[Ccpg] Ecovillages & Intentional Communities Slide Show & Talk With Diana Leafe Christian Aug 24-30 Ojai, SB, SLO, Alameda, SF CA 2005
Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson
lakinroe at silcom.com
Wed Aug 24 06:47:13 PDT 2005
SANTA BARBARA PERMACULTURE NETWORK
Presents:
Ecovillages & Intentional Communities
Slide Show & Talk
With Diana Leafe Christian
THUR Aug 25 7pm Santa Barbara Downtown Library
(More Dates and times listed below for (Ojai,SB,SLO,Alameda,SF )
What works and what doesn't work in forming Intentional
Communities and EcoVillages? Diana Leafe Christian, author of "Creating a
Life Together, Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional
Communities", will do a lecture and slide show on Thursday, August 25,
7-9pm at the Santa Barbara Downtown Public Library, Faulkner Gallery, about
the process of forming these kinds of new communities. Gleaned from dozens
of successful communities in North America, she shares the nuts and bolts
of beginning one and how to avoid fatal mistakes that cause these kind of
communities to fail. Discussed will be creating vision documents,
decision-making and governance, buying and financing land, and the organic
process of growing a community.
An intentional community is a group of people who have chosen to live with
or near enough to each other to carry out their shared lifestyle or common
purpose together. Ecovillages are intentional communities that aspire to
create a more humane and sustainable way of life. Typically, an ecovillage
builds ecologically sustainable housing, grows much of it's own food,
recycles waste products harmlessly and generates it's own off-grid power.
Diana Leafe Christian is the editor of Communities Magazine
(http://fic.ic.org/cmag/cmaglist.html), the Fellowship for Intentional
Community's quarterly national publication about intentional communities in
North America, since 1993. For the past six years she has led workshops on
the practical steps to form intentional communities. She has been
interviewed by NPR and the BBC about intentional communities. Her
articles on Ecovillages, financial and legal aspects of communities,
children in community and communication and group process issues in
community have appeared in publications ranging from Mother Earth News to
the Permaculture Activist, and Canada's Time Magazine. She presently lives
in the Earthhaven Ecovillage in North Carolina.
Public Talk Locations with Diana Leafe Christian
Donations $5- $10
WED Aug 24 7pm Ojai Kent Hall Help of Ojai 111 W Santa Ana St, (Next to
Ojai City Hall) Turn off Hwy 150 onto Blanche St between Bank of America
and Star Marke sbpcnet at silcom.com 805-962-2571 $10
THUR Aug 25 7pm Santa Barbara Downtown Library sbpcnet at silcom.com
805-962-2571 $10
FRI Aug 26 7pm San Luis Obispo Downtown Library Bob Banner
hopedance at aol.com 1-866-749-7819,805 544 9663 $10
Monday Aug 29 7pm Alameda Point Collaborative 677 W. Ranger Ave. Alameda,
CA 94501 Douglas Biggs <dbiggs at apcollaborative.org> www.apcollaborative.org
510.898.7849
TUES Aug 30 (Tentative) San Francisco Commonwealth Club 595 Market Street
SF (www.commonwealthclub.org) Eric Corey Freed <eric at organicarchitect.com>
(415) 474-7777
For Tour updates contact Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
sbpcnet at silcom.com, 805-962-2571,www.sbpermaculture.org
SPONSORS- Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, LA EcoVillage, LA
Permaculture Guild, Ojai Permaculture Guild, The Alameda Point
Collaborative, ADSPR, Organic Architect, & Hopedance Media.
Additional Information about the book & author:
Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and
Intentional Communities, by Diana Leafe Christian, editor of Communities
Magazine, foreword by Patch Adams. 2003 New Society Publishers, 272 pp.,
About the Author:
Diana Leafe Christian has been editor of Communities magazine, a quarterly
publication about intentional communities in North America, since 1993. She
has been interviewed by NPR and the BBC about intentional communities and
has contributed a chapter on forming new communities to Creating Harmony
(Gaia Trust, 1999). Her articles on ecovillages, financial and legal
aspects of communities, children in community, and communication and group
process issues in community have appeared in publications ranging from
Mother Earth News to Communities magazine, the Communities Directory, and
Canada's This Magazine.
Diana leads workshops for forming-community groups and educational centers
nationwide and at communities conferences, on the practical steps to create
ecovillages and intentional communities, including the land-purchase,
zoning, and legal stages of these projects.
She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina, one of the "successful
10 percent" communities she began researching for this book.
MORE ABOUT BOOK AND BOOK REVIEWS
Creating a Life Together is an overview of the process of forming new
ecovillages and intentional communities, gleaned from founders of dozens of
successful communities in North America formed since the early '90s. This
is what they did, and what you can do, to create your community dream. It
attempts to distill their hard experience into solid advice on getting
started as a group, creating vision documents, decision-making and
governance, agreements and policies, buying and financing land,
communication and process, and selecting people to join you. It's what
works, what doesn't work, and how not to reinvent the wheel. This
information is not only for people forming new communities - whether or not
you already own your land. It can also be valuable for those of you
thinking about joining community one day - since you, too, will need to
know what works. And it's also for those of you already living in
community, since you can only benefit from knowing what others have done in
similar circumstances."
Diana Leafe Christian is author of Creating a Life Together: Practical
Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities (New Society
Publishers, 2003), about forming communities in today's financial and
zoning climate, based on the experiences of successful community founders
in the 1990s. She has been editor of Communities magazine, the Fellowship
for Intentional Community's quarterly national publication about
intentional communities in North America, since 1993. For the past six
years she has led workshops on the practical steps to form intentional
communities. Diana is a member of Earthaven Ecovillage.
"Wow! The newest, most comprehensive bible for builders of intentional
communities. Covers every aspect with vital information and hundreds of
examples of how successful communities faced the challenges and created
their shared lives out of their visions. The cautionary tales of sadder
experiences and how communities fail, will help in avoiding the pitfalls.
Not since I wrote the Foreword to Ingrid Komar's Living the Dream (1983),
which documented the Twin Oaks community, have I seen a more useful and
inspiring book." --Hazel Henderson, author, Creating Alternative Futures,
and Politics of the Solar Age.
"A great deal of research and trial-and-error has been assembled here, and
every potential ecovillager should read it. This book will be an essential
guide and manual for the many Permaculture graduates who live in
communities or design for them." --Bill Mollison, co-originator of the
Permaculture concept, author of The Permaculture Designers Manual, Ferment
and Human Nutrition.
"A really valuable resource for anyone thinking about intentional
community. I wish I had it years ago." -- Starhawk, author of Webs of
Power, The Spiral Dance, and The Fifth Sacred Thing -- and committed
communitarian.
"Creating a new culture of living peacefully with each other and the planet
is our number one need--and this is the right book at the right time.
Creating a Life Together will be instrumental in the ecovillage courses I
teach. I can't wait to tell people about it." --Hildur Jackson, cofounder,
Global Ecovillage Network (GEN); co-editor, Ecovillage Living: Restoring
the Earth and Her People.
"A comprehensive, engaging, practical, well-organized, and thoroughly
digestible labor of love...This book is a gift to humanity, helping to move
forward the elusive quest for community, fueling a quantum leap towards a
fulfilling, just, and sustainable future." --Geoph Kozeny, 30-year
community activist, producer/editor of video documentary "Visions of
Utopia: Experiments in Sustainable Culture."
"Before aspiring community builders hold their first meeting, confront the
first realtor, or drive their first nail, they must buy this essential
book: it wil improve their chances for success immensely, and will
certainly save them money, time, and heartbreak. In her friendly but firm
(and occasionally funny) way, Diana Christian proffers an astonishing
wealth of practical information and sensible, field-tested advice."
--Ernest Callenbach, author, Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging
"While anyone can build a village, a subdivision, or a housing development,
the challenge is filling it with people who can get along, who can reach
agreements, and who can achieve far more together than they ever could
alone. If your aspiring ecovillage or intentional community gets even this
far - and this awesome book will show you how - then maybe you have a
realistic chance of living sustainably, and by example, of changing the
world. My appreciation grows daily for this thorough, practical, and
engaging guide." --Albert Bates, Director, Ecovillage Training Center, and
Board member, Global Ecovillage Network
"Developing a successful community requires a special blend of vision and
practicality woven together with wisdom. Consider this book a marvelous
mirror. If the abundant, experience-based, practicality in this book
delights you then you probably have the wisdom to realize your vision."
--Robert Gilman, founding editor of In Context, A Quarterly of Humane
Sustainable Culture
Review by Geoph Kozeny
If Creating a Life Together had been available in 1972, probably
it wouldn't have taken me five tries to start a community that would last
for more than 13 months. But with no such "how to" resource available, my
cohorts and I plunged into it the hard way-by trial and error. After
flailing around through those first four attempts, then living for ten
years in a community that succeeded, and subsequently visiting 350-some
communities to figure out what worked for them and what didn't, I was
resigned to the idea that someday I'd have to write the definitive manual
on creating and sustaining intentional communities. I'm eternally grateful
that Diana Christian did it first.
As I compare the topics featured in Creating a Life Together with
my ancient annotated list of things to include in my intended book, I'm
thoroughly impressed with how she covered the bases. It's all here-from
conceiving a community, through building a vision and gathering a group, to
finding and buying land, and ultimately how to get along together and make
it work. (See excerpt, "Accountability and Consequences," pg. 16.) Further,
it's written in a readable, captivating style that makes extensive use of
interviews and vignettes from the everyday life of real communities. (As a
testimony to Diana's thoroughness, pithiness, and the relevance of the
information, the publisher, a former communitarian himself, chose to
publish a book twice the length he'd originally agreed to once he read the
manuscript.)
The breadth and depth of this work should come as no surprise to
anyone familiar with Diana's credentials. As editor of Communities
magazine, she's perused scores of insightful and practical articles over
the last ten years, and, always looking for a good story, has sought out
and interviewed dozens of veteran communitarians, especially community
founders, about what went wrong and what worked well. (Not to mention
learning many hard lessons firsthand, through the break-ups of two
community start-ups she was involved in before joining Earthaven, one of
the communities profiled in the book.)
Creating a Life Together includes abundant examples from thriving
ecovillages and communities as well as numerous anecdotes from groups that
failed (although the latter sound strikingly familiar, they're usually
presented as fictitious models) - making for a very effective
community-building guidebook.
Information is presented logically, using the metaphor of growing
a successful garden: Planting the Seeds of Healthy Community (major bases
to cover and planning pitfalls to avoid); Sprouting New Community
(techniques and tools); and Enriching the Soil (communication, working with
conflict, adding and sustaining members). However, this seemingly
straightforward order is offered only to make the concepts easy to digest.
"Don't assume these steps are linear," Diana cautions. "The process of
growing a community is more organic - simultaneously ongoing and step by
step." She makes it clear that circumstances may dictate swapping the
order, doing many steps at once, skipping steps if appropriate, and even
adding new ones of your own.
The "Seeds" section examines basic concerns, including a general
overview of what has worked and what hasn't, the founder's role and its
challenges, crafting a clear vision, raising start-up funds, and
establishing effective and empowering decision-making structures. The
"Sprouting" section, comprising the bulk of the book, focuses on the
critical importance of good documentation, legal structures, working with
lawyers, finding and buying land, zoning, refinancing, balancing privacy
with group involvement, and setting up internal community economics. The
"Enriching" section digs into the most critical aspects of sustaining a
community once it's established: how to work with the beliefs and emotions
that underlie conflict and agreements for handling conflict, constructively
offering and receiving feedback, and how to help each other stay
accountable to the group. Additionally, a very helpful appendix features
numerous sample documents of community visions and agreements, several
dozen extremely helpful community-building resources, plus links for
finding hundreds more on the Web.
Creating a Life Together is a comprehensive, engaging, practical,
well-organized, and thoroughly digestible labor of love. Hopefully scores
of wannabe community founders and seekers will discover it before they
launch their quest for community, and avoid the senseless and sometimes
painful lessons that come from trying to reinvent the wheel. This book is a
gift to humanity-helping to move forward the elusive quest for community,
fueling a quantum leap towards a fulfilling, just, and sustainable future.
Geoph Kozeny, a 30-year community activist, is producer editor of Visions
of Utopia: Experiments in Sustainable Culture, a two-hour video documentary
on intentional community. geoph at ic.org; http://www.store.ic.org.
For lots of interesting book reviews, workshop raves and other testimonials
about Diana Christian's book and workshops, see
http://www.creating-a-life-together.org/
-end-
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
(805) 962-2571
sbpcnet at silcom.com
www.sbpermaculture.org
"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order
to grow." - Anonymous
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