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Community Alchemy – get support for your Regenerative Neighborhood
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3. Align with Group Agreements and Governance
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3. Align with Group Agreements and Governance
Social Outlook
This is one of the four dimensions of sustainability, and it is important to examine your project’s choices in social sustainability. Take a look at the considerations you should be making below. Replace this block of text with your own short statement on how you want to approach social sustainability (equity, inclusivity, etc.), then fill out the subsections below.
Personal Regeneration
The inner work required to bravely reimagine life in a regenerative community is an intense undertaking. There is a risk of unconsciously repeating some of the same societal patterns you seek to restructure. A healthy community requires healthy individuals. Likewise, community commitment to personal growth is essential for community longevity.
For healthy individuals that can communicate maturely within community, it is important to have practices from each category:
Self-Reflection
Healing / Emotional Processing
Chosen frameworks for self assessment and growth:
Resources:
ARC Prosocial Framework
Relationships
In governance, your first duty is to cultivate human relationships. Before you can create agreements, solid rapport or bonding needs to occur so that
Relationship building activities:
Community Rules
Decide what you can and cannot do on the land.
Onboarding Process
What ways you can bring diversity into your community while maintaining alignment with its core essence?
Communities often have formal approaches, and at the same time they just feel it out. Individuals experience a gradual welcoming into deeper roles and responsibilities based on how much they show up and invest in the community’s maintenance and growth.
Example Onboarding Processes:
Visits – length of minimum stay determined by community
Work Trades or Internships
Community Interviews the Individual*
Community Vote
Membership fees/initial investment
Your onboarding process:
Do you want to include a formal review process of new members? How often?
Your review process:
Resources:
Offboarding Process
What rights does the community have over members who do not keep their side of agreements?
Example Onboarding Processes:
Work Trades or Internships
Community Interviews the Individual*
Community Vote
Membership fees/initial investment
How to say goodbye to people:
Have clear rules about what behavior will cause you to be dismissed from the community.
(Optional) Enact a warning system.
Make sure it is a community consensus and involve community residents in the decision process.
Call a meeting to discuss the possibility. Give the person a chance to express their side.
Have an “exit interview” to gather information about what the community might do better in the future, and suggestions for the individual’s growth.
Activities that merit a goodbye:
Old age, mental health, or inability to participate
Death and bankruptcy
Legacy – Children and relatives that don’t align with the community values
Legal Structures
What legal structure will you choose for your community? Consider organizing your project into multiple legal entities.
Land Holding
Land can be owned privately or collectively
Development Entity
An entity to handle your finances, development, reinvestment. The business side of your community.
Operations Entity
An entity to run your community operations. The community side of your community
Possible Legal Structures:
Limited Liability Company (LLC)
Foundation
Association
Church (508c in USA)
Cooperative
FairShares Commons
Land Trust
Tenancy in Common (TIC)
Country/Municipaity
Read the resources below to figure out which structure is best for you.
Legal structure(s) of choice:
Legal Structures for Intentional Communities in the US
“Legal Systems Very Different From Ours”
Legal Approach
Your lawyer
Resources to find lawyers outside the system?
Resources:
Governance Structure of Choice
How we set our agreements:
How we change our agreements:
Who gets to participate in the decision making process?
Ways someone could earn decision-making power:
Being a (co)founder
Community Membership
Fees or Contributions
Financial Investment
Sweat equity – doing work
“Showing up” – being consistently present/engaged
Proof of stake in the project
How does someone earn decision-making power in your community?
Here are some alternative governance methods to explore so that you can choose the most appropriate and inclusive approach. Write your group’s thoughts about each method, and perhaps research each one to pick one to consider for the next section.
Holocracy
Sociocracy
Consensus-building
DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)
Liquid Delegation
Quadratic Voting
How will the group make decisions?
Communication & Conflict Resolution Methods of Choice
What is the general philosophy for how your community addresses conflict?
Here are some conflict resolution strategies to be aware of that are widely practiced in successful ecovillages and community projects. Fill out your group’s thoughts about each of these strategies. Is there one that you need to research more on? Select at least 2 methods of conflict resolution you plan to use in your community process.
Way of Council
Nonviolent Communication
Understand the Thomas Kilmann Model
Circle
Peer Mediation
Consensus Building
Meta Agreements
https://github.com/targetteal/o2-pt/blob/master/EN/meta-agreements.md
Facilitation Methods
Resources: liberating structures, sessionlab
Inclusivity Agreements
Use this space to create a manifesto of sorts about your community’s accessibility and inclusivity. How will you consider these aspects when planning your community? Replace this block of text with your summary statement of your group’s general beliefs about inclusivity, then collectively answer the following questions.
How do you make your space inclusive to all people? Consider the attitudes – and the specific practices that uphold them – to include people of differing age, physical/mental ability, race, income level, gender nonconformity, and neurodiversity.
Age
Example practice
Physical Ability
Example practice
Mental Ability
Example practice
Race
Example practice
Income Level
Example practice
Gender Nonconformity
Example practice
Neurodiversity
Example practice
How do you identify blind spots when it comes to creating true inclusivity? What processes will you put in place to uphold inclusivity?
Resources:
Write about other agreements that ensure social equity within the community, i.e. anti-hierarchical structures.
Resources:
How does your community respect the local indigenous communities (past and present), honor their existence, and include them in community participation?
Resources:
Intergenerational Care
How does your community care for its elders?
How does your community train and apprentice young people to be empowered to carry on the community vision?
Education
Views on education
Education for kids
Education for adults
What kind of education is available within your community?
Will higher education be available inside your community?
Use of Technology
How does your community relate to and integrate technology into its daily life?
Community Stipulations
What happens if the community closes?
What happens when a community member wants to sell their share or lot?
Ecological Outlook
Ecological Belief System
Write the overarching philosophies your community members share about how to coexist with nature. How does your community view the local environment and the global ecosystem? Why does your community choose to live in ecologically mindful ways?
Ecological Practices
What general ecological practices will your community use?
Permaculture Design
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Green Building Methods
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Renewable Energy
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Water Management
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Waste Management / Reduction
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Regenerative Agriculture & Food Security
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Indigenous Worldview
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Generational Impact Assessment
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Commitments to Conservation
What are your community’s commitments to conservation over development?
Resiliency & Solutions to Climate Emergencies
What climate emergencies is your community susceptible to?
How will you design your community to mitigate these climate threats?
Economic Beliefs & Practices
Economic Belief Systems
What does your community believe in when it comes to economic systems?
Does your community have an alternative mission for the economic interactions of its inhabitants, both within the community and outside of the community?
How does your community plan to relate to the established economic system?
How does your community plan to help the current economic system evolve?
Cultivating Abundance
Define abundance
How your community will cultivate abundance
“8 Forms of Capital”
How much material capital will your community share?
Economic Practices Within the Community
How expenses are shared
How work is shared
How participation is rewarded
Money
Gifts
Privileges and Special Access
Tokens
Status or Influence
Are you familiar with these, or know anyone who is? How would you like to incorporate these economic concepts into your community?
Alternative Economic Systems to be aware of:
Gift Economies – Economies based on reciprocity and “paying it forward or back” in the mindset of shared abundance and frequent sharing and gifting.
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Local Currency Creation – Creating a new currency within the community to stabilize your own economics, symbolically disconnect from other global currencies, and/or create value that can only be circulated within the community.
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Shared Income Models – All roles in the community (income earning or not) are compensated, and streams of community income are shared. Private income streams can also be shared in a communal pot that improves the quality of life of all community members.
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Cryptocurrency – Use of crypto, blockchain-based currencies within a community and accepting certain forms of crypto as payment.
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Barter – Trading goods in place of currency.
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
Work Trade or Time Bank models – Accepting time as a currency, irrespective of where the time was invested, as long as it was invested somewhere in the community model. Accepting work/time/labor in exchange for valuable services or goods within the community, or simply in exchange for accommodations and food.
How would you like to incorporate this practice into your community?
Resources:
A Commons –
Open Value Network?
Community-based insurance
Community-based pensions
Community-funded UBI (use Circles)
Resource-based economy
Community Care
UBI/Community Member Stipends
Insurance and Pensions
Worldview
Shared Community Outlook on Life
What beliefs unite your community? These beliefs include personal shared interests and hobbies (art, herbalism, technology, surfing etc.), lifestyle choices (diet, off-grid homesteading, etc.), and fundamental shared values such as spirituality and politics. What are the primary qualities that community members are looking to share with each other? What will be the daily life of your community?
Include shared beliefs of intolerance of certain things, like a zero tolerance of drugs or a no-waste lifestyle that avoids all plastic.
Make a list of key activities, and/or write paragraphs describing the community’s shared life outlook and activities.
Unshared Community Outlook on Life
What diversity of opinion do you respect? While it is certainly very healthy to welcome a variety of people, it is also perfectly acceptable for a community to define, for example, that they are a vegan community and would therefore prefer all-vegan members. If that is so, include those aspects above, in the shared community outlook. Here, you may write about what the community is open and tolerant about, such as different spiritual beliefs, political outlooks, and lifestyle practices.
Resources
Connection to Nature
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This discussion was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by
Oscar Regen Tribe 🔺.
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This discussion was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Oscar Regen Tribe 🔺.
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This discussion was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Oscar Regen Tribe 🔺.
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This discussion was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by
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