East Wind Nut butters gets some press!

East Wind community has been very shy about the press since the National Geographic article came out and although the article was accurate in many ways it was at one of our hardest times in community. Its kinda like a national report on your dirty laundry. Needless to say we just didn't want any press, So when Rob Evans of KOLR 10 came to us about doing a show on our nut butter factory our spines tingled with fear, after much debate parameters where set and he was allowed to come here and present an article for the Springfield area on our Nut butter business. I walked him around showing some of the buildings speaking on East Wind and even got interviewed along with a couple others when all was said and done this video appeared today and we are very happy.

Thank you Rob.
Enjoy
L~

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=42509731151&h=FYFMG

It's not too late

Dave Pollard writes a thoughtful blog. One of his most recent entries was rightly criticizing the government about it's inaction around climate change. And there is much to be critical of, including Obama's most recent speech on the topic, which is way too little given what the official science is telling us these days.

But this leads Dave to toy with the potentially self crippling conclusion, that we are "too late" and the game is over. Below is an extended version of the comment i wrote on his blog.

It is not too late. We are just too lazy.

I live in an eco-village in the US. We consumes 30% of the gasoline, per person of our mainstream counterparts. We use 10% of the home heating fuel and cooking gas and produces 10% of the trash of average US americans. And the lifestyle is in most ways indistinguishable from the American middle class, in terms of access to resources. And the really funny/tragic thing, is we are not even trying at it very hard. We dont prioritize sustainability over everything in our budgeting process, we often take cheap fixes instead of green ones.

What we do do well is sharing. We share 17 cars for 100 people, something virtually unheard of in the US, centralized shopping is a service which only the very rich have available to them and i enjoy everyday when i am at home. Growing most of our own food takes about 3% of our total labor (a bit higher than the national average) but most folx in the mainstream wont spend that amount of time on it.

Deer Hunting

Relax - no photos on this post.

I spent the last week deer hunting - the last time I hunted was 42 years ago. Why after all these years am I now hunting again?

Background: I grew up on a farm where hunting was a rite of passage for teenage boys. I went with the guys halfheartedly - but i was never really into it. I managed to never actually kill anything.

Now i’ve been living at Sandhill Farm for 28 years. Our ethic is to eat food that we raise ourselves. We often have vegetarians living here though most of us are omnivores. We have chickens & turkeys and used to have a milk cow and often eat her offspring; occasionally, someone would raise a couple of pigs. We do not buy meat. We gave up having a cow a few years ago and now depend on venison for most of our meat (we keep our chickens for eggs and slaughter old hens only every 3 years or so.) Since we did not have our own beef anymore, we turned to deer - a very plentiful resource around here.

A former member hunted deer while here and our son, Ceilee, who was born here, began hunting when in high school. After these two left, we had no hunters - but had grown fond of venison. For several years, we received deer as gifts from other hunters (friends & neighbors), who enjoyed hunting and shot more deer than they wanted to eat. Sometimes, we allowed them to hunt on our land - after all, deer are the main pests in our field crops.

Skyhouse Community Report

Juan here, reporting on Skyhouse's comings and goings and doings since the last FEC assembly in February at East Wind.

The biggest news in Skyhouse is that Skyhouse will be welcoming a new member in March, as Amy & I are pregnant. Preparations and modifications are being made to room layouts to accomodate the new one, and we had a significant amount of fun calling my family in Argentina to let them know the news.

Skyhouse has been having some practice with children, however, as Ma'ikwe Ludwig and her son Jibran are renting a room in Skyhouse; I, for one, am happy that we have ten years before our child is his age. Dan Steinicke, a former member of Dancing Rabbit, returned and is also renting a room for the winter.

We had our first strong contenders for Skyhouse adult membership since Cecil left when Lauren and Shannon, a couple from Philadelphia, expressed an interest in us. After Amy and I met them briefly in Philly, Skyhouse decided to forego our usual method of encouraging interested folks to visit Dancing Rabbit, and instead hosted them directly. Their visit was pleasant, and it seemed like they might be a good fit for Skyhouse. Unfortunately, they decided to take a different path, and have not returned.

We've done a lot of travelling, as well. Tony went to the Art of Community and the FIC conference in May. Much family-related
travelling ensued, with visiting of parents and friends all over the country.

On the business side of things, Tony has continued his hard work on the FIC's website, and Amy and I built the online store for the
Milkweed Mercantile (http://www.milkweedmercantile.com). A dream of Alline Anderson and Kurt Kessner of Dancing Rabbit, the Mercantile's physical building isn't finished yet. But when it is, it will be host to a bed and breakfast, a cafe and a general store. Skyhouse is now extremely close to seeing the last of the debt it incurred building our house go away, and I for one, can't wait.

Twin Oaks Community Report

As I write this, a child is being born here at Twin Oaks. In the upstairs living room of Kaweah, Summer and Purl are being assisted by friends, family and a midwife in giving birth to our newest member.

In June of this year we celebrated Twin Oaks' 41st Anniversary. Around 200 members and ex-members gathered together to watch slide-shows, have dinner and dance together to mark the occasion. Unfortunately, while we were waiting for dinner word got to us that one of the buildings next to our warehouse, named Oz, was burning. The destruction was total, but luckily the fire did not spread to any of the other buildings. The folks at Louisa Fire Department contained the fire and put it out for us. Work is already underway to replace Oz with a new steel building by this spring.

This years Halloween party was a blast. Many members dressed up and partied down. Costumes included: Sarah Palin's pregnant teenage daughter (costume worn by a 40-year old man), Peak Oil (person adorned with garbage bags and car-oil cans, with a trickle of fake oil dripping out of their head) and Johnny Cash (complete with 3-piece live band, led the whole room in singing a round of "Ring of Fire")

As of this moment, Twin Oaks is at maximum capacity. In early November we took on our 93rd adult member, which according to our current policy is our Population Capacity (or Pop Cap for short). Already since then we have collected a waiting list of a dozen people ready to move here once the opportunity arises. Is this the beginning of a new trend or just an anomaly? Only time will tell.

SANDHILL COMMUNITY REPORT

The weather made this a challenging year: we had rain, rain, & more rain. We had problems planting crops in a timely manner and yet, overall, our crops did well. We made raised beds in our main garden – which helped a lot. We also had lovely fall weather and so late crops – like peppers – matured and yielded plentifully.

We are excited about our greenhouse: this will be the first year that we are growing greens in it in the winter months – Gigi hooked up a wood stove and fired it yesterday. We are looking forward to fresh greens during the winter!

Membership stayed the same - Jacob became a provisional member for several months and plans to return to Red Earth next year. We had a lot of additional folks – so the work got done joyously. Ann & Kevin were interns all year and are still here. Thea returned for another internship. We also had numerous visitors including ex-members. The board game, crokinole was played a lot.

Local Activism:

Several of us – together with folks from Dancing Rabbit and Red Earth – did a Peace Vigil in March in the small town of Memphis, our county seat.

Gigi has become the spokesperson for Concerned Citizens of Scotland County – a group that is alarmed at the recent influx of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and attempting to make the CAFO operators manage animals and manure responsibly.

Renay continues in public school and is a great public relations ambassador – by being herself.

Celebrations:

Our annual mayday party was a great one – this year we had a contra dance in the loft of one of our barns.

We also re-instituted our annual sorghum festival and had a good turnout.

Jo came back from N Carolina to celebrate her 21st birthday and made over 600 sushi rolls for all to enjoy.

Meetings

Together with Skyhouse, we hosted the FEC assembly in November

With Dancing Rabbit, we hosted FIC meetings

Emma Goldman Finishing School Community Report

This past year has been one full of changes. The biggest being the birth of our first baby, Ruby, who is the daughter of Johanna and Sheldon. As a community, we’ve been learning how to support new parents, how to do baby sign language, and how to relate with this little one. It has been a challenging and rewarding learning opportunity for us. Now, Ruby is walking/tottering and that is bringing with it a whole new set of fun and challenging things.

Also, we have seen some dramatic membership flux. After taking on two new adult members and two children in the fall of 2007, in the summer of 2008 one of our adult couples, and our new member and her two children moved on. So there was that. But we also had the blessing of bringing on our newest member Wilson. That brings us to our current membership of 7 adults (Sheldon, Johanna, Addy, Monica, Marc, Patience, Wilson) and 1 Ruby, which means we have 5 rooms available.

We decided to open up two of the rooms for non-membership-seeking subletters, and have Marc’s partner Tamara filling one room, and our past member Thea (also of Sandhill) in the other for the winter months. We’re excited to have their upbeat energy and great skills around Emma’s.

Each year, we are expanding our own food production, and this year we joined a collective farm on Vashon Island, which is just a ferry ride away. We have 1 out of 8 shares, where we put in $400 upfront, do 6 hours of a labor a week, and get our share of the harvest. That in addition to what we grow in our own garden has made it so that we have a pretty decent produce supply in the summer months. We’re planning on continuing this next year.

Acorn Community Report

Well, 2008 has been a wild year for Acorn. We've seen some significant changes in our membership and our businesses.

Seed businesses across the USA have been seeing phenomenal growth rates this last year and our own Southern Exposure Seed Exchange has been no stranger to the trend. Overall, sales have increased by something like 50% for the year with some of our historically slower months seeing their sales double or more over last year. It could be rising fuel and food prices, a maturing organics and green movement, all the promotion that we've been doing this last year, or just a good old fear of the apocalypse. Or some combination thereof. Speaking of promotion, this year, on the first Saturday in September, we held our second annual Heritage Harvest Festival with Monticello, Whole Foods, and the Master Gardeners. We fretted and worried when the tropical storm decided to roll through our area precisely on Saturday morning but were stunned when an estimated 1000+ people came out and braved the rain with us. This year also saw us purchasing Garden Medicinals and Culinaries, a seed company specializing in herbs, off the same fellow we purchased SESE off of some 10 years ago.

August Flowers

August was great for flowers. I planted dozens of sunflowers back in June, and they were real happy by the time I got back to the farm August 1st. The butterflies were happy, the Japanese beetles were happy... and my camera, too. There was one towering, massive, shoulder-leafed mammoth sunflower that nodded you down the driveway and provided a welcome shelter to dozens of beetles.

There were darker sunflowers, sultry and mysterious, brooding and deeply vibrant in their rich bronze tones. Some of the sunflowers were edible, and I'm sure the birds appreciated the gesture. The darker sunflowers are my Mom's favorite.

After so many weeks of summer and brilliance, the sunflowers were disced into the fields to provide nutrients to the soil for fall plantings and cover crops.

Accountability & Punishment

One of the hardest things for people to handle well is critical feedback about their behavior. No one enjoys finding out that others are having a problem with something you've said or done, and there's an amazing array of things people do to keep feedback at bay—many of which are far more clever then the standard alliterative trio of defensiveness, denial, or deflection.

(Let me tell you of a great scheme I had working for a number of years, until a careful observer busted me on it. Whenever someone criticized me, I'd start beating myself up, often with more vigor than I was approached with. Horrified by how hard I was on myself, people near me learned to be careful about giving me feedback, for fear of triggering my next display of self-flagellation. Most people stopped giving me critical feedback, or at least curtailed it sharply. Then, of course, I couldn't be held responsible for not heeding feedback I'd never been given. Oh, it was plenty clever.)

And yet we need feedback—especially critical feedback—to understand more accurately how our words and deeds are landing. If you're not sure about this, think about how important pain is to maintaining health. If you step on a nail, it's a damn good thing that your foot hurts. I'm not saying it's good that you're in pain; I'm saying that it's good that pain alerts you to look at your foot, so you can take the nail out. There is as analog with behavior. While you'd prefer that people have a positive response to what you do, it's valuable to know when they don't because it's information you'll want to weigh before deciding whether to repeat that behavior. If you don't get the information, it's of no use to you.

Fun Facts About Twin Oaks Energy Consumption

I am working on my NASCO Institute presentation for this year, and came up with these figures. Enjoy!

Gasoline:

The average American uses about 500 gallons per year.(1)
Twin Oaks consumed about 15,267 gallons of gas in 2007.
With an average population of 87 adults, that would put our consumption at 175 gallons per person.
That is 65% less gas consumed!

Electricity:

The average American uses 11,000 kWh of Electricity per year.(2)
Twin Oaks consumed 268,065 kWh in 2007.
With an adult population on average of 87 adults, that would put our consumption at 3,083 kWh per person.
that is 73% less electricity consumed!

Natural Gas:

The average resident in Virginia uses 767 therms of natural gas.(3)
Twin Oaks consumed 16,221 therms of natural gas in 2007.
With an adult population on average of 87 adults, that would put our consumption at 186 therms per person.
that is 76% less natural gas consumed!

This is a great example of the power of sharing.
Cheers!

Working with Work

A couple blogs back I wrote about Untangling Hair Balls (Sept 23 entry), which was based on recent work I'd done with East Lake Commons (ELC) in Atlanta on the topic of Work/Participation. I got response froma reader that he'd like to hear more about what the starnds of that particular hair ball looked like. (I figure you gotta reward a person who leans into a hair ball for a closer look—mostly people just go "yuck!" and wonder why the cat couldn't have done that outdoors.)

Okey doke. Here's my sense of the key questions a group will have to address on the topic of Work/Participation. Note: while some of these questions are specific to residential communities, many are not, and the issue of Work/Participation can plague any group.

A. Should everyone in the group be expected to contribute to the well being and development of the group?
B. If yes, do you want to quantify that expectation (for example, hours/month)?
C. Do you want to record contributions? If so, how?
D. What is the point of this expectation? To get the work done, to build relationships among members, or both?
E. To what extent, if any, is it OK that dollars be substituted for hours? (Hint: the answer here will be highly dependent on how you answer Question D.)
F. Is it OK that one member donate hours to cover another who is working less? If so, are there any limits on this?
G. Can members "bank" hours (by working more than expected for one stretch, and then less in expected in another stretch)?

Sorghum Season!

At Sandhill today we cooked our first sorghum of the 2008 season. (Can fall colors be far behind?) It was a beautiful day, with temps in the lows 80s. We made about 50 gallons of satisfyingly light syrup, and have already filled several cases of the new crop in our distincive 1-lb and 1-quart jars. A good start.

Ten days ago it was hard to imagine that conditoons would be so favorable. Our fields were totally saturated with the 6+ inches of rain that fell in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. For the first time in more than 15 harvests it was beginning to look like we were going to have to trudge through the mud to extract the cane, and that we wouldn't be able to drive on the fields. However (cross your fingers), that didn't happen. The skies cleared after the deluge ended Sept 14, we stop working on an ark, and it hasn't rained since. We've been lucky.

In addition, we have a crew of eager labor exchangers from Twin Oaks, our sister community in Virginia, who are helping us this opening week of the season—swarming the fields like locusts, pulling down the leaves, cutting the stalks with machetes, and stacking the cut cane in little piles, where they await the wagons that will collect it for the ride to the mill. Sorghum season is a social highlight of our calendar. Based on the notion that many hands make light work, this is the month when we most encourage people to visit, turning drudgery into festival. While it's a logistical challenge finding tent space for everyone and keeping the ravenous harvest crew fed from our community gardens, it's a labor of love. Our aim is to turn complexity into conviviality, and for the most part we succeed.

Untangling Hair Balls

Last week I was in Atlanta (at East Lake Commons) to deliver Weekend I (of eight) of the two-year training I’m offering with my wife—Ma’ikwe Ludwig—in Integrative Facilitation. In exchange for hosting the weekend, the home community had the chance for outside facilitation of meetings on real issues (I figure the students learn much faster facing live bullets than through reading, watching demonstrations, or practicing role plays).

In this case, East Lake Commons selected a community favorite: Work/Participation. It’s probably the single topic I have the most experience navigating as a process consultant. In fact, almost all cooperative groups struggle with this one.

In addition to being a volatile topic (one in which emotional distress is common), it’s also a complex topic. That makes it a double whammy, and it’s no wonder that groups struggle with it. While it was a tough nut for the students to attempt to crack in Weekend I, it also offered an abundance of teaching moments, one of which I want to share in this blog: a model for tackling a complex topic (aka “a hair ball”), based on the old military strategy of “divide and conquer”:

Step 1: Identify all the questions that need to be addresses (the interwoven strands of the hair ball).

You know you've lived on a commune when...

You know you've lived on a commune when...

...you share a Netflix subscription with 4 or more people.

...you have no idea what Netflix is

...you or a member of your family has ever answered to the name Sage,
Harmony or Rainbow

...you know the Briggs-Meyer, Enneagram or Aryuvedic dosha type of
everyone you live with

...you've ever given or received feedback while naked, with someone
other than your lover

...you share a checkbook with 5 to 75 other people

...dinner conversation turns to reminiscing about your favourite
McDonalds food before you stopped eating there. The longest-term
member thinks they ate there once in the 80's.

...you cringe at the phrase "high impact", because you want to get as
far away from those people as possible, or because you *are* one of
those people

...you've ever organized an orgy by consensus

...you've decided when to hold a retreat based on the most auspicious
astrological reading

...your household income breaks down to either $75 a month, or
$250,000 annually, depending on how you look at it

Eight of the above are true for Valerie, who wrote this.

Feedback for the New Website

The new FEC Website has been up and running for 6 months now. How do you like the site? Do you find the content interesting and informative? What could we do better?

Please give us your feedback! Post a comment on this topic, or email us at secretary@thefec.org.

Thanks!

Sometimes It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better

Ten days ago I was working with Monan's Rill, a 35-year-old Quaker-based community near Santa Rosa CA. Started in 1973 (just one year before my community, Sandhill Farm) they were unusual in that the founders were mostly in their 50s, inspired to build an intentional community in their "retirement" years. (I put that in quotes because I can hardly imagine a more demanding and consuming endeavor than creating a successful community from the ground up—yet that's what they did. The founders were fireballs, who did not go gentle into that good night.)

In any event, now the founders are all gone. Either passed away or relocated to assisted living, where the daily demands of getting around are less physically rigorous. For the members who comprise Monan's Rill today, there's a question about who the community is and where is it headed, which is part of the reason they invited me in.

I was asked to focus on two main things: 1) getting greater clarity about what non-monetary contributions are expected of members toward the development and well being of the community; and 2) how to work constructively with conflict when it emerges among members and complicates an issue. I was asked to both get traction on the thorny topic of Work/Participation and to provide a model for dealing with complex and volatile issues in general. For the 24 hours I'd be working with them (about 10 hours of plenary meetings), there was no danger of running out of things to talk about.

Sailing the Seven C's

I'm preparing a talk that I'll give this evening at Friends House, a Quaker retirement facility in Santa Rosa CA. As part of it I'll be talking about how to build community. In wrestling with how to organize my material (and be entertaining at the same time), I've hit upon the rubric of the Seven C's, which I'm test driving here:

1. Communication
The key here is developing the ability to listen accurately. Of course, it also helps to be able to be clear and concise in stating your own views, yet hearing well is crucial. Doing this well typically means developing a range of ways to communicate (styles and formats), so that you are using a language that is comfortable and easily understood by others. If making the connection is important, then be prepared to travel most of the way to others, instead of making them come to you.

Factors here include slang, time of day, how long you speak without pausing for the other person to respond, eye contact... even how close you are physically to the other person. There's a lot to this!

2. Curiosity
How interested are you (or more to the point, how interested do you appear to be) in what others are saying, especially if they have views that are different than your own. The more genuinely welcoming you can be, the better this is going to go. Please understand that I'm not saying you have to agree with someone to be curious about how they got there.

3. Courage

honey harvest

The harvest is usually the culmination/high point of any crop. With vegetables, fruits, grains, etc, the harvest often comes at one time; but the bees gather honey whenever they can. So then the issue is: when do you decide to harvest honey? Most folks harvest at the end of the “honey flow”, which varies depending on where you are. We are in the middle of the mid-west (northern Missouri) and our honey flow is usually mid May to end of July - mid August (depending on rainfall & weather). We normally harvest at the end of August. By that time, they will hopefully have capped most of the honey and it still gives them plenty of time to bring in fall honey for their winter stores.

There are 2 distinct parts to the honey harvest: getting the honey from the beehives and to extract the honey from the frames in the boxes. How do we get the bees out of the boxes of honey? We use a commercial product called Bee Go which is basically a bee repellent: it is smelly and unpleasant so the bees try to get away from it. We apply it to a cloth inside of a lid which we put on the hive. The bees go down in the hive allowing us to examine the frames to make sure we are taking honey and not brood. (Using bee go is the one thing we do which is not allowed in organic production. I choose to do it because of the various methods I have tried it feels the most humane to the bees - fewer bees get wounded or crushed than other ways I have tried)

Twin Oaks & Television

I have a three-lettered acronym that comes in handy as a process consultant: OBE. (No, it doesn’t mean Order of the British Empire, though that’s a useful bit of crossword trivia.) In my argot, it means “overtaken by events.” I use it to describe situations that are difficult to resolve, yet which become moot when circumstances shift.

For example, learning how to type accurately was an important secretarial skill when people relied on the technology of mimeograph machines to create inexpensive copies (it was an absolute booger correcting mistakes on a stencil, necessitating costly delays). Today, in the era of high-speed photocopiers, no one uses stencils. With computer word processing and inexpensive printers, it’s no big deal to rework a document and crank out a fresh original if someone discovers a typo. Although it’s more important today that everyone learns to type—it’s hard to imagine functioning without email or access to the Web—the need to type accurately is largely OBE.

In general, people live in intentional communities with the purpose of altering their lifestyles to something more in line with their values than they can readily find among mainstream options. It’s what makes them “intentional.” While communities vary substantially in where they draw their lines, for the purpose of this article I want to focus on the history of television at Twin Oaks, which is a well-established income-sharing community in central Virginia that celebrated its 41st anniversary last June. Twin Oaks members have always been deliberate about how much they let outside culture seep into their environment, and yet the floodgates are never closed completely.