this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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This is the community to talk about communities and learn how we can make communities better - create the ones we would like to see in the world, and improve the ones we happen to be in.
This group operates under the understanding that by being raised mostly in authoritarian structures of some kind or another we have unlearned a lot about healthy equal-to-equal relationships and healthy self-ruling communities, but it's still out there somewhere. Let's get this power back and collect knowledge here! Examples of what could go here:
- Personal stories: your experience matters. Let's learn from each other's successes and failures (no, they were not really failures, they were learning experiences!)
- How to create/maintain a community
- How to solve conflict
- Differences between physical/online communities?
- Different communities: local, hobby, mutual aid, based on origin, ...
- Multi-generational communities: pass on the poison or plant seeds?
- Split or stay together? When fundamental values collide
Be kind to each other, we are all learning.
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The last two years were quite the opposite, just me and bf and occasionally my kid, without plans to change that in the next years. I guess my way of thinking about community has changed in the sense that I feel we humans are all kind of disabled, community-wise, and that it's a result of living in authoritarian societies and of so many of us being traumatized already in our families. When I was younger I believed I could just move into a commune kind of thing and just leave all problems behind, but as we all bring our baggage into the commune we still have to know and use strategies to deal with whatever comes up. I guess it will take several generations of work to create more healthy communities from what we have now.
The commune as it's usually imagined or as it usually happens has its limitations: often there's only younger people, or only people with kids. I have started thinking about how should the elderly be integrated into a healthy community, not locked away separately and away from everyone. As I age, I might get back into a commune lifestyle and explore new ways of multigenerational living, who knows.
I feel that for those who try and start a commune (small as an alternative family or large as an alternative village) there's so much more helpful material available than we had then, but the only groups I have seen who survive longer are the culty ones, unfortunately.
I guess it's more often than not a mix of both. My first commune experience happened in Germany, where lack of resources wasn't really a thing back then. We went dumpster diving (because we were too young and urban to know how to garden), did some jobs, got some money from the state ... The communes I see happening now are mostly young people moving out to Southern Europe and wanting to homestead. A lot are very disappointed with their first commune experience and give up after a short time. And in that case it's often a mix of all of those things: lack of resources, the steep learning curve of handling a homestead in an unknown climate, learn a new culture, handle the difference between expectation and reality, and then get on with others you maybe only just met through all these problems.
But also, more resources are available (back then in my commune days there was no internet or we were too Luddite to start using it). Online you can find dire warnings like my paragraph above, but also information about when to seed carrots, how to milk a goat, how to organize and moderate a community meeting etc. So you do have more and more places succeeding and doing land restoration, permaculture and agroforestry.
In this case, working on festivals.