Intentional Communities

OUR Eco Village Cooperative is an organization with a unique vision and a rich history.

The following is a verbal report presented to the members of the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative (EJBICC), during their 2025 Annual Meeting.

In all likelihood, board meetings will be run according to Roberts Rules of Order. My guess is that the vast majority of HOA are governed in this way. Based on my 4+ decades of working with cooperative groups, however, I know this can be done better. 

I have some things to say about the role of common values in communities, about how to think about community buildings (as distinct from private dwellings), and about how the one relates to the other.

Capitalism isn’t just an economic system we live inside. It is a culture that lives inside of us. It influences our psychology, how we design our communities, how we relate to each other, the kind of culture we create, and what’s possible for us to do together. 

As a consensus facilitator, I am constantly trying to make it easier for everyone to contribute what they have that's relevant to the conversation. Then I do what I can to establish how those contributions are rooted in a reasonable interpretation of group values (and therefore worthy of taking into account), as distinct from personal preferences. 

Through sociocracy you can design feedback systems so everyone in your community knows what is going on and can be heard on matters that affect them. In this webinar, recorded on December 2022, Sociocracy for All’s Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez share in dept knowledge about using consensus to foster a sense of harmony and connection in your group.

Some suggestions for navigating transparency and discretion in conflict in intentional communities.

What makes communes and their advances so important? To explain their significance, one has to appeal to something that is not immediately visible: social relations and especially relations of production.

In this memoir, Elayne Archer describes daily life in the commune, its challenges, and its rewards. The memories of several commune participants, including three of the children, enrich the memoir and make it a vivid description of the time and of an alternative approach to living and raising children.