The March Hare: Winter '00
Issue 23

Explosive growth for DR?

by Cecil Scheib

The jokes are true: we do indeed to have the population growth of a rabbit warren! Since Dancing Rabbit's early days, growth has always been the foundation of our progress. The grandiose goal sometimes seems no closer now that we're a dozen members than when we were half that number, but these early formative years seem like important stages we'll go through on the way to creating a village.

Sometimes the most attractive prospect is explosive growth. On the other hand, building multiple new buildings and integrating dozens of smiling faces simultaneously can be exhausting and might prematurely tire us out. While we don't want to stagnate, our sustainable growth seems to be best kept slow and steady.

At our recent Dancing Rabbit retreat and annual planning session (January, 2000) we agreed on some growth principles and targets for the next year and into the future. Here's some of what we determined:

• we'd like to add six new members by the end of this year, bringing our total membership to 16-18.
• we'd like to have 22 members by the end of 2001, 30 in 2002, 40 in 2003, and 50 by 2004. Looking ahead, we're shooting for 500 by 2040. We'll add more members each year as time goes on, but this will actually impact our community less each year since we'll be bigger and more able to easily integrate new folks.
• for now, we're being choosy about membership and residency at Dancing Rabbit and are picking folks who can integrate smoothly into our efforts and life here. Nevertheless, this isn't our long-term goal. We reinforced our commitment to truly create a village, a place where as long as you follow general social norms (which in our case would mean signing the Dancing Rabbit Covenants) you're allowed to move in. We see the changeover point between selectivity and open membership happening when our population is in the range of 50 to 150 people.
• it seems to us that when we're less than 30 people, our current individual-oriented systems of decision making and conflict resolution will work well for us. When we're 75 people or more, we'll have a village-like feel that will allow people to create multiple subgroups that meet their social needs within a more formal village government framework. Between 30 and 75 members, we'll need to be carefulÐÐwe'll be too large for personalized attention at meetings, for example, but might still be too small for everyone to have a social network that supports them.
• we have two limiting factors on growth: housing, and our ability to integrate new members. We've also realized that it is nearly impossible (though we can imagine exceptions) for someone to construct a livable structure their first year here, and that the work required to help a new member start building their house is immense. Meanwhile, none of our own houses are finished yet! We'd like to focus on getting what we've started habitable by winter 2000, and renting to new members over next winter so they can start building in spring 2001. Accordingly, we're not going to commit to doing any land use planning this year until winter. Since this needs to happen before someone can build a house, we're essentially prohibiting someone from starting a new house this year. Instead, we hope to integrate members and let people spend this year helping build their winter quarters, do demolition work to acquire materials, and spend the winter preparing for construction next year.
• we also have questions about how able we are to integrate children into our life this year. We don't have a lot of common space or kitchen space. Since we're only adding six new members this year due to physical and social limitations, there aren't many kid spaces availableÐÐbut children need peers. So, we are discouraging any new child members in 2000. Please note that we still encourage parents with kids to come visit and get to know us, since we definitely want kids as part of our village! We look forward to having more resources to draw on and accepting several families with kids at once, so both parents and children will have peers from the start.

We're still encouraging visitors to come and get to know us, since we've found the process for someone to decide to move to Dancing Rabbit can spread across several years. If you're interested in joining us, please get in touch.