Oct 8, 2021
017 Building Resilient Communities (Season 1 Recap, Part 3)
Welcome to the third installment of our Season 1 Recap series, where I’ve been reviewing what we’ve learned from a dozen interviews with veteran landowners throughout Costa Rica.
In today’s episode, we’re going to take a dive into the concept of ‘Community’, our place in it, and how we can be more harmonious members and effective contributors to our communities, both within a project and amongst our neighbors.
In my twenties, I spent a lot of time visiting communities around North America. I’ve seen it done a lot of different ways.
I’ve seen projects try and fail and I’ve seen the humble groundedness of those who’ve changed with time.
There are a lot of things that can make or break a community. Let’s see what’s worked best for our guests.
What is Community?
“Community” can mean different things to different people - at different stages of their lives, even.
Within the “back-to-the-land” movement, the term often refers to a group of individuals or families who co-owns the property, share some level of resources and responsibilities, and (if they want to last more than a couple of seasons) have some manner of formal agreements in place for how to manage the sharing of those resources and responsibilities.
The term community is often used in other contexts, as well.
One of those would be our relationship with our neighbors in our surrounding region. Shared roads, aquifers, and other utilitarian items inherently bind us.
When we look a little deeper, we expand that list of shared assets to include companionship, insights, tools, labor, information, food surplus, child-raising, and more.
Taking the time to connect with our broader community brings fresh perspectives, wisdom, security, and a multitude of other invaluable gifts.
Of course, the term community can be further expanded to include groups of people that aren’t in the same bioregion but are united by interest.
Online communities are a growing phenomenon, and if that’s something that you’re actively involved in, I encourage you to listen to this episode with a conceptual translator on.
I’m sure that much of what we review here can be relevant to what you’re doing. For that matter, much of this advice could even be used to build more healthy neighborhoods, in cities and in suburbs.
Our Lineage of Communitarians
One of my favorite references to community is when Ancel Mitchel described sitting around a table with others, processing raw harvest into a cleaned product for storage.
This is the work passed down to us from our ancestors. This is a practice of community that goes back to prehistoric times.
The practice of cleaning food that’ll be used for communal sustenance, with others whose lives are intertwined with their own, builds community in a way that few things can.
Our ancestors had it a little differently than we do, however.
Their sense of community was inherent in their existence. That is, people didn’t move around nearly as much as we do these days.
In most parts of the world, to have left your tribe was a bigger deal, and if you did, it was generally into some other well-established tribe. We live in a new age now. We’re redefining what “tribe” and “community” mean to us.
To make up for the absence of these established generations-deep traditions, Alnoor Ladha asserts that longevity is born from a robust social infrastructure, and it’s one that we have to intentionally start designing into our communities. I quite agree with him.
As I mentioned, I’ve seen the remnants of a number of projects that didn’t make the distance.
Those who’d taken the time to fortify their invisible infrastructures with community-living agreements, time spent working & playing together, and developing a common vision, faced their storms better than those who had far less to anchor them.
The time spent developing the social infrastructure of any community, large or small, pays off in often unexpected and life-enriching ways.
A New Age, A New Way
In our age of mass transportation, the phenomenon of seasonal community members can make cohesion difficult.
Developments of online meeting forums have alleviated this a bit. Still, a land-based project needs more than a couple of members to hold it down for extended periods of time, in order to prevent that seasonal community vibe from evolving into awkward cycles of unresolved differences of opinion for how things should be run.
This can break momentum before it ever gets the chance to get going.
At the time of our interview, Brave Earth was developing a school to assist members who’d like to be able to stay year-round.
Where we send our children to school will always be something that needs to be considered. For many people, sending their kids where more support is provided is preferred over local, rural schoolhouses.
Knowing who we want to live with is another vital aspect to consider.
Brave Earth has designed its community model and manifesto to call in masters of different trades needed to internally craft their theme of transformational retreats.
Starting with this kind of goal in mind can make a significant difference in the quality of the community that forms.
As part of their social infrastructure, members are asked to contribute 10hrs/week to the community in some way. It’s trust-based and flexible.
They pretty much invite any contribution to the community that one feels like offering.
It’s expected that each member spends some time each week, leaving something better than they found it or simply making someone else’s day. I like that.
After that, additional employment may be available at times, through the community’s profit-generating activities, like retreat production.
Coming Together for Common Vision
Many community-focused projects usually experiment with different formats of rhythmic check-in forums to hold space for a general sense of connection as well as to address any issues that might arise among the members or guests.
It’s generally recommended to make time for different circles for discussing work and logistics, apart from celebration or conflict resolution.
Suzanna Leff reinforces that conflict resolution requires training and intentional practice.
For her, weekly meetings are ideal. She only has one land partner, so her weekly meetings are primarily with her volunteers.
She encourages the practice and was sure to point out that the volunteers often know more than we do. To that, I can definitely attest!
Sailcargo Inc. is a unique community, in that it’s essentially composed of semi-long-term employees who are there for a functional purpose. Many of them will likely move on when the project is complete.
Some may stay longer, while some leave sooner. They’re all there for different reasons, which might not be to live in a community, but rather to build something they all believe in.
Nevertheless, they’ve begun self-organizing living arrangements to improve the form and function of their beachside homestead.
Each player makes their own contribution, and it keeps getting better. It’s a pretty cool scene, really.
It’s a blend of organized vision and labor, mixed with a flavor of anarchy amidst its unique players and their individual contributions to the collectively shared spaces.
Lynx Guimond, the ringleader of the bunch, says that healthy and happy people are high-quality assets.
He emphasizes the importance of taking the time to check in with guests, volunteers, and team members and make sure that they have a chance to be heard, if not helped.
Over at the Permaculture Country Club, Justin Dolan designed a model where he sold shares of the community to members that wanted to live within the shared grounds of the property and also sold sovereign lots to neighbors who wanted to live nearby.
The idea was to call in a bit of an eco-village. His aim to have like-minded neighbors has worked out to a degree, b…