E VERY FEW YEARS, WE TAKE STOCK OF WHERE THE COMMUNITIES movement is, and where it seems to be moving. The last time we did this was spring 1995 when we released the current edition of the Communities Directory. This 25th Anniversary issue of Communities magazine seems a good time to do it again.
There has been brisk interest in information about community living this entire decade - with no apparent sign of letting up. Foremost, we've sold more than 31,000 copies of the Directory since it was first released in 1990. That's nearly four copies for every man, woman, and child living in the communities listed in the current edition. Either there's serious interest in community, or we're decorating a lot of coffee tables.
When the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) took over as publisher of Communities in 1992, we had about 900 subscribers. After four years of regular quarterly production we have brought that up to 1,500 and rising. Since initiating our Web site in early 1995, we've seen an explosion of interest in getting community information electronically. Within 18 months we were getting 3,000 visits to our Web site (www.ic.org) each month, and traffic is now topping 4,000 per month.
The history of this magazine goes back to 1972 - to the waning energy of the countercultural revolution of the '60s. Inspired by the cooperative promise of those heady days, the magazine tried to build a sustaining circulation focusing on North American back-to-the-land rural communes. When that didn't take off, the magazine expanded its focus to encompass cooperatives - both urban and rural - and the political arena.
Reaching beyond geography, there has always been some dabbling in inter-national communities, leading up to an entire issue (#48) focused on groups outside North America in 1981. But strong connections abroad have been difficult to establish and harder to maintain. With the advent of the Information Age, there are signs that the electronic shrinking of time and distances will make a difference in international networking. We'll see.
Right from the beginning, the vision for this publication was to provide even-handed coverage of community activity, not promoting one style of group living over another (so long as the choices were not violent). Over the years it has been a strain on various groups who have shouldered the burden of having members contribute underpaid staff work to the magazine. Editorial integrity has been maintained throughout, yet it hasn't always been easy.
When Twin Oaks wanted a break from 12 years of carrying the magazine in 1984, it negotiated with Charles Betterton to take over editorial and business responsibilities. Charles had made the deal with financial backing from The Stelle Group, his home community. However, when the group learned that maintaining the magazine's editorial policy was part of the deal, and that they wouldn't be allowed to use it as a house organ to promote their own beliefs, they withdrew their money. Charles was left to scramble for support, all the while keeping the ecumenical flag flying. At great personal sacrifice, he held on until the FIC took over publishing duties in 1992.
A sampling of the last 25 years of the communities movement reveals a cornucopia of community movements, highlighting the incredible breadth of choice that has always characterized the movement. There is nothing monolithic about it. (There is an interesting parallel between this fluidity and the shifts in location of the editorial office of this magazine - starting out in Ohio, it moved to California, Oregon, Virginia, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, and now Colorado. It has been, pardon the expression, quite a trip.)
Having said that, positive words about intentional community living is getting out to a wider audience. Probably nothing has done more in the '90s for improving awareness of community living than cohousing, which burst on the scene in the late '80s when Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett released their seminal work about this Danish import in the U.S. Today there are 28 cohousing communities occupied, 26 more under construction, and 100 groups in the forming stages. This segment of community living has worked hard to portray the concept of community in terms that the mainstream culture can more readily grasp--great neighborhood, safety, leveraged resources/shared amenities, and protection of owner equity.
While cohousing groups may be leading the way, there has been a marked increase in press coverage on other communities as well. Amazingly, Twin Oaks had separate major stories about it appear three times last summer: in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Times. Follow-up from one of these led to FIC doing a one-hour radio interview on the Derek McGinty Show with National Public Radio.
What societal challenges will communities be grappling with in the years to come? The gap between rich and poor has been widening for decades now, and that means an increasing percentage will be struggling to make ends meet. While community living so far has largely been a choice of the educated middle class, we may see a shift ahead, as people work to develop models of community that include the urban working class.
Take cohousing, for example. While this fast-growing choice offers exciting options for people who can afford to buy their own homes (for many cohousing groups you need to be able to invest or borrow six figures in order to join), this will not be an entree for most people unless cohousing principles are applied to cooperative housing on a more modest scale. Some handful of cohousing groups are offering subsidized housing for people with limited incomes, and it will be interesting to see how much these prototypes are adopted by others.
A few years ago we started noticing increasing demand for information about community living for people suffering from Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (sometimes called Environmental Illness). It's clear that we're now reaping the harvest of years of chronic exposure to nasty chemicals in everyday life: from the formaldehyde in building materials, to perfumes and deodorants; from gas residue in LP and propane stoves, to spray drift from herbicides and pesticides for lawn, garden, and farm. Undoubtedly, many suffering from MCS have not yet been diagnosed, and there will be increased demand for housing and living opportunities for those who live with this malady.
The good news is that many MCS patients make full or nearly full recoveries when they can secure safe housing; the bad news is that many don't figure out what they need until they're too disabled to be a fully contributing member of a community. They may be caught in a Catch-22 where they need the community in order to recover, but cannot contribute enough labor or money to meet community minimums ... until they recover. When we prepare for the next edition of the Communities Directory, we'll include specific information about MCS in our questionnaire.
As demand for community information goes up, so does the responsibility for the Fellowship to provide it in sophisticated formats. In its inaugural issue, Communities printed a Directory covering eight pages and 200 communities. That was it - and was considered pretty hot stuff at the time.
Today our 12th edition of the Communities Directory lists over 600 communities. The cross-reference charts alone run 20 pages, there are nine pages of maps, and the 16-page index is twice the size of the entire original Directory. We publish quarterly updates to the Directory listings as a regular feature of Communities magazine, and at our Web site we've installed a search engine which allows the user to investigate all 250 groups linked to our site. We maintain a central office and staff where people can get answers to their questions about community by phone, fax, or e-mail. There is always more to do.
Another movement need that has been exposed by the surge in new community starts and expansion of existing facilities has been a dearth of working capital. Most lending institutions don't know a community from a church (and some are both!), and struggle to analyze a business plan taking into account group dynamics and the commitment to pool resources. It looks messy, and lenders often shy away. Since community business is not big business (yet), it's no big deal to banks. It can, however, be a very big deal if it's your community that gets rejected.
FIC is steadily doing more to help package loans, matching groups with lenders. Our strengthening contacts include people - many of whom are living in communities themselves - who have money and would like to see it used to create cooperative alternatives, all the while earning interest. If you hanker to turn back that age-old admonition and either a borrower or a lender be, we encourage you to get in touch with us.
Coincident with the rise in community interest this decade has been a spate of folks putting out a shingle advertising their skills in group process and group consulting. This is a difficult field in which to get credentialed, so people are mostly building a clientele based on personal recommendations and word of mouth. All of this is possible because communities today - both new groups and long-established ones--are more willing to reach out and ask for help when they get stuck. Some even ask for outside facilitation without being stuck, to sharpen the saw before it gets dull and everyone (including the saw) starts squeaking.
Throughout its 25 years, Communities magazine has gone through a continual process of redefining its audience. Starting out with a fairly parochial focus on rural intentional communities, it has, by degrees, accepted a role of defining the relationship between intentional communities and the wider culture. Today, we see anything dealing with "community" in its broadest sense as our natural area of focus. While our roots are in intentional community, and we maintain a special connection to that small but powerful segment of society, we are increasingly looking to build bridges that will support steady traffic in ideas and people between cooperative alternatives and the mainstream culture. Communities are learning things about how to solve problems and build sustainable lives for which we believe there is a growing urgency and a growing audience.
The Fellowship has recently accepted a focus on "community" as the cornerstone of its vision, and we'll be carrying out that mission on the pages of this magazine into the 21st century. We invite you to join us.
Communities magazine is published by the nonprofit Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC). Laird Sandhill is the FIC's Publication Manager.
Copyright 1998 by Fellowship for Intentional Community. All rights reserved. Opinions expressed by the authors and correspondents are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.
Movement groups may reprint with permission. Please direct inquiries to Communities, PO Box 169, Masonville, CO 80541-0169, (970) 593-5615.
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