Author

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.

Writer  and activist Helen Forsey was a member of the now defunct Dandelion Community in Ontario from 1984 to 1991. While there she visited various other communities, and worked with Laird in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC). This interview was originally published in her book, Circles of Strength – Community Alternatives to Alienation (New Society, 1993). Helen now divides her time between Lothlorien Farm in Ontario and her family's cabin in Newfoundland.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard is a political economist and Associate Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Africana Studies Department at John Jay College, City University of NY; and author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. An affiliate scholar with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, University of Saskatchewan, Canada, she is a member of the GEO Collective, as well as the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy, the Southern Grassroots Economies Project, and the US Solidarity Economy Network. Gordon Nembhard is also a member of the Shared Leadership Team of Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE) DC (a community organizing organization in Washington, DC). Jessica is the proud mother of Susan and Stephen, and the grandmother of Stephon Nembhard.

Bob Stone is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Long Island University. He is co-author, with Betsy Bowman, of Sartre's "Morality and History":An Introduction to the Unpublished Writings of the Mid-1960s (forthcoming). Stone has been with GEOs since 1992. In August 2004 he joined with others in launching the Center for Global Justice, for research and learning for a better world, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: www.globaljusticecenter.org