Community Where You Are

Life in and out of community offers valuable lessons about governance, membership, vision, struggles, and deepening connections.

The Tamarack Institute helps people talk and learn together about the possibilities of community.

A veteran of Washington, DC’s Sojourners Community reflects on wisdom her group gleaned from Central Americans and from one another.

In rural Maine in the ’70s, community was everyday reality, and everyone needed help sometimes.

Children in outdoor programs face—and often overcome—three major obstacles to learning and growth.

Kibbutzes, ecovillages, cohousing communities, and pocket neighborhoods offer us opportunities to make a new start.

After 6,500 miles of pedaling and 100 community visits, a couple documents the promise of intentional community and cooperative living.

An innovative approach to collective community gardens nurtures a culture of giving while allowing participants to feed both themselves and those in need.

Finding meaningful, socially and ecologically responsible work cannot be done in a vacuum. Right livelihood depends on networks of relationship.

In Brixton, South London, and Edinburgh, Scotland, right livelihood finds a home in innovative, resource-conserving, grassroots projects.

A collective financial approach that allows individuals to pool their resources in support of favorite projects, crowdfunding both encourages and thrives upon community.

Believing that the next phase in human evolution involves a return to the “local” and to community with neighbors, the author focuses his job search close to home, and includes any useful type of work.

To the Compostmeister at a collective house, the cycles of compost embody a new economics that focuses upon human needs and relationships.

A fifth-grader takes initial steps toward right livelihood by creating a neighborhood newspaper that embodies and helps bring together her local community.

In the author’s first, very intense intentional community immersion, revealing the truth led to love and intimacy. He left that group, but, in many spheres of life, emotional and intellectual honesty became his religion.

Despite widespread desire for community, structural and cultural obstacles to intentional community in the modern world loom large.

For 12 years, a once-proud career woman struggled with manic depression, becoming a “bag lady” and experiencing more than a dozen hospitalizations, before entering recovery.

Ex-members of the Emissaries of Divine Light reflect on their shared past and discover more holistic approaches to inner wellness as they reunite online.

How can we best support mental health? Caring attention—even from amateurs—can promote healing unattainable through impersonal approaches or drugs.

A disenchanted community founder leaves her group, and finds that her rural hometown farming community and international travel and service better match her vision of honorable elderhood.

In reviving and restoring the site of two historical intentional communities, a town’s benefactor revitalized its sense of present-day community as she continued to dream, create, grow, and give.

The founder of Enright Ridge Urban Ecovillage describes what it’s like to be criticized, marginalized, stripped of leadership responsibilities, and given the opportunity to explore a new role.

Geoph Kozeny’s community documentary brings forth reflections on Hearthaven, discussions among neighbors and friends, and ultimately a new intergenerational family community.

Neither the therapist diagnosing Major Depression nor the psychiatrist prescribing an antidepressant asked the fundamental question: Do you like to garden? When the author discovers this doorway into the natural world, he also finds community and inner and outer health.

After serving thousands of meals, a community of post-Katrina relief kitchen volunteers moves to the West Coast and acquires a mortgage, a baby, full-time jobs, and the challenges of the mundane.

With a long history of protecting the local watershed, Trillium Farm Community in southern Oregon grows not only organic food, but ecological activists.

Organized around common ecological values and a shared appreciation for the epic of evolution, a group of neighbors reduces its collective energy consumption by 25 percent.

A long-time events organizer reflects on the rewards, challenges, logistics, and community dynamics involved in hosting gatherings large and small.

While in similar circumstances to his neighbors from Clan Super Size, our author replaces a desperate sense of scarcity and need for low-cost goods with feelings of hope and abundance.

Can an ecovillage gal live for a week in a mainstream household--with a microwave oven, processed food on paper plates,five SUVs, and six tiny pedigreed show dogs--and make a difference?