Practical Intentional Community Formation

Study Group

Beginning in June 2024, 10 week cycles until February 2025

Exact meeting times to be determined with interested participants.
Together, we will set a fortnightly meeting schedule that works for as many of us as possible.

If you are actively engaged in forming an intentional community -- or you are curious about what doing so might entail but are intimidated by the process -- EcoGather's Intentional Community Formation Study Group might be for you.

From June through February, we will convene a mixed-experience group of people with different skills to research and assess varied models for collective and cooperative land-based living, sustenance, and enterprise. Study group members will identify together several possible paths to investigate more fully, divide up the work of familiarizing themselves with helpful models, literature, and case-studies. We will convene every 2 weeks for 2 hours each session to learn together about the different ways that intentional communities are established and operated. This group will be flexible, adaptive and co-created with the participants to create momentum and inspiration around the daunting process of divesting from individualism and atomized housing and shifting towards shared housing and life-making.

Ideally, you will come to this group with an action-oriented motivation. If you have land, collaborators, or other resources at the ready but need a structured space and some support in puzzling through the "how," you’ll find kindred spirits with whom you can puzzle through next steps. That said, even if you are not directly positioned to start an IC soon, your presence and participation will be valuable, as we will discuss real and hypothetical scenarios and build a network of supportive folks who you may be able to turn to when you are ready to take the leap. We will compile, share, and actually dive into resources together, helping each other figure out good ways to design and develop models for collective living that suit the needs and desires of our participants' places, human and more-than-human community members, values, and starting resource base.

Participation is open to those who are just beginning to explore communal living, as well as to those that are already several steps along in the process. By collaborating across different levels of knowledge, types of living and enterprise experiences, and stages in development, we can all learn with each other. Working through specific scenarios will help us hone and continually advance our learning goals.

We will meet in 5-session cycles with a breaks in between, starting the first or second week of June. This cadence of focused study punctuated by periods for absorption, reflection, and implementation is intended to enable participants to sustain engagement and to support each other in moving from theory through ideation into practical action.

Overview

We will work with the group of interested participants to decide on a meeting schedule that works for most people. There will also be opportunities for asynchronous participation in threaded group forums and group chats, as well as access to recorded sessions for those that cannot make it to every meeting. EcoGather’s own Nissa Coit will organize and facilitate the study group.

The schedule for the first cycle is as follows:

  • Session 1: Study group formation; settling our scope (defining what we mean by and exclude from ICs, for now); articulate goals and come up with priority questions for research and exploration; introduce book for group reading during the 1st Cycle (likely, Everyday Utopia by Kristen Ghodsee).

  • Session 2: Locate, share, and discuss resources (from among those assembled by EcoGather and suggested by participants); divvy up the work and assign deliverables.

  • Session 3: Guest speaker session with Q&A; may include conveners and members of existing ICs, professional advisors to ICs and sharing economy practitioners (e.g., attorneys, accountants, loan officers); Anthropologists and other scholars of communal living.

  • Session 4: Synthesis - Present and workshop deliverables.

  • Session 5: "Book Club" discussion facilitated by Nicole Civita.

At the end of the first 10-week cycle, study group participants will make suggestions about schedule for the next cycle, including choosing a new book. EcoGather will generate a resource guide from Cycle 1, which will become part of its Learning Commons. EcoGather will reopen the study group to new participants, who may catch up by reviewing the resource guide from Cycle 1 and enter the group at the start of Cycle 2. In this way, we can balance group formation, active collaboration, and openness to newcomers.

For more information, or if you have questions, reach out to Nissa at ncoit@steringcollege.edu.

How to Join

  • Those who join the Study Group will receive access to EcoGather-curated and group-identified or created resources. Participants will also have access to secure group messages and an easy-to-use discussion forum to facilitate asynchronous participation and discussion between meetings. You will also receive access to a digital copy of the book selected as our long read for the cycle.

    To access this learning opportunity, please select the tiered fee that feels right for you, your relative structural advantages, and your present circumstances:
    Tier 1: $80
    Tier 2: $40
    Tier 3: $20
    We trust participants to make a choice that feels fair, honest, comfortable within your current financial means. All material will be available to you regardless of which tier you choose. If none of these works for you — especially if you are based in a part of the world where payment in US dollars disadvantages you, please reach out to us. We are happy to explore ways to remove financial barriers.

    If, at the end of a cycle, you feel that you received greater value from the Study Group than you contributed (monetarily or in kind), you might consider making an optional donation to EcoGather. Community support really helps to sustain our heterodox learning journeys and alternative economic practices. Generosity, solidarity, and trust feel so much better to us than typical transacting.

    If you are interested in participating, complete the scheduling poll. We will reach out when we have determined our meeting times.

    Application

Meet Nissa.

Nissa will be organizing and participating in this study group. Nissa currently works at EcoGather as a Learning Network Associate. In her free time she enjoys all sorts of handicrafts like pottery, sewing, knitting, and candle-making. She hopes to establish a cooperative living situation in Vermont in the very near future!