[About NICA] [Resources] [Communities][Communities Seeking Members]
Diana Christian, Communities Magazine Editor, wrote:
August 1, 2005
Jaime Roitman, ABC Television
Dear Jaime Roitman,
I'm writing in response to your email of July 31st, which was
forwarded to people involved with the Fellowship for Intentional
Community (FIC), a nonprofit that serves intentional communities,
community seekers, journalists, and academic researchers. (www.ic.org.)
For the last 11 years I've edited the FIC's magazine, Communities, and
recently wrote a book on how to start successful new communities and
ecovillages (New Society Publishers, 2003; "Creating a Life
Together.") I assume you'd like to approach your project from an
informed stance. If so, may I offer some context?
I'd like you to know that most intentional communities in North
America today have little if any to do with something one might call a
hippie lifestyle, although perhaps 30 to 40 years ago, in the heyday of
what media called "hippie communes," this was certainly true. But the
days of disaffected youth fleeing mainstream culture to live a tie-dyed
life of lazing about are long past. Any 'hippies' I know of living in
communities are mostly folks in their 50s and 60s, who look back on
those days fondly, but who own their homes, pay taxes, and have jobs
just like other people.
What you will find, is that the largest and most rapidly growing
aspect of the intentional communities movement is cohousing, in which
people develop and manage their own small neighborhoods themselves.
There are about 66 up-and-running cohousing communities in the United
States today, with about 150 more in the planning and/or construction
stages. Members of cohousing communities are usually two-income
professionals with families who can afford slightly more than local
market-rate housing, or retiress. The Wife Swap show featured a
cohousing family, Zev and Neshama Paiss of Nomad Cohousing in Boulder
Colorado, swiping husbands with a motorcyle-riding biker family in
another part of Colorado.
www.cohousing.org will give you more information about the cohousing
aspect of the communities movement.
Another large part of the communities movement are student housing
co-ops affiliated with universities, especially in Ann Arbor, Madison,
Austin, Palo Alto, and Berkeley. In student housing co-ops, university
students live during their college years in group households owned by
their school or an affiliated nonprofit. The students are taught how to
manage their own household in terms of group decison-making,
maintenance, and financial management. The NASCO (North American
Students of Cooperation) organization can offer much more information.
www.nasco.coop.
A much smaller, but rapidly growing aspect of the communities
movement, and one which, like cohousing, is also now attracting media
attention, are ecovillages, like the one I live in here in North
Carolina. Ecovillages are intentional communities in which the
residents attempt to live a more ecologically sustainable lifestyle,
usually in the context of ecological education, using their community
as a model and demonstration site for others, and offering classes and
tours, etc. You can learn more about ecovillages from ENA (Ecovillage
Network of the Americas) ena.ecovillage.org, GEN (Global Ecovillage Network)
gen.ecovillage.org, or UEN (Urban Ecovillage Network)
urban.ecovillage.orgOther kinds of intentional communities include urban group households,
urban artists' collectives, senior housing co-ops, affordable housing
co-ops, rural conference and educational centers, service-oriented
communities (which serve populations such as the urban poor, Latin
American immigrants, or people with mental disabilities, for example),
and spiritual communities (such as meditation centers or yoga ashrams),
and literal communes, in which people work for community businesses and
receive room, board, and a small stipend. ("Commune" is an economic
term, and my guess is that in North America they comprise less than 2%
of the intentional communities movement, even tho this includes some of
the largest or most well known communities.)
The only community I know of whose members are literally 'hippies' is
The Farm, a large, well-established (33 years old) community 90 minutes
from Nashville. Farm members, mostly grandparents now, were never your
typical hippies, however, as they were always dedicated to service to
others, technological innovation, and entrepreneurship. It was Farm
midwives who through education, activism, and technincal inventions,
practically single-handedly restored the practice of midwifery to the
medical profession in North America and western Europe; and Farm aid
workers who created their own UN-sanctioned NGO, called Plenty (which
still sends medical, technical, and nutritional experts to indigenous
people in 3rd world nations); and Farm inventors who created and
patented various devices related to fetal monitoring, detecting radiation
emissions, radio and solar power equipment, and so on.
www.thefarm.org.
I've included the FIC's document, "What's True About Intentional
Communities: Dispelling the Myths," below. (now linked instead)
You mentioned that you're seeking a family so dedicated to this way of
life that they can't imagine living any other way. I think you could
find any number of families like this in the intentional communities
movement, although I should caution you that many of them may not want
their lives and what they hold dear to provide entertainment for a
reality TV show. The Wife Swap show featuring the Colorado cohousers,
and a recent episode of a reality TV show in which two New Yorkers
lived for 30 days in a rural Missouri off-grid ecovillage, were edited
in such a way that made both the "swapped" people and the communities
look rather superficial and petty. My own ecovillage recently agreed to
let a TV crew to film a meeting of our tour guides and visitors who
were supposedly interested in potential membership here. It was soon
obvious that they were actors who'd been coached in saying the most
inflammatory and disrespectful things their story editors could come up
with, making themselves (supposed recent immigrants from India) look
like uneducated, superstitious villagers and ourselves look
increasingly astonished, to say the least. I believe that many people
the communities movement--cohousers, ecovillagers, Farm members, and
others--are become more informed and more skeptical about the motives
and methods of reality TV show producers.
If I understand you correctly, I believe you as casting director and
ABC TV are seeking to create entertainment programs engaging and funny
enough to induce viewers to stay tuned and thus see the commercials of
your sponsors. We, in contrast, are seeking to share out way(s) of life
with others, through various means sometimes including popular media,
but now that we know more about the television industry, not
selectively edited our ways of life into what program producers
consider entertainment created at the expense of accuracy or our
integrity and dignity.
Thanks for reading this.
Diana Christian
Editor, Communities magazine
Contact: Craig Ragland
Updated: 8/16/05