Service and Activism

Our Fall issue focuses on Service and Activism. Authors explore how communitarians can help others and the planet, both through embodying a culture of cooperation and service and through reaching out to make a difference in the wider world.

Featured groups in “Service and Activism” include Camphill communities, Innisfree Village, Gesundheit!, Konohana Family, Magic, Black Bulga, and more. The issue also shares “after the fire” reflections from Harbin Hot Springs, a 25th-anniversary retrospective from ZEGG, a story of the new neighborhood at EcoVillage at Ithaca, and results of a wide-ranging study on happiness in intentional community. Please join us!

To purchase a print copy of this issue, contact Communities’ new home at GEN-US.

Articles in “Service and Activism”

• Publisher’s Note—Community, Social Justice, Responsibility, and Accountability by Sky Blue
• Notes from the Editor—The Need for Greater Purpose by Chris Roth
• Community Living as Social Activism in Camphill by Kam Bellamy
  In Camphill communities, people of all abilities have a voice.
• Innisfree Village: Lifesharing in a Service Community by Nancy Chappell
  Adults with disabilities and residential caregiver volunteers share the challenges and joys of community life at Innisfree.
• The Gesundheit! Institute: A 45 Year-Old Communal Hospital Experiment by Patch Adams
  In a decades-long project with worldwide reach, medicine, humor, and community become vehicles for social change.
• Service in Community: A Fijian Success Story by Philip Mirkin
  An ecovillage benefits its neighbors by hosting nurses for a transformative week in the islands.
• When Each One of Us Changes Our Mind, the World Changes: Life with Konohana Family by Yoko Oki
  At the foot of Mt. Fuji, spirituality and community play key roles in healing physical and mental ills.
• Taking Death by the Hand by Lindsay Hagamen
  Through its Natural Burial Cemetery, Windward allows individuals, even in death, to foster the growth and renewal of life.
• Activism and Service at Black Bulga Community: Inspiring, Nurturing, Challenging, and Not All Hard Work by Geoff Evans
  At Black Bulga, the experience of community provides vital support for members to be effective change agents in the wider world.
• Coming of Age in Service Community by Jen and Hilary Bayer
  Growing up in a community with a strong commitment to changing the world can be both enlivening and challenging.
• Not the Last of the Mohicans: Honoring Our Native Predecessors on the Land by Jeff Golden
  How can we do right by the native peoples whose ancestral homelands now host our intentional communities?
• The Case for Mass Civil Disruption and Resistance: The story of how 15 intentional communities and experiments came together to form a national coalition to defend life, come hell or high water by Ethan Hughes (edited by Laila Johnson and Gavain U’Prichard)
  Activists and communitarians gather to ask: “How do we respond to our current global crisis?”
• Activism Revisited: Personal reflections on trying to make a difference by Daniel Christian Wahl
  Through the power of our attention, and our actions and failures to act, we are all shaping the future.
• The Co-Evolution of My Communities, Co-Intelligent Process, and Activism by Tom Atlee
  From the Great Peace March to Walnut Street Cooperative, community, process, and social change continue to converge.
• The Choices We Make by Paul Freundlich
  More than four decades after their shared time in India, former Peace Corps Volunteers still feel the connections and transformations it created.
• Grassroots Activism Starts at Home by Dan Hines
  At the RareBirds Housing Co-operative, community life and outside activism deepen and strengthen each other.
• Homelessness and Tiny Houses: Two Worlds Intersect to Foster Community by Kerri Fivecoat-Campbell
  Those inspired by the tiny house movement can help those with no homes to become part of it.
• After the Harbin Fire: Reflections on a Community Disrupted, Not Defeated by Geoffrey Huckabay
• Utopian Polish and the Dust of Everyday Life: Twenty-Five Years of Creative Failure—What Can We Learn from the ZEGG Experiment? by Dieter Halbach
• Aging in Community: How an Older Couple Helped Launch a New Multi-Generational Ecovillage Neighborhood by Wallace Watson
• The Seven Steps of Sociocracy—Putting it All Together by Diana Leafe Christian
• Creating Cooperative Culture—Happiness in Communal Life: A Scientific Project by Bjørn Grinde