monastic orders. So this was meant for more Christian groups at that time. Understanding that income was pooled in those situations and that it was unfair burden to tax the monastery and then tax the friars or sisters that were in it twice. That was considered double taxation, considering with the reality of the way they organized their finances.

So what it allowed those groups to do, which is still available to intentional communities today that are secular in incoming sharing, which includes mine, by the way, of Sandhill Farm... operates under this tax code. We file an informational return as a corporation, but because we have income sharing and are recognized as such, we file a partnership return, which has no liability per se. We then divide all the income on a prorated basis among our members, and then we file 1040s. So this is very powerful for us in a couple ways. First of all, there's not corporate, there's no community liability. Then in addition, while I go out as a process consultant and make considerable amount of money for the community. Stan is an organic inspector and I as a process consultant account for over 50% of the community's income in a fraction of the time we spend doing work in the world. And yet that doesn't have to appear on our 1040s. We would ordinarily have a tax liability. Instead that goes back to the common treasury, we divide it up, and then people who do only domestic work -- might only work in the garden or at home and who don't directly produce income for the community -- they get their share of that income, is reported on their 1040.

The economies we're able to achieve by being a self-sufficient homesteading farm means that when we divide all our income among all the members and report it in the 1040s and subtract our expenses, we don't have a tax liability. So we're not evading taxes. We're doing it in an open way that's recognized by the government, but we live simply enough that we're not contributing taxes to the US government. Given our political analysis that we have strong objections to the way the US government uses tax dollars, it's very satisfying for us to not participate in those things. Now, I want to contrast that, in the case of Sandhill with we do participate in state taxes, which some religious groups may be able to avoid and may be exempt from those, however, as a religious group... We are not a religious group, nor do we make any claim to be. We do participate, and willingly, in state taxes, which go to roads, libraries, hospitals, and that kind of services, which we do participate in and which we believe in. Unlike, say, the war in Iraq, which we do not believe in. So we do participate on the state level and not on the federal level. However, we do it above board and openly in a recognized way. That's an advantage we have and religious groups have been always able to have access to.


It's my sense that most intentional communities exist primarily to create a better life for their members. That's the way they see it. There is a small fraction, which to me is a very important fraction, a very vital one and essential to the existence of the Fellowship and the impact intentional communities may have on the wider culture. There is a significant minority which is activist oriented, by which I mean they have an outreach mission that is not just about the quality of life of its members, but they mean to be an example of a different, and what they think is better, way of living and they intend to influence society around them. This could take different forms. At the simplest level, it is simply being a model and then being open to being seen. Inviting people to come and visit, not as part of the membership process -- although they do that too -- however, explicitly just to let people look and experience what it is like to be in this model and whether or not that's inspirational to them.

However, in many cases it goes much more, it goes beyond that, to either conducting events, or visiting other people, or sharing with others what they've learned in their community, whether that's training or through talks. There's a variety of ways that's done. There may also be a particular political agenda that a community may have that is not about just simply living a different life. It's about trying to influence society in some specific way around a certain cause. Just take the Catholic worker movement. They're typically addressing homeless issues in the way they do it. They do it by providing services to homeless and relieving, in a private way, a burden on society where something's not working. We've got a lot people who don't have homes. There's many reasons why that exists, and so on. They're not necessarily trying to solve the problem. They're trying to ameliorate the suffering, and they take that on in a way that's a profound, fundamental commitment to charity as a base Christian value. They're not trying to preach Christianity. They're trying to live a charitable life and offer that in the world. And that's a political act. So they take on that mission, and there are a hundred or more of those in the United States. They tend to not proselytizing, they tend to be just doing their work. They're almost all in urban centres, well not entirely. Now that's just an example.

There are communities such as Camphill is one, this community we're in right now for this interview. They have a network, and they have a commitment to providing services to people with developmental disabilities. There's Innisfree in Crozet, Virginia. They also do this. There's Gould Farm in western Massachusetts that focuses on people suffering from a variety of mental illnesses. They try to create a therapeutic environment for people to have a better quality of life while they struggle with their health issues of whatever nature, believing that a community environment gives dignity and purpose in their life and is also itself therapeutic in the potential for recovery, and at least quality of life, for those people. There's a commingling of able-bodied, or coworkers is the term they use here at Kimberton, to live with on a day-to-day basis their client base. Then fees from families, and in some cases government agencies that would otherwise be providing for care in other institutions, will support the economies of these service organizations. That's a political act, depending on how you look at it. It's also a service act.

I see community, for myself personally, as a base of operations. That I think this is a place where I try to integrate my daily life, that is, I integrate the values that are important in my life into my daily living, and then it becomes a base for me to be in the world to do things. Because my community's an income-sharing group, it means I don't have to face a personal obligation to make money. My group has to face that. Collectively we have to solve it. So I was able to develop a career, for instance, in process work, where I work with groups, taking what we're learning -- in many cases through a lot of hard-earned bumbling around, not knowing what we were doing -- out into the world and make it available so others won't have to do so much bumbling. In the early years that was a lot of volunteer stuff, for my community had to support me doing that work, because I was not making money in it. But I believed in it, and they believed in providing an opportunity for me to do work that was meaningful, social change work that mattered. We have a commitment to creating that opportunity for each other.

Now it wasn't unlimited, and I couldn't keep doing it forever. However, I had long enough at it, with the support of my community mates, that I was able to find a way to actually turn it into a business that makes money. And now it's the other way around. Now my work is rewarding enough financially, not just spiritually or psychically, that my activities make it possible for others to pursue their interests, and they have the opportunity now to explore whether that's something they want to stay with or that could be a business for them. We are using a model of supporting each other to do work in the world. We don't all do the same work. Stan's excited about spreading word and information about organic farming in the world. I'm excited about spreading word about what we're learning about group dynamics. It's the same kind of commitment -- we believe in doing good in the world, and if a person is inspired to do that, we don't push somebody to do a certain thing. We create the opportunity for them to explore it, find it, pursue it, and then figure out how to develop a business out of it that's sustainable, for the community and the individuals both.

There is this active minority in the movement that is definitely oriented toward trying to make a difference in the world through sharing what we're learning. Not running it down somebody's throat, but trying to make sure everyone's aware that it's out there and how it could be applied to their life. Some people might dismiss intentional communities because, "Oh, that's so exotic. I'll never consider owning property with other people." However, when you talk about how well do you get along well with others, how do you solve problems cooperatively, almost everybody has a sense of how that would be good to know. So if you can take what's learned in that crucible of intentional community and make it available in those less intense but still applicable situations, then there's interest in that. That's just that particular line.

You also have groups that have a political agenda. They want to stand in the world to be anti-materialistic. They want to be a model of how... Like at Dancing Rabbit they've got forty people and they run three cars as a car co-op. That's very radical, because I think the number of registered cars that are on the road today is about equal to the number of people in this country. It's about 1:1, and they're living on a 40:3 ratio. So that's a very radical act. Especially in the country, where there's no public transportation to support what they're doing. There's a number of communities that have an agenda to be a model and want to make it known what they're doing rather than just create a nice lifestyle for their members.

I'll say one thing. The cooperative challenge, at its core -- I don't think this is something that came out in the workshops yesterday or in the event -- to me is, How do you disagree about things that matter, things that are non-trivial, and have that be a good experience? How do you solve that moment so that everyone feels like they were better off for being in the conversation? They feel better connected through the engagement. And the solution, that is, the choice of what you do as a result, has the solid support of all the participants, rather than winners or losers. Or it's a battle. Mostly we approach problems that way. I'm not even talking about manipulation or underhandedness, which also exists. Even a fair fight is still a fight. How do we disagree and not have a fight, and have an interesting and a curious exploration? That's the fundamental challenge of cooperation.

One of the things that's most exciting to me about intentional communities, in terms of its application to the wider culture, is we are learning something about that thing. I think the hunger for alternate ways to make political decisions, to make them even just on the family level, never mind the village level or the neighbourhood level. You can ratchet all the way up to the international level. But first, if we're going to object to making war on the international level, we have to learn how to not make war at home and with each other. That means how do we live on a day-to-day level a cooperative life when we disagree? Nobody needs help when everybody thinks the same way. It doesn't even make any difference how you make decisions. That's not the hard part. It's when we're facing non-trivial differences and doing that moment differently and actually feel more connected afterwards... Once we learn better and better how to do that, then I think we'll have something irresistible to change the world with.