Seeking Core Team to Start Intentional Community! Western Mass/Southern Vermont

by Emma Lee

Category: Forming Communities
Location: Western Mass/Southern Vermont

The Idea

It has been a dream of mine for many years to start an intentional community with a very simple intention: to create more ease in our lives by forming a healthy web of interdependence between households. The working title for this project is “Lifeboat”, as in:

This capitalist patriarchy is dying, this ship is sinking, hop onto the Lifeboat! Lifeboat seeks to undermine the repressive systems in place that rob us of our most precious resource- time. Time with those we love, time to learn, grow, be creative, be independent thinkers, and to nourish our relationships of all kinds. Time to simply be.

Lifeboat seeks to aid in deconstructing the patriarchy by empowering women and families to create systems of support for ourselves and our children that are greater than what we are experiencing as stand alone households. Some of these systems will be new, and some will be re-creations of old. In this we can model a different way to be for the next generation, one that may serve them better in this quickly changing world. For too long women have been repressed in a myriad of ways and shut up in the domestic prisons of the present, a facade of stability which creates loneliness and dysfunction, mental and physical illness, addiction, and which does not feed our children but instead shows them that parenting is arduous and joyless when it could be joyful if the burdens and joys were shared with many others. The repression I speak of does a great disservice to men and non-binary individuals, we all feel it and we can’t solve it without the cooperation of the whole and by reinventing our daily life.

Lifeboat seeks to undermine capitalism by undoing the need to carry the heavy financial weight of high rents or mortgages on our backs, thus reducing the amount of hours we need to work to pay the bills. By utilizing shared resources, such as food, bikes, cars, tools, and machinery we can further reduce the cost of living. From this we gain more time and energy to put into rethinking how we live and work and free up time and resources to help marginalized populations and asylum seekers or others who currently lack power, financial security, and support.

These are not new ideas and I see no need to reinvent the wheel; There are many examples of people doing this in the past and present. However, there is currently nothing quite like this that exists in the Pioneer Valley or Southern Vermont, which is where I would ideally like to see this idea come to fruition.

The Structure

In the last few years I’ve done a lot of research about Community Land Trusts (CLT’s). Using a Community Land Trust structure is one way to create affordable, stable, and sustainable housing. CLT’s can also become non-profits, allowing them to take advantage of a wider array of funding streams. In this model no one individual owns the land, it belongs to the trust in perpetuity. However, members do own their houses and can sell them at any time as long as the cost remains affordable to the buyer (there are clear guidelines on this but too much for this email). There are many organizations who can help in developing and supporting this model, and I’ll link to a few of those at the end.

Have you ever heard of an “Octopod”? I’m not attached to the actual way the community is built or set up but I like the symbolic nature of separate yet together in this model. Picture a round hub in the center that has shared laundry, a communal kitchen, a play area for kids, a library, you get the picture! Coming out from this are 8 hallways that double as solariums for longer growing seasons and beauty. At the end of each hallway there is an individual dwelling, which could look a lot of ways, but it’s basically 8 separate households joined together in solidarity.

Why Now?

The pandemic laid bare the ways in which the current systems are not working and accelerated the pace at which they are falling apart. The Pioneer Valley and Southern Vermont were already expensive places to live, and now with the rising costs of everything and the high numbers of non-local buyers that came in during the last couple of years it is nearly impossible for some families to find or maintain housing. Speaking for myself, I’ve raised my children here and grew my practice here and I’d like to be able to stay, but without an out-of-the-box answer, as a single parent household in a rental situation, I may not be able to. Lack of stability in our housing has always been a problem for us, and in my son’s 12 year life time we’ve moved 7 times, and most of those were out of sheer necessity. We are not alone in this, as I see now many of the people and families that I know are in the same situation.

As I see it, the time is ripe to do this project. Lack of affordable housing has become an issue that is being widely discussed now and I feel that there might be more support than ever for creative solutions to the problem, in a financial sense as well as in state and local government policy, reformation of zoning laws, and organizations that are helping people make positive change.

Interested? Action Steps!

Once we have identified a core group of households that are interested in becoming potential residents of the community, we could start by holding a meeting (probably over zoom) to begin to discuss questions, ideas, possible governance structures, etc. I think it would be helpful to make a collective list of all the people we know who could be potential helpers and/or funders for the project. From here we could divide into 8 smaller teams:

1) Fundraising

2) Zoning Laws

3) Structural- Physical

4) Structural- Governance

5) Land Acquisition

6) Legal/ CLT/ Exit Strategies

7) Intentions and Bylaws

8) Tech/Social Media

Thank you so much for reading! Below are some links you could check out to learn more. I look forward to hearing back from you.

-Emma

In the words of Lin and Larry Pardey, “the Nearings of sailing”,

“Go simple, go small, go now”