The “core team” (Ute, the Tiffanys, Laurie, Judy, Jennifer, Victoria and Jonathan) met at Brothers Moon in Hopewell on Sunday to consider the following:
- Review of last meeting
- Discussion of properties
- Weekend Agenda / Participants (including children)
and to discuss Jennifer’s visioning process.
Discussion of last meeting:
- Properties (Alison Kingsley) — Ben Franklin spreadsheet Ben Franklin for the Eco Village
- Hillier property:
Discussion:
- Properties: what’s ideal?
- Buying back development rights, and how that could add to the costs?
Decisions:
- Devote one or more days a month to visiting properties
- Visit other ecovillages
Jennifer then led the group through a visioning exercise. This began by getting each participant to write down the 3 or 4 most important things to them in life. These included such things as family, health, environment, etc. but could also include things like social equity, privacy, and so on. These were all inside a central circle. Then she drew a larger circle around this, for what supported this set of personal wants and needs; we called this the Community level. Then a larger circle outside that represented the environment or biosphere level. This included things like clean air, water, food, energy, and shelter. Around this we also drew the universe or cosmos.
Seen in this way, we could then discuss what we wanted from the effort, including “sustainable comforts” (i.e., good food, warmth, beauty, etc., but done in a way as to cause the least burden on the planet), ethical understandings, meaningful relationships, etc. internally, and providing an example to the world externally. We explored how we might measure our impacts, and whether there are “best practices” for intentional communities. After much discussion, we arrived at several ways of expressing something like the following:
Our goal is create a community which sustainably cultivates the necessities of life (air, food, water, energy, shelter, health, etc.) in a way that allows for the full expression of human potential and the flourishing of its members.
There are multiple ways of stating this, but we think this encapsulates the central drivers for all of the members of the group: we want to live well, and help others do so, while ensuring a reciprocal balance with nature, as a means to unfolding the full potential of each person.
We then visited a beautiful hundred-acre property in Montgomery (perhaps a bit costly, at $3.4 million, and that’s without any development rights), and agreed to meet again in July (presumably Sunday, July 7, at a location to be determined).
Finally, the group agreed to a conference call on Thursday, June 27, 11-12, to finalize the July agenda and fill in additional details for the August weekend.