There seem to me to be two primary ways that intentional communities
can address issues of diversity. One way revolves around the specific focus
and structure of the community, such as economic, legal, governmental,
and physical structures. Decisions such as whether to be urban or rural,
income sharing or not, what decision making process to use, and what is
the primary purpose of the community will all select for a certain membership.
These are things that are generally explicitly agreed upon as central and
often inflexible structures of a community. Another factor in diversity
rests on the social issues created by the actual members and their current
social norms at any given time. Often a community will be structurally
open to a broad range of people, but because of its current demography,
it will select for a certain type of person who is compatible and comfortable
with the other members. There will often be social filters that are not
explicitly codified or considered central to a community's goals or structures
but can nevertheless have a great impact on the community's diversity.
Early on at Dancing Rabbit, we realized that even though we agreed on
the need for a radically sustainable 1000-person town, we didn't necessarily
agree on how each of us personally wanted to live. There was general agreement
that cooperation and community were integral to a sustainable society,
but there was not agreement on the specifics of economic and social structures.
Some of our group envisioned living in a fully income sharing egalitarian
community. Others wanted the independence of a private home for their family.
So we developed a structure which was flexible enough for us all and called
it the Society of Communities.
The idea is that we could create a town-sized society which was made
up of different kinds of communities. Small, medium or large; spiritual
or secular; communal or cooperative; single family to co-housing to communes;
or some with a specific focus such as art, a sociological theory, a specific
ethnicity, or a specific diet--all kinds would be welcome and encouraged
in the town of Dancing Rabbit. It would be as if many communities all settled
right next to each other and could share the economic and social benefits
of this larger society, cooperating towards its goal of sustainability.
We wouldn't dictate the details of sub-community structure, only the very
basic social issues (freedom of speech, freedom to leave when you want,
etc.) and ecological guidelines that will be the cohesion for the entire
town. Furthermore, we would set things up to minimize the economic barriers
for people joining (e.g., not having a high buy-in fee) so as not to have
another structural filter on economic background. Also we theorized that
as people moved through different stages of their lives they might choose
to move from community to community within the town. There could be a community
which addressed more of the needs of young parents, families with teenagers,
or one set up for the elderly. We hoped this flexibility would allow us
to be attractive to a wider spectrum of people.
We were quite pleased with our idea for this innovative social structure.
Of course we soon discovered that we weren't the first to come up with
this kind of idea (Abundant Dawn's Pods, Twin Oaks's "small living
groups" or even Acorn, etc.) But this only reinforced our belief that
this idea, while not novel, was certainly an interesting and viable one
for a project of our type.
So despite having a primary focus, radical sustainability, which will
act as a considerable filter for new members, we saw real potential that
our social flexibility and our goal of minimizing economic barriers would
lead to diversity in our eco-town. But having potential will not guarantee
actually having diversity. Furthermore, it is unclear how far we are willing
to go for diversity. Diversity is something many communities have not achieved
and it seems to require a lot of work and constant consciousness to a variety
of issues. It even has the potential to interfere with the primary goal
of a community, in our case creating a sustainability demonstration project.
People have warned us that too much diversity when a group isn't ready
for it may mean divisiveness and conflict.
Should we decide to make diversity a high priority, we as a group will
need to be aware of the social and interpersonal issues that can filter
out people who are different than our existing membership, which is admittedly
homogeneous on many social spectrums. We pay close attention to the image
we portray, which as a forming community revolves around our two main activities
of outreach and meetings.
One example of how our group did some unintentional filtering was our
almost exclusive use of the internet for outreach and communication early
in our formation. Email reaches only a small and somewhat homogeneous segment
of the population. Also, the medium requires typing skill and promotes
a certain style of communication, mainly long textual arguments and cross
discussions, with emotions and such communicated very poorly. We never
really denied that these obvious filters existed but our social inertia
kept it as one of our main forums for quite some time.
Our meeting structure and style are an example of a much more subtle
kind of filter, which is difficult even to notice and sometimes more difficult
to remove if you decide to. Our meetings are run by consensus and despite
efforts to moderate behavior, conversations often take on a particular
style. People in our group often talk quickly and energetically and one
person can often jump in as the last has finished. Also, early on, meetings
were easily dominated by newcomers or individuals in the group with an
agenda to push. This type of meeting style can often present a social filter
to people who are shy, less articulate or unwilling to enter a not so friendly
conversational arena. In turn, we noted that this personality filter appears
to affect our gender balance, reducing the diversity of personalities and
thinking styles present, with men in general being more comfortable with
our meeting style than women because of the societal norms and inculturation
we all experience during our upbringing. Fortunately, at Dancing Rabbit
we are learning to have highly effective and inclusive meetings, but there's
always a long way to go.
We are now trying to take steps to broaden our outreach efforts to remove
or counteract some of our unintentional filtering. For one we are trying
to present our ideas in many different formats so as to be accessible to
various people. Our original information pack outlines our project in a
very academic, high-level text, but we are now experimenting with narratives,
answers to common questions, and hopefully graphic images as well. We are
now looking at augmenting our internet outreach by doing more local advertising
with fliers, ads in local papers, interviews on the radio, and of course
word of mouth. Specifically, we are hoping our membership will diversify
through contact with other activist organizations with demographic characteristics
different from our own.
When trying to decide where to hang up fliers we try to be conscious
of what market we are targeting and whether we might be limiting diversity.
It is very easy to think of all the places you might see a flier and put
them there but you will most likely only attract people like you. We often
talk about places where we can target a very broad audience, like public
transit stations, and ways we can target specific groups, like posting
at women's bookstores.
We have even talked about achieving diversity by doing outreach not
just for individuals but for entire sub-communities that are different
from those already proposed by current members. We dream of some day being
able to invite forming communities to come settle on our land and be part
of the DR sustainability goal, but otherwise have autonomy. We have run
across groups such as an African American back-to-the-land group and a
Native American group that could potentially fit into DR and allow more
diversity while not requiring everyone fit in with the same program.
Our hope at Dancing Rabbit is that we have set up a structure that won't
prevent diversity in our community by limiting who can join. But
we realize that limiting who wants to join will always be a subtle
and delicate issue to keep a close eye on if we want to achieve and maintain
diversity in our group.
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