Building Community: Where to Start?

This site organizes the community building journey along four pathways:

“Should I Start With Mutual Aid or Intentional Community?”

Mutual aid

  • is a “bloom where you’re planted” path,
  • letting you start small
  • and grow organically.

Intentional community

  • aims to resolve some of the biggest issues in “one fell swoop,”
  • by designing a new, alternative living system.
Mutual aid is likely the best starting place for most people trying to build community.
  • You can start with minimal upfront investment (of money, time, and other resources)
    • Which means virtually anyone can do it
    • And it can be relatively easy to recover from failures
  • It may be an ideal first step toward ultimately starting an intentional community.

Helping to organize mutual aid projects can build vital skills and understanding:

  • Challenging your habits and assumptions around power-sharing and group decision-making
  • Confronting you with conflicts and dilemmas that may require creativity, selflessness, and/or new skills to address
  • Accepting that perfection is an impossibility and learning what is worth doing even if some compromises cannot be avoided
  • Dealing with the consequences of mistakes and strategizing prevention of future errors
  • The list could go on

The mutual aid page has some recommendations to help you get started.

Note: For the purposes of this website, I am using the term “intentional community” to refer to people choosing to live in proximity to each other, as a “community,” having a shared purpose/vision. I understand that the term “intentional community” could also imply to some people’s minds, people who are already neighbors deciding to relate to each other in ways that are more like “a community.” This is not wrong. But I am adopting a narrower sense of the words “intentional community,” based on the alternative living movement which tends to use that term, in order to distinguish it from “mutual aid.”