Author

Mira Luna is a long time social and environmental justice activist, community organizer and journalist, working to develop an alternative economy. She co-founded Bay Area Community Exchange, a regional open source timebank, the San Francisco Really Really Free Market and JASecon, and has served on the board of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and currently serves on the boards of the US Solidarity Economy Network and Data Commons Cooperative. She coordinated the Bay Area Participatory Budgeting Tour, the first Homestead Skillshare Festival in San Francisco, the Festival of Grassroots Economics in Oakland and two workshops for the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives.

JJ Noire is the producer of the 2-DVD workshop "This Way Out: A Guide To Starting A Worker Cooperative" (http://www.MightySmallFilms.com/This_Way_Out.html) She is a volunteer with NoBAWC and lives in a Limited Equity Housing Coop in Berkeley, CA.  For the past several years she has been videotaping conferences and presentations about worker and housing cooperatives and posting them online (http://www.YouTube.com/JJNoire)

Joss Winn is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, University of Lincoln and a founding member of the Social Science Centre, Lincoln.

Elizabeth Barrette writes and edits nonfiction, fiction, and poetry in diverse fields including speculative fiction, alternative spirituality, and community. She ran the Pagan magazine PanGaia for 8 years and writes regularly for the Llewellyn annuals. Visit her blog The Wordsmith’s Forge and coven website Greenhaven: A Pagan Tradition.

Bonnie Shulman, now in her 60s, is an elder hippie who came of age in the 60s.  She is a recovering mathematics professor, recently retired from Bates College in Lewiston, ME, and looking forward to life in the slow lane.  Her friends and family are skeptical about her slowing down, and she grudgingly admits they may be right.  She is eager to return to her passions of poetry, gardening, and yoga.

Chris Roth edited Talking Leaves: A Journal of Our Evolving Ecological Culture for eight years, and has edited Communities since 2008. A resident member of Lost Valley Educational Center/Meadowsong Ecovillage in Dexter, Oregon, he has lived in intentional community and on organic or permaculture farms most of his adult life. Contact him at editor [AT] ic.org.

I’ve lived in intentional community for 41 years: 39 years at Sandhill Farm (a small, income-sharing community I helped found in 1974 in northeast Missouri), followed by 20 months at nearby Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage started in 1997 with a core mission of modeling how to live a great life on a resource budget that’s only 10% of the US average. Today I live in Chapel Hill NC, where I’m trying to pioneer a new community with close friends. For the last 28 years I’ve also been integrally involved with the Fellowship for Intentional Community—a North American network dedicated to providing the information and inspiration of cooperative living to the widest possible audience. Recognizing the value of what is being learned in intentional communities about how to solve problems collaboratively and work constructively with conflict, I started a part-time career as a process consultant in 1987. Today, I’m on the road half the time conducting trainings, working with groups, and attending events all over the country. Recreationally, my passions include celebration cooking, duplicate bridge, wilderness canoeing, and the New York Times Sunday crossword.