I'm Tony Sirna and I live at Dancing Rabbit EcoVillage, and I am 36 years old. I've lived here for almost 13 years now.
Dancing Rabbit got started in 1993. There was a group of us living in a student co-op at Stanford, called Synergy. And so, we were already living in community, experienced with making decision by consensus and living cooperatively. We wanted to do something that would change the world. We were specifically focused on ecological living, and someone got the idea that the way to do that was to create a full scale village, focused on sustainable living, and to be a demonstration project in that way. Because we felt anything smaller than that wouldn't really be full featured, and we didn't really have plans for anything larger than that, that seemed ambitious enough. And it was interesting, because we weren't using the term "eco-village" at the time; it wasn't really in the common usage. And yet, people were coming up with exactly the same ideas at the same time, like there was some sort of cultural zeitgeist that we had all tapped into. And so, we were calling it "eco-town" and we came up with the name, "The Dancing Rabbit Project", which is sort of a long story.
Our first public presentation was in 1993 at Earth Day. We got together there, we did a presentation, and then after that we started having regular potlucks and monthly meetings, and email lists. That was sort of a new thing people had at the time. We came together as a group during those years, and then it was in '95 that some of us decided to reallymake it happen, we had to start living together again. By that point, we had graduated and had attracted people who weren't part of Stanford community, and so we actually moved in together in a place in Berkeley, California. We lived there for a year and then we started having meetings as often as 4-5 times a week, and so that really accelerated the process. At that point we were working on clarifying our vision, working out our membership structure, doing a lot of planning, looking for land, figuring out what were the priorities for buying land. It was in '96 that we left California, we had decided that we weren't going to be able to get affordable land in California that didn't have restrictive and zoning and building codes. So, we started looking around the country, and specifically, in the Midwest and Northeast. We wantedto be near an existing community and we had visited Sandhill Farm in our many trips to other communities to try and learn from what was already out there. And we decided to move out to Scotland County because it met all of our criteria.
Well, one of our first steps was to look around at other communities because we figured, if there was something out there that we could join, we wanted to do that. And that is something I would recommend to anyone who talks about forming a community, because it's a lot of work. And so we suggest, if you can find another that meets your needs before starting one. We visited Twin Oaks in Virginia, which has a lot of similar values, and we adopted a lot of different values from there. We really like some of the land-use planning that they did; how some of the buildings are clustered. They do a lot of ecological stuff. They grow a lot of their food. They have industry and business on-site. But we decided against the fully income-sharing model from very early on. The reason for that was we didn't think that we could grow to the size we wanted to, if we were purely income sharing. As far as we could tell, in this country at least, there had been no groups that had grown to over 100 people with the income-sharing model, as side from the Farm (which had its boom and bust in the 70's and 80's). We thought we would be more attractive to a wider swath of people and more accessible to the mainstream if we accepted an economical model that was more diverse and allowed for people to have their own private homes, their private finances and things like that. So, a lot of inspiration from places like Twin Oaks and East Wind, but we didn't think that income-sharing was the model for Dancing Rabbit.
We visited co-housing -type communities. We looked at: Do we want to be in an urban area, do we want to be suburban? Our goal was to sort of push the envelope, be something more radical, to really look at fundamental changes, not incremental changes. So we really ended up looking more towards rural areas, where we could do those different things that we wouldn't have been able to if there was restrictive zoning and building codes. We certainly weren't looking for any kind of spiritual model, because again, we wanted diversity. We figured, we're creating radical change on the ecological front, that we wanted not to be pushing agendas on the economic, the spiritual, religious fronts, because we wanted to allow for the most possible diversity. We already figured we were going to be limiting a pool our people when you're talking about no private ownership of vehicles, and alternative energy, and things like that. In a rural area, there's only going to be so many people that you're going to be drawing from.
We learned a lot about food production from people, from different communities. We learned a lot about how to get along in consensus decision-making. How to structure the community, as far as membership structures and dues, and a lot about social groove that makes community work. And I would say that Dancing Rabbit would not still be here today if it weren't for how much we learned from the Communities Movement, and especially the communities that have been around 20, 30 years; we have been able to stand on the shoulders of all that they have done.
We learned early on from other communities that one key thing was to have clear ownership of the land in something that the whole group could control. It's very common that a community might start with one person, or a couple, or a family, or a small group owning the land; and they try to avoid the power dynamics inherent in that, but it's really challenging to do that. There have been groups that have successfully made the transition to real group control over the land, but we wanted to start right from the very beginning. From the start, we set up a non-profit land trust to own the land, so that everyone had control over that, to minimize how much the founders or the people who had the funding, to minimize how much extra power they have. They're still going to have some power in the group, but really address that from the get go. And so, that was something we did clearly from the beginning.
We also learned from other groups about just being really clear about membership, and what it means to be a member in the group. From very early on we tried to clarify: you have to come to this many meetings, and that you have to live here for this long, before you can become a member, you have to be consensed upon by the existing membership, and that's what the rights and responsibilities of the members are. And so, we've had a membership agreement before we had any other by-laws or any other agreements really. First thing, we wrote up our vision statement we made from the very beginning, and that's really served us. I think sometimes we struggle with who gets to make the decisions, especially in the very early stages when you -- I mean, we experienced this to some extent. We had this potluck and this mailing list, and people who would walk through the door, maybe on their first or second meeting would say, "I think Dancing Rabbit should be this", and it was sort of like, "Well, that's an interesting idea, but that's not really the direction we're going" -- they wanted to do something urban, or they wanted to do a summer camp for kids. And it was like, "Great ideas, go for it", but it wasn't what we were doing. And so, luckily, we had enough clarity of process and clarity of vision that we were able to keep focused on a specific path.
We chose to go with consensus as our decision-making process because we were already familiar with it, and because of the many benefits it brings in terms of higher quality decisions, full buy-in from all members, a very egalitarian power-sharing system. And it's worked really well for us over the years, and we're very happy with how its gone. And, it creates a certain culture in the same way as a democracy; it's not just about that you get to elect your representative to the government, but it permeates everything in your culture. And so, in the same way that voting does in our wider American culture, consensus does that at Dancing Rabbit. So at this point, we make all of our major decisions that way, but within that structure, we do a lot of delegating to committees, delegating to individuals. We do actually have a Board of Directors who has some final authority over our land trust and our non-profit; but their power rests with the consensus of the membership that controls who is elected, who is selected for those board positions and can control very significantly what kind of decisions they can make.
Do I think we can use consensus long-term? I think we will use it in a lot of different ways, but I'm not sure we will use full consensus for the entire membership, long-term. I think it's very possible to do that with hundreds of people; I don't think it's what we will choose to invest our energy in, based on the number of decisions we need to make; that by living together, by the amount of things that affect each other, that we will prefer to streamline our process and make decisions that don't require full consensus of the group. You can look at that as just continuing to delegate more and more to committees, and I expect that someday that we will have something akin to a town council. They'll probably use consensus to make decisions, and they'll be selected by the group. It's unclear whether, at some level, the question of whether that decision-making is still consensus, whether a single individual can override a decision. If we continue to allow that, then in my opinion, we're still using consensus at some level, or a consensus based-system; even if we consent on this town council, they make most of the decisions, but if one person objects, it can be overridden.
I'm not sure we'll stick with that, because we have already had some experience where challenging individuals can have a big detrimental effect on community process. I think we might choose to insulate ourselves from a really challenging personality dynamic and go with some system that's like a super-majority. Could be 70%, 80%, 90%, or that it would take at least 10% or 15% of people to recall a decision of the town council. To me, that's still a very democratic decision-making system, and I think could be more efficient time-wise for a larger group. To me, what's more important is not consensus, per se, but for people to feel that they're participating democratically. To me, that means that when there's a decision that affects them, they can affect change, they can affect what decision is made, and they feel empowered in that process. It doesn't really matter what the process is, as long as they feel that they can be empowered when that comes up. So as long as we can hold that goal, that vision, I'm happy with whatever decision making system we come up with.
We chose to set up our system so that it was affordable to live here, and to have no "buy-in" fee to join, because we wanted sustainable living to be accessible to as wide a swath of people as possible. We didn't want it to be something only the people with access to resources, the well off, could participate in. That is a value that we take from our egalitarian background, and we manifest that in our systems now. It's not a full success, in the sense that it still does take money to get yourself set up here, unless you're willing to live in a tent, or sleep in a tree, or something like that, you're still going to need to build some sort of housing, or rent housing, or something like that. So, it does take money to live here. And, we don't have the type of system like a community like Twin Oaks or East Wind that is income-sharing, so when you show up you can have nothing in your pocket and no assets to your name, and we'll give you a bedroom, we'll give you a job to do, and you then become as full a member of the community as everyone else. There's a few income-sharing people here at Dancing Rabbit, and subgroups where you can do that, but as a full group, we don't provide that. So it's fairly economically accessible, but not as accessible as an income sharing group.
Within the community, we have people who have a variety of incomes, or a diversity of incomes. We have people who have a diversity of access to resources, access to assets, whether those are financial for some people, for others it's skills, and/or physical strength to be able to build things. And so you get some very interesting dynamics, where some people feel very limited because they don't have any money. Other people feel limited because they don't have the skills, or the know how, or the ability (or think they don't, at least), to build their own home. And so, it's interesting, like, who feels rich, or who feels like they have access to the means that they need to achieve what they want. We get people all over the map and we really do have people with hardly a penny to their name; that really live, you could say, hand to mouth, but only in the best sense of it, in the way that a forager lives hand to mouth. We have other people who struggle with their finances even though they have more access to resources. We have people who come in from the wider culture, they've already owned a home in the wider culture that they can sell, or have savings from many years of working. They can be rich by Dancing Rabbit standards because it costs so little to be here.
There's some dynamics in the community around money, I wouldn't call them class dynamics. There are almost two different things to me. Class dynamics can be about culture, it can be about, What was your relationship to money growing up? What did your parents do? What was your relationship to education? What did your family do for entertainment? Those end up being those cultural class dynamics that can be completely tangental to whether people have money. And then, around money, there's how much you have and then there's how do you feel about how much you have. There's people who have thousands of dollars in the bank, but they feel like they have a scarcity, they don't feel rich, they feel like they worry about money all the time. There's people that don't have anything in the bank but they don't worry at all, or there's people who have tons of debt but they feel confident about their ability to pay it off.
All of those things are a factor in how people relate to money and if you can do this, in our community, we've done this in others, talk about everyone's relationship to money, it's amazing the stories that everyone has, and how different they are, and how different everyone relates to it in an emotional, psychological way, to money. To me it's like, it's getting more personal than class, and class is one part of that, but we're a small enough community that we don't break down into social classes. It's not like, there's the rich people and they hang out at the rich place, it's like, No, we're all doing the same things, we're all together. It's more like, There are times when it's clear that some people are struggling just to make ends meet and some people aren't, but there's a whole bunch of reasons that go into that that are way more complex than what their economic background is, it's just way more complex than class.
I think that people sometimes worry about, Could people be oppressing each other, economically oppressing in decision making, or something like that. And in a close knit group, in a small town, I don't think things like that happen as much. Especially a small town that is rooted with a lot ofegalitarian values, rooted in consensus. Even if we're not making decisions that way, that doesn't mean having lobbyists who are throwing their money around to be able to influence decisions. I think there will still be power dynamics, but the people who will be more influential in decisions are people who are more active in community, people who are more active in community process, who have the social skills, and the charisma, and the ability to be persuasive and articulate, and are willing to put the time into writing proposals and going and talking to people; those are the people with power in the community.
I grew up in, my family is from, my father is Sicilian and my mom is Irish. Irish might be Northern European, but still people knew how to raise their voices, and things like that. And so, I've learned how to express myself in different ways: to not interrupt people, to not talk louder to get my way. What was always challenging for me was that in my family, raising your voice was not a threatening thing. It was definitely trying to exert power over other people, you win an argument by talking over someone else, but it was never a precursor to violence. Whereas for many people, raising one's voice is the precursor to violence, and so they feel very threatened anytime someone raises their voice, or raises their energy in that way. And so that was really hard for me to learn, and hard for me to shift my behavior. But I chose to, because I didn't want for anyone to feel threatened by me. And, it isn't something that I am perfect at by any means, but it's something that I have adapted, to the point that my family doesn't recognize the way that I used to interact. They recognize that it's different than it used to be.
I do see that class is a factor there, too. I think that people who are of middle-class or upper-class are more likely to use other means of persuasion, other means of exerting their power than just physical presence, raising one's voice, things like that. I think that gender is a big, a really big factor in here, as well, because women and men often display their emotions differently, and react to that kind of dynamic differently. We've had problems where people who had a lot of anger expressed it by raising their voices, other people felt threatened by them. On some level it, there wasn't anything inherently wrong with their behavior, or right about not doing that. But there's some level where people need, I mean, there's a place for tolerance and diversity, and there's a place for where people are just not getting along and you can't do it. Or, where one person's behavior forces other people into engaging with them in a certain way. And so, I've found that when people would, I could rise to meet the energy levels that some people would engage with; if they raised their voices, I could go there, too, and I was at some level comfortable with that. But if that is the only mode that they can interact in, then it doesn't give other people the option to interact with them in their preferred way. And it doesn't make one way right or wrong, but it's like, if I can interact either in a high level or low level, then that's going to allow me to interact with a diverse group of people than someone who can only act at a high level or only act at a low level. There's no right or wrong but it's a tricky diversity issue.
And so it comes to, I think, in some of those gossip moments, or in some of those things, like, you're frustrated with someone else and you're like, I can't believe that so and so, blah blah blah. Like there's some level where, I hope people have internalized, or at least someone else might say, What do you think is going on for them, why do you think they are doing that? He thinks the reason for them being that way, and looks toward finding commonality, finding connection, finding resolution, rather than just responding to that with venting or negativity, with, Yeah, I hate it when they do that, or, You're totally right, they're out of their mind, or whatever. That's feeding the gossip machine or that negative energy, and sometimes that's what the person needs, they need a little support in that moment. But overall, I think we've tried to create that culture, where if someone's feeling that negativity about someone else, that there is that energy for helping them get in touch with their own feelings about why that's happening, or connect with that person either directly or indirectly, or just in general, with working towards a resolution, and not just working towards demonizing other people. That said, that's not easy, and some people have the tendency towards connecting, and some people have it towards blaming, or wanting to find the bad guy in each situation.
We're in the midst of setting up a conflict-resolution team for our community. And we do have a notion, it's in our membership agreement, that everyone commits to being open to mediation when there's conflict, and to resolving conflicts peacably. Exactly what that means, there's interpretation to it; there's definitely a commitment here towards resolving conflicts. Are there are still problems where people don't like each other. We're not sure, we're not trying to expect that everyone's best friends, but if it is affecting the decision-making of the community, if it's affecting the functioning of the community, we will actually step in and say, Hey, you really need to work on this, can we get you a mediator, will you sit down and talk to them, can we try to resolve it? where resolution means at least getting things to a place where things can be workable.
Is there gossip? There's some. It's not a big problem for us, but it might get worse as we get bigger, because as you say, I do have some level of personal connection with everyone. I mean, there is only 45 of us, but when we're 500, in some ways the goal of being 500 is NOT to have a personal connection with every person. Because there is value in the acquaintance, there's value in the pool of people that you are still waiting to get to know, that you have the potential for new friends in that pool. That whereas with 45, I can look around and already know what my social connection is to all these people. I look forward to the day when there's enough people that I don't know every single person's business. That said, you're going to know people's business, and some people react to that really strongly, some people are the town busybody and have their nose in everyone's business; I think we're going to have the same small-town dynamics that any small town has, but hopefully we'll deal with them a little bit better. But humans are humans, and a lot of those social dynamics are about power, some of them are just about people's personalities. I don't expect to prevent them all, I just hope to not have them be -- there's the kind of problem that eats away at the heart of the community, and I think we need to avoid those. I don't think we can expect utopia or perfection, and so if gossip were to get bad enough where it was really detrimental, I think we'd engage on it, and talk about it as a group or talk with the individuals that it was affecting and see if we could resolve it.
Unlike some of the communities started in the 60's and 70's, Dancing Rabbit is less of a social experiment. Although you could say it is a social experiment, just around ecology. We've never tried to breakdown the nuclear family, or change the way that people relate to their children, that's just not on our agenda. For the most part, people who want to have children, they have children, people who don't, don't. Because we have an ecological focus, we actually get a lot of people who have voluntarily chosen to not have kids, or to have very few kids. That said, we also have a number of families in the village with multiple kids, and we now have some 11 children in the community and a 12th on the way. For awhile we didn't have any kids in the village, and it was, in my sense, it was the same reason that any family would choose to put off having kids; we weren't ready, we didn't have the money or the infrastructure. We didn't have a common house yet, because we started the community with kids, and it was pretty challenging when we were packed into a small space to have two really young kids. And so when that family left, we actually took a time where we said, we aren't ready for kids, let's wait till we have more resources.
Once we opened the doors to kids, it actually came fairly quick, and we have actually, as a community, talked about what's a good balance of adult to children, and come up with a preferred range of about 3 adults to 1 child, 4 adults to 1 child. If we start getting more children than that, it does have a big impact on the whole community. Although, a lot of that depends on how much infrastructure each family has. If they have a more spacious house, then their kids have more space there to play in. If they have a very small house, or if they're camping or living in a tipi or something like that, they're going to spend more of their time in the common house. Depends on the personality of the kids, their age, if they're going to school or not, I mean all of these different factors, and so we're still feeling out what exactly our relationship as a whole community is to managing the demographics in that way. That said, we never limit, like if someone's like, I'm going tohave a baby, we're not going to tell them no, it's more like about how many new people joining as families already, how much we take somebody into our visitor program who have kids.
We have at times had dynamics where people who didn't have a primary partner, weren't in a relationship struggled, because we are out here in the middle of rural America, there's not a lot people, peers outside of our community to relate to, and if everyone is involved in a romantic relationship but one or two people, and they spend their evenings or their free time with their partners, then those single people can feel relatively isolated. We've also seen a cultural shift, where people with families are going to have a different social and socialization needs than people who don't have kids. We try to breakdown some of that dynamic, and try to have it not be so partner-based, so nuclear family-based, and there are a lot of social opportunities that cross those boundaries, and there's a lot of friendships. In some ways, it's fairly different than living in the wider culture, where you have just your partner that you live with and you see them most of the time. You really do get to see a lot of people coming in and out of here in your day to day life in a lot of different ways. And we're supportive of all different kinds of relationships, and we've a number of people who have lived here who are queer or polyamorous. We're open to those different things, but it's not anything, there's no agenda around that, and it's more a matter of, that's your business, that's great, in the same way we let people have a diversity of spiritual beliefs, a diversity of economic systems, we don't try and dictate what people can or can't do, that's between consenting adults.
That said, in a rural area we do have to be conscious of, and people choose to be conscious of, the wider community, and how supportive they'll feel in their relationships or in their public presentation when they go to town and things like that. And it can be anything from like, how many facial piercings you have, to how often you swear in front of the Mennonite neighbors, to whether you want to hold your gay lover's hand in public. I actually think our neighbors are remarkably tolerant. I think that if you started pushing an agenda, they might react, but I think they are willing to live and let live, and they may talk behind our backs or something like that, but I think they are pretty friendly and pretty supportive of what we're doing. So I think so long as we're respectful of them in letting them live and let live; then I think that we get pretty good dynamics there, and we actually have good relationships with the surrounding community.
For me, community has always been both a means and an end in itself. I really love living with other people, I love co-operative living, I thrive on the connections I have with my neighbors and friends and my chosen family that I surround myself with. And, I also see it as a means for ecological living. I think that co-operative living facilitates, resource-sharing, simpler living, cooking co-operatively means: 1 kitchen, 1 refrigerator, the ability to eat whole foods without having to spend all of your personal time cooking, things like that. So I've become, from early on, a community activist; not just choosing to live in community, but really promoting community as an option for people who want to choose it. And in this country, it is something that most people aren't even aware is really even an option.
It's not uncommon for people to have like, Wow, I just got this great idea, maybe I could live with other people; I could live with my friends. I wonder if anyone is doing that, oh, probably not. And, it's like they have to discover community and invent it, even though it's already out there, because it hasn't reached some cultural level where it's just common knowledge that everyone is tapped into, that it's an option. So people who I think would want it, and they just don't realize that it's an option for them because they think a lot of people want more connection in their life, more connection with their neighbors, more intimacy, more social dynamics, or just better quality interactions with the people they work and live with. And so I feel like it's something I've been wanting to promote, to make that available to people.
And one of the main ways I've been doing that, besides just living at Dancing Rabbit, I've been participating with a non-profit called the Fellowship for Intentional Community for the last 13 years, both as a Board Member and working on projects like, the Communities Directory, as well as the Intentional Communities website, and the online directory. Those tools have made community really available to a lot more people, or at least known to a lot more people. Before the Communities Directory existed, starting in 1990, it was very hard to get information about communities. Maybe you'd see an ad in the back of some magazine and that would turn you on to it. But now, especially with the internet, you get the idea, co-operative living, you type that into Google, and we come up. And suddenly, you can find that there's thousands of these opportunities around the country; you can read about it, there's books about it that you can find, and there's all these resources that can help you create more community where you are, find an intentional community to join, just learn about co-operative living. So, people sometimes still have to get that hook into it to really find out about it. But it's becoming much easier once they get that to find what's really out there.
And to me, that's really the main thing, is just making it accessible to people, making sure that they realize that it is an option; that there are more options than just what the mainstream offers, in its general way. And maybe those options are not exactly what they want, but I think there's something powerful in knowing, I could live a different way. Even if you do choose to live the way that you are doing right now, it is an act of choice, and not, I'm stuck in it. Now, not everyone always feels empowered to leave their current life and all their responsibilities, and move to the commune, but just knowing it's there, just knowing its an option and an inspiration can change a lot of people's lives, and possibly encourage them to change the community that they're living in without specifically creating an intentional community.
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