== Participants ==
Part 1:
* [[Ben]] (convener)
* Michelle
* [[Eric]]
Part 2:
* [[Brandon]] (convener of part 2)
* [[Shelley]]
* [[Eric]]
* [[Ben]]
== Discussion ==
=== Part 1, in the car on Friday evening ===
Michelle’s father lived in two towns, Oshawa and Moncton, where he had something very like an intentional community of friends and family in the neighborhood where he lived (one street in Oshawa). People knew each other’s business, in a good way, and helped each other out all the time; for example, men in the neighborhood would take turns helping a single mother with tasks like cleaning gutters. People had groups of friends over for supper (kitchen parties). The towns were smaller than Ottawa, and in Oshawa the people were very blue-collar, mainly working in the steel industry or for GM or Chrysler, although Michelle’s father was a window-washer there. Now that he’s moved to Ottawa (due to his wife getting sick and needing help that wasn’t available in Moncton), Michelle has noticed her father has a much smaller circle of friends and family and believes he would enjoy life a lot more if he still had that kind of community.
=== Part 2, on the Sanders' deck on Saturday evening ===
Eric thinks that in a community like Windward, when someone gets sick, their partner isn’t left alone to care for them, which can be a huge weight put on one person’s shoulders.
Brandon is inspired by the Trackers Earth community, which kindled the fire of imagination and desire to be outside learning about the woods in our kids. It seems like a type of place where people end up volunteering, taking classes, even building their lives around it as a community. There’s something magical about it.
Brandon also likes how the PSAS works on their rocket regularly every Tuesday night and has these big launch events where people are really excited, providing an upward spiral of support for people who are into rocket stuff that sucks in a lot of other people for a while. There’s no question about when they’re going to be doing things, it’s every Tuesday night.
Eric visited a makerspace in Ottawa, on the top floor of a warehouse, expecting everyone to be focused on individual projects. What he found was a bunch of people sitting around talking about their projects and drinking beer, and it seemed like they went there as much for community connection as for the projects. People were helping each other with projects and giving advice. Eric asked about building a Gaia statue and got some really good advice, like to build it using cob and then make a mold. (They mentioned it would cost way too much to 3D print.)
Ben: Windward inspires me because they not only have a way of living together that enables both community-based life of shared work and the individual members having their own work that they are individually inspired by, but also is part of a bigger movement. Hosting these big events of living in a new culture (e.g., where people are more open about sexuality). What is important about it to me is the way that it combines community, individual creativity, and collective activism to change the world. This is probably true of Damanhur and The Farm in Tennessee. I met a representative of The Farm at a festival in Washington state (he was a very inspiring speaker). He was a climate activist, really into biochar. They created their own soil out of compost where there wasn’t previously good enough soil to make it happen, and also built a lot of amazing things out of recycled materials.
Shelley thinks about the staff at Big Lake, a 7th Day Adventist youth camp. They have a one-week training for the staff (mostly young people) in a beautiful physical space, with a shared good intention for creating a beautiful experience for kids (not always driven by love of Jesus). It gives a strong sense of being part of something important that everyone is going to work toward together. You get one day off a week, which demonstrates how hard everyone is working, driven by a sense of ownership, of “if I wasn’t here pulling my weight, I would be missed.”
Brandon wants to add the OES school community, which partly works because it’s very expensive, so most people here are really into it. For most of these people it’s a big choice, which creates a bond that creates a shared sense of values that transcends all sorts of other things. There is financial aid, but except for the very rich, it’s difficult for everybody to go here. It feels like you’re investing in your kids, which is a positive-feeling thing, and it’s very easy to connect with other people around that, and to get over a lot of things like personality clashes because “it’s about the kids, not about us.”
Brandon: Also the cul-de-sac, talking to people walking their dogs and people hanging out in their front yards walking over and chatting. That seems like it could really become something, even more than the pool. It’s easy and it’s good.
Eric: I lived in a very diverse neighborhood, including racially and socioeconomically, and the dog walking in that neighborhood brought together people from very diverse socioeconomic statuses. The only contact I still have in that neighborhood is a guy who is very poor, lived in some of the worst city housing in the neighborhood, was on welfare and had massive student loans that he had to avoid paying back. He had taken history in college. He was there and so were people with consulting positions, from these little crescents of half-million-dollar houses, and everything in between. People just met and talked at the park, but we would actually time it so we would meet there.
I met one woman there who got me linked into the whole community-garden-building thing, which was another bright spot in itself. There’s a real feeling of accomplishment when you walk by a community garden that you’ve helped build. At the garden we set up, there were a lot of more experienced gardeners helping less experienced ones. There was a farmer from southeast Asia who had lost all his land in conflict and came to Canada as a refugee and was so happy to be gardening again, and as a subsistence farmer, he really knew organic farming. He helped people out and showed them lots of techniques, which is a nice reversal from how refugees are usually in need of help.