Privacy Policy

This document explains the privacy policy for the Intentional Communities website and the Intentional Community Data Collective .

We store a cookie on your computer to store your session information (including your shopping cart). We also store cookies to allow certain site layout features and to prevent spam.

If you order from our online store, your credit card information is collected and transmitted to our order office via secure server. It is encrypted while stored on our server and in our order system. We collect your contact information when you place an order, and use your address to ship the order, and your email, phone number, and address to contact you regarding the order if necessary.

We do occasional mailings to promote a product, gather or disseminate information, or for other reasons (currently about once a year). We mail to addresses on our list within a geographic area when we are holding an event nearby. You have the opportunity when entering your contact info to accept or decline mailings.

We put out an email newsletter, currently about once a week. You can sign up for it here. When registering at our store, you have the opportunity to accept or decline the newsletter. Unsubscribing later is simple. We may occasionally do a special topic emailing to this same list.

We occasionally share mailing information with like-minded groups. (Some examples are Co-op America and the Communal Studies Association.) You have the opportunity when entering your contact info to accept or decline such sharing of your mailing address.

Phone numbers publicly listed on this website will not be shared with other organizations except through websites and printed Directories. Store customers' and other registered users' phone numbers will be used only for customer service (this includes calling you about your listing on this website). We will never give your private phone number to someone outside of our organization (unless we know through other contact with you that you are interested in community networking calls).

We do not share email addresses, but we may occasionally do a special emailing to our list for a like-minded outside organization.

Third Party Advertising

We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services potentially of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, contact us.

Fellowship for Intentional Community Members

Most of the above applies to FIC members also. However, we mail to members more often. In particular, we mail members invitations to all our events and organizational meetings, whether or not the member lives nearby. Members get an occasional newsletter. We might phone members about something special, and we might do special emailings to members.

Communities and Community-Related Organizations

We link to the web sites of communities on our web site. We provide selected lists of communities (matching certain criteria) to community seekers. We do additional mailings to communities, including inviting all communities we know about within the geographic area to our organizational meetings and events. We share community information with other community networking organizations such as Coho/US. We provide information about communities, including contact information, on request, unless you've requested that we do not.

We keep your community information private on your request. We never publish your community information in our publications without your consent.

Please also see our note on obscuring email addresses.