Edges

For over 20 years, the Edges Community has evolved through many forms, serving as home and opportunity for diverse individuals, families and lifestyles as well as a refuge of biodiversity, holistic healing, off-grid living, and affordable housing. It has provided a place of entrepreneurship in alternative medicine, green building, organic agriculture, and renewable energy and offered educational opportunities in both permaculture and ecological awareness. Though many of Edges members, families, and businesses have come and gone, what remains is a small core of committed members with a social, financial, and governance structure backed by over two decades of learning and observation in community living. We are looking forward to the continuing story of our community and what it may offer future generations.
Edges is owned and operated as a land trust corporation, comprised collectively and equally of its members. Members own their houses, but the land property itself is held in trust, undivided and unparceled.
Though there are no property lines, members occupy and homestead their own personal area of land. The community seeks to balance privacy and autonomy with integrated community living and collective planning and decision-making.
Our governance structure operates by “consensus minus-one”, though almost all our decisions are reached through full consensus, upholding simple core values of trust, respect, transparency, and open communication.
Currently there are eight core members, seven of which live on the land. The community is also home to other resident non-members and families, and continues to offer affordable housing options for alternatively minded individuals and couples who may or may not be interested in a long-term membership commitment.
Our membership process involves an extensive 7-month “provisional membership” period during which potential members live on the land and participate as if they were members, with several “check-ins” to discuss compatibility.
Our community meets one weekend a month for an official meeting, work-day project, and meal. We benefit from several shared resources, including a laundry room, large chest-freezer, garage/workshop, tractor and bush-hog, riding mower, hauling trailer, 4×4 UTV, wood chipper, and small barn.
Our 94 acres is located near Athens, Ohio, in the foothills of Appalachia and unglaciated Ohio River Valley. Our land occupies one of the highest points in the county, serving as a watershed property for tributaries of the Federal and Sunday Creek. The diverse ridge top topography cradles many diverse micro-climates and habitats, from dry open meadows to mature diverse hardwood forests, swampy seeps and vernal pools to highly competitive new-growth forests. The land offers abundance in wild food and medicine, including persimmon, paw paw, elderberry, black walnut, blackberry and wild mushrooms. We have a half-acre pond. Delicious varieties of second and third generation apple trees speckle the property from an old orchard. Our meadows, rarely mowed, are pollinator havens as well as battlegrounds of highly competitive invasive species such as multi-flora rose, autumn olive, and Japanese honeysuckle. The land supports little fertile bottom land, but its dynamic forms in both topography and biodiversity offer enormous potential for a large-scale permaculture plan and integrated systems approach to food, medicine, and firewood production.
Currently, we maintain personal gardens, harvest wild food, and keep several bee hives.
We hope to attract creatively driven individuals to participate in and become part of an evolving community vision, one which is ecologically sensitive, which celebrates diversity and cooperation, one which respects privacy and self-reliance, but is empowered by co-dependence, collaboration, and trust.