JICC Program Book 2015

THE 3RD ANNUAL

JEWISH INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES CONFERENCE

AN INTERNATIONAL NETWORK CULTIVATING COMMUNITY THROUGH LEARNING, MEALS, PRAYER, AND MUSIC

FOUNDING PARTNERS

SUPPORTING PARTNERS

DEC 3-6, 2015

THE 3RD ANNUAL

FEATURING:

DIANA LEAFE CHRISTIAN

FORMER EDITOR OF COMMUNITIES MAGAZINE AND AUTHOR OF

“CREATING A LIFE TOGETHER:

JEWISH INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES CONFERENCE

PRACTICAL TOOLS TO GROW ECOVILLAGES AND INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES” AND:

MUKI TSUR

CELEBRATED ISREAELI AUTHOR, HISTORIAN, AND

FORMER SECRETARY OF THE KIBBUTZ MOVEMENT

JOIN AN INTERNATIONAL NETWORK CULTIVATING COMMUNITY THROUGH LEARNING, MEALS, PRAYER, AND MUSIC

PEARLSTONECENTER.ORG/JICC

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference Pearlstone Center December 3-­‐6, 2015

schedule subject to change

Thursday, December 3 2:00pm

Registration Opens

2:30-­‐5:30

Walk-­‐in Volunteer on the Farm (all ages) Arts and Crafts for Kids -­‐ ​Activity Center Games outside for Kids -­‐ ​Outside hill

5:00-­‐6:00

Welcome & Orientation -­‐ ​Room 100

6:00-­‐7:00

Dinner -­‐ ​Dining Room

6:45-­‐7:00

Optional Ma’ariv -­‐ ​Beit Midrash

7:00-­‐7:30

Opening Introduction: What is the Jewish Intentional Communities Initiative? -­‐ ​Room 100

7:30-­‐-­‐9:30

Plenary 1: Diana Leafe Christian: Three Aspects of Healthy, Thriving Community & Ecovillage Slide Show -­‐ ​Room 100

9:30-­‐11:00

Evening Options (snacks and beverages in lobby) Tinctures: Yishai Cohen -­‐ ​Room 103 Pickling: Josh Rosenstein -­‐ ​Moadon Native Clay Pots: Zev Friedman -­‐ ​Activity Center

Friday, December 4 8:00-­‐8:30

Optional Farm Chores -­‐ ​Animal Pasture​ / Shacharit -­‐ ​Beit Midrash

8:30-­‐9:30

Breakfast -­‐ ​Dining Room

9:45-­‐11:00

Breakout Sessions I Diana Leafe Christian: Eight Antidotes to Structural Conflict in Forming and Existing Communities -­‐ ​Room 100 Rachael Copp Cohen: Introduction to Jewish Intentional Communities -­‐ ​Library Zev Friedman: Community Scale Permaculture Design and Strategies -­‐ ​Room 103 Kids: Cooking Project -­‐ ​Dining Room

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference Pearlstone Center December 3-­‐6, 2015

schedule subject to change

11:00-­‐11:15

Snack -­‐ ​Lobby

11:15-­‐12:30

Breakout Sessions II Muki Tsur: Jewish Anarchy from Biblical & Modern Times ​Room 100 Yoshi Silverstein: Landscape Linguistics and Hebrew Metaforms -­‐ ​Room 103 Roger Studley: Loss of Family and Community Structures -­‐ ​Room 103 Kids: Meet the Animals: ​Pasture

12:45-­‐1:45

Lunch -­‐ ​Dining Room

2:00-­‐3:15

Breakout Sessions III Diana Leafe Christian: An Introduction to Sociocracy -­‐ ​Room 100 Hakhel Cohort: Revealing the Unknown Israel: Encounters with Blossoming Jewish Intentional Communities -­‐ ​Library Psachyah Lichtenstein: Challenges of Power & Sex in Jewish Communities -­‐ ​Room 103 Joseph Murray: Wisdom of the Wilderness School Communities -­‐ ​New Lobby Kids: Shabbat Art Projects -­‐ ​Activity Center

3:15-­‐4:30

Shabbat Prep/Free Time/Snack -­‐ ​In lobby

3:30-­‐4:15

Optional Restorative Yoga -­‐ ​Room 103

4:30-­‐5:15

Candle Lighting and Entering Shabbat Together -­‐ ​Room 100

5:30-­‐7:00

Kabbalat Shabbat and Ma'ariv (Egalitarian -­‐ ​Room 100, ​Mechitza -­‐ ​Beit Midrash)

7:00-­‐8:15

Dinner -­‐ ​Dining Room

8:30-­‐10:00

Plenary 2: Muki Tsur: ​Kibbutz in Crisis: The Birth and the Rebirth of the Kibbutz -­‐​ ​Room 100

10:00-­‐11:30

Tisch -­‐ ​Room 100

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference Pearlstone Center December 3-­‐6, 2015

schedule subject to change

Saturday, December 5 7:30-­‐8:45

Breakfast/ Optional Farm Chores -­‐ ​Pasture

8:45-­‐10:45

Shabbat Services (Egalitarian -­‐ ​Room 100​, Mechitza -­‐ ​Beit Midrash​, Kids -­‐ ​Room 103​)

10:45-­‐11:20

Kiddush (with snacks) -­‐ ​Lobby

11:30-­‐12:45

Breakout Sessions IV Diana Leafe Christian: Community Clinic: free-­‐form Q&A -­‐ ​Room 100 Craig Oshkello: Birthing Intentional Community and Livelihood -­‐ ​Library Muki Tsur: Kaballistic & Hassidic Thought in Jewish Community -­‐ ​Room 103 Kids: Trail Activities -­‐ ​Meet in Activity Center

12:45-­‐2:00

Lunch -­‐ ​Dining Room

2:00-­‐3:30

Free time (Farm tour ​-­‐ leaves from lobby​, nature walk -­‐ ​leaves from Activity Center​, games -­‐ ​upstairs lobby​, Torah Study -­‐ ​Room 103​)

3:00-­‐3:30

Shabbat Mincha -­‐ ​Beit Midrash

3:30-­‐3:45

Snack -­‐ ​Lobby

3:45-­‐5:00

Breakout Sessions V Muki Tsur -­‐ Meetings with Gershom Shalom and Martin Buber -­‐ -­‐ ​Room 100 Aharon Ariel Lavi -­‐ Hassidic Teaching on Community -­‐ ​Library Zev Friedman – Ritualized Community Agriculture -­‐ ​Room 103 Kids: Games and Stories -­‐ ​Activity Center

5:30

Havdallah -­‐ ​Room 100

6:30-­‐7:70

Dinner -­‐ ​Dining Room

8:45-­‐9:15

Plenary 3: Hakhel: Jewish Community Incubator Panel -­‐ ​Room 100

9:30-­‐11:00

Campfire -­‐ ​Fire Pit ​/ Coffee Shop (with snacks) -­‐ ​Room 100 ​/ Games -­‐ ​Upstairs Lobby

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference Pearlstone Center December 3-­‐6, 2015

schedule subject to change

Sunday, December 6 7:45-­‐8:15

Shacharit -­‐ ​Beit Midrash ​/ Optional Morning Farm Chores -­‐ ​Pasture

8:15-­‐9:00

Breakfast -­‐ ​Dining Room

9:00-­‐10:15

Community Shuk and Share -­‐ ​Room 100 Kids: Greenhouse exploration -­‐ ​Meet in Activity center

10:15-­‐11:30

Plenary 4: Building the Initiative, Wrapping Up, Next Steps -­‐ ​Room 100 Kids: Greenhouse exploration

11:30-­‐-­‐12:00

Closing Circle -­‐ ​Room 100

12:00-­‐1:00

Lunch -­‐ ​Dining Room

1:00

L’Hitraot!

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference Pearlstone Center December 3-­‐6, 2015

schedule subject to change

Session Descriptions

Plenary I (Thursday)

Three Aspects of Healthy, Thriving Community and How Some Ecovillages Have Benefitted the Wider Culture: Diana Leafe Christian The three aspects (and the foundational fourth aspect) that ecovillages, cohousing communities, and other kinds of intentional communities would ideally have to succeed, thrive, and meet their goals and fulfill their purpose. The slide show is about ecovillages internationally, and about how some ecovillages in various countries worldwide have beneficially affected their region or even their whole country​.

Breakout Sessions I (Friday)

Eight Antidotes to Structural Conflict in Forming and Existing Communities: ​Diana Leafe Christian Participants will learn the typical challenges that can occur in forming community group-­‐-­‐termed “structural conflict” because it arises from the lack of certain crucial structures needed for forming -­‐ and how to reduce and even prevent this kind of conflict.

Introduction to Jewish Intentional Communities: ​Rachel Copp Cohen

Community Scale Permaculture Design and Strategy: ​Zev Friedman

Breakout Sessions II (Friday)

Kibbutz in Crisis: The Birth and the Rebirth of the Kibbutz: ​ ​Muki Tsur

Landscape Linguistics and Hebrew Metaforms: Creating a language of landscape design for Jewish Meaning and Identity in relationship to people, place, and community: ​Yoshi Silverstein So you're building a Jewish garden, farm, gathering place, or even the master plan for an intentional community. How does the physical design of space and landscape reflect the values and ideals a community strives to embody? How do we express Jewish ideas, values, symbols, language, meaning, and identity through physical design? What does Kabbalah have to do with stormwater management?

Community Brainstorm: Disappearance of Community (and Family) from Modern Life and How to Restore It: Roger Studley Over millions of years, from hunter-­‐gatherer beginnings through the pre-­‐industrial era, humankind evolved to live in community. Only in recent centuries have we abandoned the connectedness of community, leaving a void between the intimacy of family and the impersonal nature of modern society. This session will be a communal brainstorm to make the argument that IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. With an eye toward crafting an essay, speech, or video, we'll bring our collective knowledge and ideas to the table. How did community disappear from modern life, and how can we bring it back? Does religion have a role? In a society dominated by transactional relationships, how do we understand what is missing and create the networks of mutual, sustained, and caring interrelationships -­‐ the communities -­‐ that will restore meaning and purpose to our lives?

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference Pearlstone Center December 3-­‐6, 2015

schedule subject to change

Breakout Sessions III (Friday)

Sociocracy Self-­‐Governance -­‐ Effective, Efficient, and Fun: ​Diana Leafe Christian Sociocracy is a self-­‐governance and decision-­‐making method designed to foster harmonious organizations, based on the values of equivalence, transparency, and effectiveness. I now highly recommend Sociocracy to ecovillages, cohousing communities, and other kinds of intentional communities and member-­‐led groups. Participants will see a highly visual overview of Sociocracy, and experience one of the four meeting processes in Sociocracy: “Selecting people for Roles (Elections).”

Revealing the Unknown Israel: Encounters with Blossoming Jewish Intentional Communities:​ ​Hakhel Cohort Participants in Hazon and UJA Federation of New York's Hakhel incubator program had an opportunity to learn first-­‐hand with Aharon Ariel Lavi and James Grant-­‐Rosenhead about the variety of intentional communities that exist in Israel. The tour in March 2015 of Jewish intentional communities strongly enhanced the sense of Jewish peoplehood among its participants. The participants' evaluations of the program indicated how truly life-­‐changing it was for all of them. In this breakout session, program participants will share stories and lessons learned from this rich opportunity. The Hakhel project is integrally linked with Makom, the parallel movement of Mission-­‐Driven Communities in Israel, where more than 200 communities have been established in the last three decades. Lavi and Grant-­‐Rosenhead, founder-­‐members of intentional communities in Israel, are activists and leaders in the Makom movement.

Challenges of Power & Sex in Ancient and New Communities: ​ ​Psachyah Lichtenstein Wisdom of the Wilderness School Communities: ​Joseph Murray Simple wisdom and stories from the Wilderness Communities and Indigenous communities on mentoring people through grief and building stronger communities.

Plenary II (Friday) Muki Tsur Breakout Sessions IV (Saturday) Community Clinic: free-­‐form Q&A: ​Diana Leafe Christian Workshop participants describe what they enjoy and what they find challenging in their existing or forming community. I suggest responses to the challenging situations they describe based on what has worked well for other communities with the same kinds of situations. This will include — because these topics are always relevant when groups have trouble — “Crucial Relationship of Purpose, Decision-­‐Making Method, and Membership Process” and “Why I Now Recommend Sociocracy Instead of Consensus."

Kaballistic & Hassidic Thought in Jewish Community:​ ​Muki Tsur

Birthing Intentional Community and Livelihood: ​Craig Oshkello An exploration of patterns and processes of bringing our ideas to fruition. Referencing the structure of Diana Leafe Christian’s book Creating a Life Together, our discussion will examine the interplay of forces in the development and

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference Pearlstone Center December 3-­‐6, 2015

schedule subject to change

sustenance of intentional community. Using the concepts of cultivation and harvest we will examine how to keep the vision vital and care for the newborn community.

Breakout Sessions V (Saturday)

Jewish Anarchy in Jewish Community: ​Muki Tsur

Ritualized Community Agriculture: ​ ​Zev Friedman Milpa Farming and Story Circle at Earthaven

Hassidic Teaching on Community: ​Aharon Ariel Lavi Intentional communities have taken many forms in Jewish history both in theory and practice, going back to the Levite tribe model and all the way to the contemporary mission-­‐driven communities movement in Israel. Intentional communities are the deepest response to the inner psychological human struggles, and they play a role in the individual's life that can be fulfilled by neither family nor nation. On the other edge of the scale, intentional communities play a role in the nation's life that can be fulfilled by neither political structures nor by individual improvement.

Plenary III (Saturday)

From dream to reality: The Jewish Intentional Communities Incubator is marching into it's second year!​ ​Hakhel Hakhel, a partnership between Hazon and Nettiot, is the first-­‐of-­‐its-­‐kind Jewish Intentional Communities incubator in North America. Generously funded by UJA Federation of New York, the incubator, now in its second year, includes two urban communities within New York City, one networked community across the eastern seaboard, and one community each in upstate New York, Colorado, and California. The leaders of these communities bring important skills and knowledge-­‐sets to the project, from urban zoning to real estate finance to communal decision-­‐making, and are eager to serve as models for other intentional communities to learn from in the future. Furthermore, each of these projects has a mission deeply rooted in Jewish traditions, from group learning to the communal celebration of Jewish holidays, and all of the projects will actively pursue social justice and conduct outreach beyond their immediate membership. This plenary panel will give the JICC community an opportunity to hear about the group's learnings, challenges, triumphs, and goals as they move into the second half of the second year of this meaningful experience.

Keynote'Speaker'Bios' Diana'Leafe'Christian!is!author!of#Creating#a#Life#Together:#Practical#Tools#to#Grow#Ecovillages# and#Intentional#Communities,!about!forming!successful!communities!and!ecovillages.!It!has! been!translated!into!six!languages,!most!recently!Korean!and!German!She!formerly! published!Ecovillages#newsletter!and!formerly!edited!Communities!magazine!in!the!US!for!14! years.!

Diana!speaks!at!conferences,!offers!consultations,!and!leads!workshops!internationally.!Her! topics!include!the!tools!and!processes!to!create!successful!new!intentional!communities,!what! helps!existing!communities!thrive,!and!governance!and!decisionEmaking!methods,!especially!

Sociocracy.!She!has!taught!Sociocracy!for!ecovillages!and!other!kinds!of!intentional! communities!in!North!America,!Latin!America,!and!Europe.!!

She!has!been!a!keynote!speaker!for!the!annual!conferences!in!2013!of!both!the!Swedish!

Ecovillage!Network!and!UK!Cohousing!Network,!and!for!the!Japanese!Ecovillage!Conference!in!

2007.!She!was!one!of!many!presenters!at!GEN’s!20th!Anniversary!Conference!at!Findhorn!

Community!this!year.!!

An!Ecovillage!Design!Education!(EDE)!trainer,!Diana!contributed!chapters!to!the!Gaia!Education! books!Beyond#You#and#Me!and!Gaian#Economics,!and!to!GEN’s!20th!Anniversary! book,!Ecovillage:#2000#Ways#to#Heal#the#Planet.#!

She!is!one!of!two!representatives!for!the!eastern!US!in!GENEUS,!and!lives!at!Earthaven!

Ecovillage!in!the!U.S.!Her!website!is!www.dianaleafechristian.org! !

Muki'Tsur!is!one!of!Israel’s!most!celebrated!authors!and!historians.!Muki!is!a!leading!expert!on! the!first!Aliya!movements,!the!early!settlement!period!in!Israel,!the!labor!movement!and!

Kibbutz!life.!He!is!a!graduate!of!the!Hebrew!University!in!Jerusalem,!majoring!in!Philosophy,!

Hebrew!Philosophy!and!Kabbalah.!He!is!one!of!the!initiators!of!the!groundbreaking!project!“The! Seventh!Day”!after!the!sixEday!war,!and!served!as!Secretary!General!of!the!Kibbutz!Movement.!

Muki!lectured!at!the!Jordan!Valley!College!and!at!the!Midrasha!in!Oranim!and!is!a!muchEsought! after!speaker!and!educational!tour!guide.!He!boasts!a!wealth!of!knowledge,!personal!stories,! and!firstEhand!experiences!of!the!history!of!Israel.!He!is!a!senior!educator!at!BINA!Center!for!

Jewish!Identity!and!Hebrew!Culture!and!one!of!the!founders!of!the!Secular!Yeshiva!in!Tel!Aviv.!

Muki!has!lived!in!Kibbutz!Ein!Gev!on!the!Sea!of!Galilee!since!1956.!! ' ' ' '

Community'Bios' Keith'Adams!is!a!local!musician!and!teacher,!working!with!students!in!the!progressive! educational!communities!of!Sandy!Spring!Friends!School!(Middle!School)!and!School!of!Rock!

Baltimore.!As!a!regular!Pearlstone!volunteer,!Keith!is!excited!for!yet!another!enriching! experience!at!this!year's!conference!!

Hi,!my!name!is!Jillian'Bar=av.!I!am!an!herbalist,!nutritionist,!gardener,!and!onceEuponEaEtime! environmental!activist.!I!am!married!to!Lev'Bar=av!and!we!have!a!21!month!old!daughter,!

Hannah.!I!have!a!private!practice!and!herbal!apothecary!(Greenspring!Herbs),!I!teach!at!

Maryland!University!of!Integrative!Health,!and!I!am!the!Resident!Herbalist/Nutritionist!at!Roots!

Market!in!Clarksville,!Maryland.!Lev!is!a!photographer!and!owner!of!National!Photo!in!Pikesville,!

Maryland.!Hannah!attends!a!Jewish!playgroup!partEtime.!My!passions!are!growing!food!and! preserving!as!much!of!it!as!I!can!through!canning,!freezing,!dehydrating,!and!I!really!want!to!get! better!at!lactoEfermented!pickling.!As!a!family,!we!observe!Shabbos!and!keep!kosher.!I!have! had!an!interest!in!living!with!others!in!a!landEbased!community!for!many,!many!years.!This! vision!did!not!used!to!be!a!Jewish!vision.!Then!it!was!Jewish,!but!not!orthodox.!Now!what!I! really!want!is!a!landEbased!community!of!people!who!also!observe!Shabbos,!keep!kosher,!and! have!a!deep!love!of!the!earth.!

Along!with!her!daughter!Sara!Shalva!and!a!dozen!likeEminded,!mostly!Jewish!professionals,!Judy' Barokas!cofounded!Lev!B’Lev!to!create!an!intermittent!intentional!community!for!young! families,!embodying!the!erstwhile!transmission!of!joy!in!a!Jewish!retreat!or!familyEhomeE Shabbat!setting.!Outside!of!Lev!B’Lev!and!other!Jewish!Havurah!experiences,!Judy!leads!

Consulting!Research!&!Information!Services,!a!research,!evaluation!and!writing!firm!in!Reston,!

VA.!

David'Blank!is!currently!studying!the!AfroEBrazilian!Martial!Art!of!capoeira!at!FICA!Baltimore.!In! his!free!time,!he!is!a!youthEmentor,!wilderness!guide,!farmEbased!educator!and!gourmet! cooking!instructor!at!the!Pearlstone!Center.!

Oren'Brandvain:!!I!have!been!a!Jewish!communal/intentional!living!practitioner!and!advocate! since!age!7!when!I!was!Chalutz!at!Camp!Tavor.!I!have!since!lived!in,!studied,!and!explored! intentional!communities/EcoVillages!in!Israel,!Scotland,!Ann!Arbor,!Chicago,!and!Cottage!Grove,!

OR.!I!am!currently!working!with!Hazon!Detroit!in!the!exploratory!phase!of!an!urban!kibbutz!in! the!city.!!When!I!am!not!cycling,!meditating,!and!building!community,!I!work!as!an!urban! planner!for!a!community!just!north!of!Detroit.!! ' ' ' '

Rabbi'Deborah'Bravo!is!currently!serving!as!the!spiritual!leader!and!founder!for!Makom!NY:!A! New!Kind!of!Jewish!Community.!This!community!seeks!to!reach!the!unaffiliated!and! disconnected!Jew!in!suburban!Long!Island.!Through!a!unique!blend!of!collaboration,! partnership!and!transparency,!Rabbi!Bravo!and!volunteers!are!lowering!barriers!and!offering! high!level!worship,!programs!and!learning!to!Jews!of!all!backgrounds!and!affiliations.!Prior!to! creating!Makom!NY,!she!served!large!and!small!Reform!synagogues!from!Washington!DC!to!

Long!Island.!Ordained!from!HUCEJIR!in!1998,!Rabbi!Bravo!also!holds!a!Master!in!Education!from!

Xavier!University.!

Aryeh'Canter!is!trying!to!become!a!mystical!engineer.!Throughout!his!life,!he!has!strived!to! build!community!spaces!that!create!space!for!G!d,!joy!and!sustainable!living.!After!moving!to!

Jerusalem!and!running!a!street!festival,!he!realized!he!needed!a!real!job.!Thus!he!is!currently! taking!prerequisite!classes!at!Columbia!and!applying!to!graduate!school!in!environmental! engineering!(wasteEwater/sludge!treatment!systems).!If!there's!a!good!grad!school!near!your! holy!community,!let!him!know!!

Rachael'Love'Cohen!is!a!bigEpicture!thinker,!captivated!by!social!systems!and!social!change.!She! believes!deeply!in!the!process!of!community!building!as!a!means!to!remedy!social! disintegration!and!repair!individual!wellEbeing.!In!2009,!Rachael!founded!New!Jewish!

Communities,!with!the!objective!of!mobilizing!a!new!grassroots!social!movement!around!Jewish! intentional!community!building.!In!2013,!Rachael!was!one!of!two!lay!leaders!on!the!planning! committee!for!the!inaugural!Jewish!Intentional!Communities!Conference,!and!in!2014,!she! began!working!to!create!Kumah!South!Florida!,!a!retrofit!cohousing!community.!Rachael!has!a! masters!degree!in!community!practice!social!work!and!nonprofit!management,!however!her! current!daily!pursuit!is!surviving...!er,!raising!!...her!three!deeply!spirited!young!children.!

Yishai'Cohen!is!currently!the!Director!of!Jewish!Life!and!Leadership!at!the!Scheck!Hillel!

Community!School!in!Miami,!FL.!Previously,!Yishai!was!the!director!of!Teva!programs!at!Isabella!

Freedman,!where!he!moved!with!his!family!seeking!community!in!their!quest!for!intentional!

Jewish!living.!!Yishai!is!currently!in!a!rabbinical!studies!program!with!Rabbi!Chaim!Brovender!of!

Jerusalem.!

Raines'Cohen!is!a!Cohousing!Coach!and!community!organizer!living!at!Berkeley!(CA)!Cohousing.!

He!has!visited!over!100!cohousing!neighborhoods!in!the!US!and!abroad,!lived!in!two,!and! advised!many,!serving!on!national!boards!for!the!cohousing!and!Intentional!Communities! movements.!He!wrote!the!"Aging!in!Community"!chapter!in!the!book!Audacious!Aging,!and!is!a!

Certified!Senior!Advisor!and!Certified!Senior!Cohousing!facilitator,!and!coEfounder!of!the!

Conscious!Elders!Network!and!Elders'!Guild,!based!on!Reb!Zalman's!"Ageing!to!Sageing"!work.!

He!and!his!wife!Betsy!Morris!are!Associate!Producers!of!the!communitiesEmovement! documentary!Within!Reach,!helped!coEcreate!the!Group!Works!Deck!patternElanguage!cards,! run!the!world's!largest!intentional!communities!MeetUp!group!andCohousing!California! regional!umbrella!organization,!along!with!theJewishCohousing.org!website.!

Perri'DeJarnette!is!the!Perennial!manager!at!Pearlstone!for!3!years.!Enjoys!farEaway!travel,! local!adventure,!and!communing!with!animals.!Radish!is!my!spirit!vegetable.!Currently!spends! time!designing!her!future!tiny!house.!

Caren'Feldman:!!!

Things!I!like!to!do:!

Carving,!farming,!hiking!too!

This!is!a!Haiku! !

Shira'Frager!lives!and!works!in!Queens,!NY!and!became!interested!in!intentional!living!after! attending!Isabella!Freedman's!Adamah!fellowship!last!summer,!and!Eden!Village!Camp!this!past! summer.!She!is!originally!from!the!San!Francisco!Bay!Area,!but!found!a!home!in!New!York!City! after!moving!there!6!years!ago.!Shira!is!excited!about!exploring!the!various!elements!of! intentional!communities,!and!contributing!based!on!her!previous!experiences!living!on!a!farm.!

Jared'Gellert:!!I!grew!up!in!Habonim!and!spent!a!year!on!Kibbutz!where!I!was!powerfully!drawn! to!the!land!and!discovered!a!love!of!cows.!I!lived!on!American!communes!(East!Wind!and!Twin!

Oaks)!after!college.!I!have!long!craved!both!spiritual!Jewish!community!and!rural!living,!and! have!never!been!able!to!create!this.!I'm!looking!forward!to!the!conference.!

Teri'Jedeikin!is!currently!pursuing!her!Masters!in!Social!work!at!University!of!Maryland,!

Baltimore.!She!also!works!at!the!Park!Heights!JCC's!JTown!program!as!a!creative!Jewish! educator.!Teri!is!an!innovator,!Judaica!artist,!craftsperson!and!Jewish!leader.!She!is!passionate! about!justice,!worms,!compost,!herbs!and!soap!making.!She!is!married!to!Josh!Rosenstein.!

Eitan'Kenefick!has!been!farming!for!the!past!six!seasons.!He!worked!with!goats!in!Israel!and!at!

Pearlstone.!He!completed!a!veggie!growing!apprenticeship!in!Maine.!Currently!he!is!farming!in!

Western!Mass!and!making!fruit!wine!in!his!spare!time.!

Elinor'Klein!is!a!graduate!of!the!Hornstein!program!for!Jewish!Professional!Leadership!at!

Brandeis!University!and!has!been!teaching!yoga!in!Boston,!San!Francisco,!and!northern!Virginia! for!eight!years.!She!completed!her!200Ehour!IyengarEstyle!yoga!teacher!training!in!2008!and! then!received!specialized!training!in!restorative!and!Jivamukti!yoga.!Elinor's!partner,!Dan!Finkel,! is!the!Head!of!School!at!Gesher!Jewish!Day!School!in!northern!Virginia.!The!current!family! quarters!are!home!to!2!children,!Oren!and!Yaara,!Ima!(Ellie),!Abba!(Dan),!and!several!plants.!

Elinor!blogs!about!how!parents!and!kids!can!relax!and!do!yoga!together!at! www.elinorklein.com!

Aharon'Ariel'Lavi,!Founder!of!Garin!Shuva,!a!missionEdriven!community!bordering!Gaza,!and!of! the!Nettiot!network,!reengaging!Ba'aley!Teshuva!into!Israeli!society.!Lavi!is!also!the!founder!of! several!social!businesses,!a!published!author!on!Jewish!Economic!and!Environmental!thought,! coEfounder!of!the!National!Council!of!MissionEDriven!Communities!and!involved!in!developing! similar!communities!in!North!America!as!founder!of!the!Hakhel!project.!

Meredith'Levick!is!the!Associate!Director!of!Education!at!Hazon.!!She!values!Jewish!Communal! work!as!an!opportunity!to!weave!together!her!interests!in!building!transformational!learning! experiences!for!a!variety!of!populations!and!strengthening!the!collective!Jewish!community!via! innovation,!adaptability,!and!thoughtful!communication.!!Meredith!received!her!Master's! degree!in!Jewish!education!with!a!focus!on!experiential!education!from!The!Jewish!Theological!

Seminary.!!Additionally,!she!completed!a!Master's!concentration!in!Israel!Education!via!the! iCenter.!!She!holds!a!Bachelor!of!Arts!degree!in!English!Literature!and!Spanish!from!

Northwestern!University!in!Evanston,!Illinois.!!Meredith!lives!in!New!YorkCity!with!her!husband,!

Danny,!a!fellow!Jewish!communal!professional.!!She!can!be!reached!at! meredith.levick@hazon.org!

Hart'Levine!works!on!a!series!of!community!organizing!initiatives!for!millennials!with!the!OU,! including!Heart!to!Heart,!a!peerEtoEpeer!Jewish!college!outreach!movement!that's!reached!over!

10,000!students.!He!also!runs!The!Beis!Community,!an!inclusive,!grassroots,!intentional!Jewish! community!in!Washington!Heights,!NYC,!part!of!Hazon's!Hakhel!incubator.!Hart!graduated!from! the!University!of!Pennsylvania!in!2010!with!a!degree!in!bioengineering,!did!JOIN!for!Justice's! community!organizing!training,!and!is!also!finishing!rabbinical!studies!at!Yeshiva!University's!

RIETS.!He!lives!in!Washington!Heights!with!his!wife!Yael!and!twin!newborn!sons!Hallel!and'Ben' Ami,!and!is!proud!to!call!the!Beis!Community!his!home.!

Yael!Brodsky'Levine!lives!in!Washington!Heights,!NYC!with!her!husband!Hart!and!twin!baby! boys!where!she!is!one!of!the!founding!members!and!leaders!of!the!Beis!Community.!As!the! chief!learning!coordinator!at!the!Beis,!Yael!runs!numerous!experiential!Jewish!learning! programs!like!Potluck!Learning,!a!participatory!model!for!group!text!study.!Yael!also!ran!salons! about!mikvah!through!ImmerseNYC,!teaches!Jewish!marital!laws!to!brides,!and!mentors!Jewish! high!school!dance!crews.!By!day,!Yael!works!at!New!York!State's!Office!of!Storm!Recovery! making!public!infrastructure!more!resilient!to!future!storms.!

Chai'Levy!is!a!rabbi!of!Congregation!Kol!Shofar!in!Tiburon,!CA!and!creator!of!Kol!Shofar's!Center! for!Jewish!Spirituality.!Outside!of!her!rabbinic!work,!Chai!plays!bass!in!a!rock!band.!

Jeff'Levy!is!a!real!estate!professional!with!over!16!years!of!commercial!real!estate!finance!and! project!management!experience.!Jeff!is!the!founder!of!the!Boulder!Jewish!Commons!Housing!

Initiative!(BJCHI),!which!is!working!to!build!an!intentional!housing!community!on!the!Boulder!

Jewish!Commons.!The!BJCHI!is!a!part!of!the!first!cohort!of!Hazon’s!Hakhel!E!Jewish!Intentional!

Communities!Incubator.!Jeff!is!also!a!member!of!the!development!committee!for!the!Boulder!

Jewish!Community!Farm,!a!member!of!Hazon’s!Boulder!Advisory!Board,!and,!a!member!of!the! board!of!the!Jewish!Studio!Project.!He!lives!in!Boulder!with!his!wife,!Becca,!and!their!dog,!Frisco.!

Rabbi'Israel'Psachyah'Lichtenstein!is!father,!teacher,!and!artist.!He!has!served!as!a!community!

Rabbi,!scholar!in!residence,!chaplain,!teacher,!speaker,!and!mentor.!He!is!most!interested!in! deep!Torah!and!the!indigenous!soul.!

Kalilah'Malkah'Lichtenstein!is!a!mother,!teacher,!and!visionary!artist.!Her!creativity!has!found! expression!within!a!mystic!journey!through!the!Kabbalistic!process.!Her!art!has!been!exhibited! in!Israel!and!across!North!and!South!America.!

Previously!a!wilderness!therapy!field!instructor,!and!currently!a!Teva!forest!faerie,!Hannah' Limov'enjoys!majickal!hikes!in!her!home!of!the!Blue!Ridge!Mountains!in!North!Carolina,!dancing! in!her!kitchen!while!baking!barefoot!in!a!red!polkaEdotted!apron,!contra!dancing,!growing!food,! group!singing,!and!is!in!the!slow!process!of!learning!to!play!the!mandolin.!

A!native!of!Brooklyn,!NY!Gabriella'Maimon!is!an!avid!crocheter,!olive!oil!connoisseur!and!allE around!Earth!lover.!When!she!is!not!busy!taking!kids!frolicking!in!the!forests!of!Connecticut!she! can!be!found!gushing!over!her!pets!(ask!her!for!pictures!),!drinking!coffee!or!thinking!about! transEboundary!water!management!in!the!Middle!East.!

Jakir'Manela's!greatest!achievement!in!life!is!marrying!Nets!and!fathering!Lev,!Shama,!&!Yovel.!

Jakir!also!runs!the!Pearlstone!Center,!founded!Kayam!Farm,!and!sits!on!the!Hazon!board!of! directors.!He!loves!coaching!youth!sports,!campfires,!and!making!music!with!friends.!

Nets'Chaya'Manela!lives!in!Reisterstown,!MD!with!Jakir!and!our!three!boys,!Lev!Yodea!(8),!

Shama!Nissim!(nearly!6),!and!Yovel!Chai!(newly!1).!We!keep!very!busy!waking!our!dreams!to!life,! thanks!to!the!Creator!and!a!growing!intentional!community!of!visionaryEmanifestingEexperts.!

Ask!me!about!our!CSE!(community!supported!education)!Collective,!"World!House."!

Lev'Yodea'Manela!can!teach!you!many!tricks!if!you!ask!him.!To!name!a!few,!he'd!love!to!show! you!how!to!make!a!monkey!fist,!set!up!a!deadfall!(animal!trap),!string!a!bow!(for!a!bow!drill,!for! example),!or!play!Ode!to!Joy!on!the!piano.!But!you'll!have!to!catch!him!first...!or!wait!for!him!to! sneak!up!on!you.!

Shama'Nissim'Manela!can!be!found!laughing!most!any!time.!He!would!like!to!play!shesh!besh! with!you!(watch!out!for!his!ridiculous!dice!rolling!karma),!hear!a!story,!and!have!a!catch.!We! haven't!let!him!know!yet!that!he!might!be!the!best!5Eyear!old!frisbee!thrower!and!catcher! around...!so!don't!tell!him,!but!check!it!out!!

Yovel'Chai'Manela!speaks!for!himself.!!=D!Ah!!!=D!Uh!oh!!!=D!Udder!dudder!!=D!Oh!yah!!!=D!!

Elan'Margulies!is!the!Director!of!Teva,!a!program!of!Hazon.!Elan!aims!to!inspire!joy!and! reverence!for!the!natural!world!by!introducing!students!to!earthEbased!Jewish!traditions!and! the!wonders!right!outside!their!door.!He!works!to!transform!Jewish!education!through! experiential!learning!that!fosters!Jewish,!ecological,!and!food!sustainability.!In!his!free!time,!he! enjoys!finding!wild!edibles,!brewing!ginger!beer!and!working!with!wood!and!metal.!

Mira'Menyuk!is!a!Program!Associate!at!Pearlstone!Center.!!She!has!worked!at!Pearlstone!for! two!years!in!all!facets!of!the!organization.!!She!has!lived!in!many!intentional!communities! including!Urban!Adamah!in!CA.!!Enjoys!compost!building,!flower!picking,!and!singing!bluegrass! songs.! ' '

Nathaniel'Moldoff!is!a!Development!Officer!at!Big!Tent!Judaism,!an!organization!that! strengthens!the!North!American!Jewish!community!by!embracing!intermarried!families!and! lessEengaged!Jews!and!encouraging!their!increased!participation!in!Jewish!life.!Originally!from!

Cherry!Hill,!NJ,!Nathaniel!is!a!graduate!of!Franklin!and!Marshall!College!and!also!studied!at!the!

Pardes!Institute!for!Jewish!Studies.!He!lives!in!the!Washington!Heights!neighborhood!of!

Northern!Manhattan,!where!he!is!active!in!The!Beis!Community,!an!inclusive,!intentional!Jewish! community!that!harnesses!the!power!of!its!members!to!create!a!welcoming!home!for!GEd.!

Raised!in!St.!Petersburg,!Florida,!David'Morris!is!a!1976!graduate!of!the!University!of!

WisconsinEMadison!(Soc!Wk)!and!lived!in!Israel!between!1976E1998.!Based!in!Jerusalem,!he! was!a!licensed!tour!guide!and!served!as!agent!for!the!Ziv!Tzedakah!Fund!(founded!by!Danny!

Siegel)!from!1984E1998.!Upon!returning!to!the!United!States,!he!worked!in!South!Florida!as!a! reporter!with!both!The!Jewish!Journal!and!The!Florida!Jewish!News.!Now!based!in!St.!Paul,!

Minnesota,!he!is!employed!as!a!fullEtime!substitute!teacher!with!KE12!public!schools! throughout!the!Twin!Cities.!David!attended!the!International!Intentional!Communities!

Conference!in!2011.!His!continuing!interest!in!the!possibility!of!socialist/communal!living!within! a!Jewish!framework!brings!him!to!this!year's!conference.!

Joey'Murray!also!called!Joe!has!a!love!of!the!wilderness!that!was!fostered!since!he!was!a!child.!

At!age!42!he!has!had!the!opportunity!to!travel!all!over!the!world!learning!from!Indigenous! elders!and!nature!connection!leaders!and!has!constantly!asked!the!question.!What!brings! people!closer!to!nature!connection?!What!brings!people!to!discover!and!follow!their!own! vision?!It!is!the!drive!to!answer!these!questions!and!especially!the!community!of!friends!that!he! works!with!that!has!put!Joey!in!at!the!cutting!edge!of!the!nature!connection!movement.!Joey! loves!to!care!for!the!land!and!when!he!is!not!teaching!he!is!learning.!Over!the!span!of!his!career! he!has!trained!many!instructors!and!helped!start!a!number!of!wilderness!schools.!More!close!to!

Joey’s!heart!though!has!been!the!thousands!of!children!he!has!helped!mentor!into!becoming! fully!alive!amazing!beings.!!Joey!has!been!mentoring!deep!nature!connection!since!1997!and! loves!to!spend!time!in!nature!with!his!students,!community!of!other!nature!connection!mentors! or!walking!with!his!wife!Renata!and!dog!Solo!in!the!large!patch!of!woods!outside!his!house!or! simply!being!in!his!backyard!or!garden.!

Craig'Oshkello!has!been!dedicated!to!the!design!and!development!of!landEbased!livelihoods! and!communities!forthe!past!fifteen!years!both!as!a!professional!and!daily!practitioner.!In!2003,!

Craig!started!a!nonEprofit!organization,!Land!For!Good!(landforgood.org)!to!help!keep!New! England’s!working!lands!productive.!As!a!professionally!trained!landscape!architect,!Craig! delivers!farm!design,!land!planning!and!green!development!consulting!services!to!a!broad!range! of!WSD!clients.!Craig!has!also!been!in!private!practice!designing!and!building!homesteads!for! the!past!ten!years.!Craig!now!leads!the!effort!of!developing!a!farm!centered!cohousing! community!in!the!Mad!River!Valley,!putting!15!years!of!experience!of!homesteading!at!Cold!

Pond!Community!Land!Trust!to!work.!He!has!spent!more!than!a!decade!living!in!a!landscape!of! his!design,!homesteading!through!raising!vegetables,!fuelwood,!donkeys,!sheep,!chickens,!fruits! and!nuts.!

Naomi'Raphael!(Nomi)!is!the!Lead!Educator!at!Pearlstone.!!She!has!been!at!Pearlstone!for! almost!four!years!farming,!teaching,!learning,!fundraising!and!so!much!more.!!She!is!thrilled!to! have!been!a!part!of!putting!this!conference!together!and!has!been!eagerly!awaiting!all!of!your! arrivals!for!months.!!She!is!often!seen!crocheting,!baking,!singing,!and!hanging!out!with!her! fiance!Keith!and!their!derpy!dog!Milo.!

Joshua'Rosenstein!is!a!Baltimore!based!entrepreneur,!farmer!and!farmEtoEtable!cook!and! educator.!He!has!had!the!opportunity!to!work!with!the!Adamah!program,!starting!their!value! added!product!business,!and!the!Pearlstone!Center,!running!their!educational!farm.!Currently! he!runs!his!business!Edible!Eden!Baltimore!Foodscapes!LLC!which!designs,!installs!and! maintains!food!gardens!and!edible!landscaping!for!homeowners,!businesses!and!schools!in!the!

Baltimore!area.!He!is!also!a!part!time!chef!and!farm!to!table!coordinator!at!the!Pearlstone! center.!He!is!married!to!Teri!Jedeikin.!

Elon'Rov!is!a!member!of!the!newest!Habonim!Dror!Kvutzah!in!Brooklyn,!NY.!He!lives!with!4! others!in!a!home!in!Crown!Heights,!and!is!in!the!process!of!coEcreating!a!socialist,!Jewish,! justiceEfocused!home.!Elon!works!at!The!Natan!Fund,!a!Jewish!foundation!in!Manhattan!that! funds!emerging!innovative!Jewish!projects!in!the!states!and!in!Israel.!On!the!side,!Elon!runs!a! small!artisan!Judaica!shop!called!Shmutz!+!Bolts,!where!he!creates!mezuzas,!menorahs,!and! hamsas!out!of!found!scrap!metal,!tools,!and!hardware.!

Nigel'Savage,!originally!from!Manchester,!England,!founded!Hazon!in!2000,!with!a!CrossEUSA! Jewish!Environmental!Bike!Ride.!Since!then,!Hazon!has!grown!the!range!and!impact!of!its!work! in!each!successive!year;!today!it!has!more!than!60!staff,!based!in!New!York!City,!at!Hazon’s!

Isabella!Freedman!campus,!and!in!other!locations!across!the!country.!Hazon!plays!a!unique!role! in!renewing!American!Jewish!life!and!creating!a!healthier!and!more!sustainable!world!for!all.!

Nigel!has!spoken,!taught,!or!written!for!a!wide!and!significant!range!of!audiences.!!(A!selection! of!his!essays!are!at!hazon.org/nigel).!He!has!twice!been!named!a!member!of!the!Forward!50,! the!annual!list!of!the!50!most!influential!Jewish!people!in!the!United!States,!and!is!a!recipient!of! the!Bernard!Reisman!Award.!He!has!given!Commencement!speeches!at!Wagner!(NYU,!in!2011)! and!at!Hornstein!(Brandeis,!in!2014).!In!2015!he!was!awarded!an!honorary!doctorate!by!the!

Jewish!Theological!Seminary.!Before!founding!Hazon,!Nigel!was!a!professional!fund!manager!in!

London,!where!he!worked!for!NM!Rothschild!and!was!coEhead!of!UK!Equities!at!Govett.!He!has! an!MA!in!History!from!Georgetown,!and!has!learned!at!Pardes,!Yakar,!and!the!Hebrew!

University.!!He!was!a!founder!of!Limmud!NY,!and!serves!on!the!board!of!Romemu.!Nigel! executive!produced!the!British!independent!movies!Solitaire!For!2!and!Stiff!Upper!Lips!and!had! an!acclaimed!cameo!appearance!in!the!cult!AngloEJewish!comic!movie,!Leon!The!Pig!Farmer.!!

He!is!believed!to!be!the!first!English!Jew!to!have!cycled!across!South!Dakota!on!a!recumbent! bike.! ' ' '

The'Schneider'Family!lived!in!Boulder!for!9!years!where!we!passionately!participated!in!the!

Jewish!goat!and!chicken!coEop.!We!moved!to!Baltimore!a!year!ago!to!be!closer!to!family.!We! now!volunteer!at!the!Pearlstone!farm.!We!envision!living!with!other!families!in!a!Jewish! communal!farm!either!suburban!or!rural.!We!yearn!to!integrate!the!traditionality!of!Orthodoxy! with!the!spirit!of!Jewish!Renewal.!Sarit!is!a!nurseEmidwife,!Aaron!is!a!massage!therapist!and! psychotherapist!and!Bria!(almost!3)!plays!all!day.!

Jaclyn'Schwanemann!is!interested!in!coEcreating!a!rural,!earthEbased!Jewish!community.!I!love! growing!and!preserving!food.!Next!spring!I!plan!to!expand!my!garden!and!start!keeping!bees.!

I'm!the!registrar!at!Isabella!Freedman!Jewish!Retreat!Center.!

Sara'Shalva!is!the!Director!of!Jewish!Innovation!at!the!Washington!DCJCC.!She!lives!in!Reston,!

VA!with!her!best!friend!and!life!partner,!Ben'Shalva,!who!is!a!wandering!rabbi!and!freelance! writer,!Lev!(9)!and!Avital!(7),!and!Lola!(5!months),!their!new!puppy.!She!is!the!coEfounder!of!Lev! B'Lev,!an!east!coast!retreatEbased!intentional!community.!

Aaron'Shamberg!has!been!involved!in!Jewish!community!for!over!35!years!in!the!USA!and!Israel! and!Pearlstone!Farm!since!it!began.!Aaron!is!a!landscape!architect!,!owner!of!a!Landcare!and!

Spectrum!Site!Services,!husband!of!over!34!years!to!Shoshana,!father!of!6!adult!children!and! grandfather!to!6.!All!except!one!daughter!now!live!in!Baltimore.!Sustainability!and!organic! farming!and!Torah!have!been!a!lifelong!passion!

Shoshana'Shamberg!has!been!involved!in!Jewish!community!for!over!35!years!in!the!USA,!!

Israel!and!Pearlstone!Farm!since!it!began.!Shoshana!is!an!occupational!therapist,!potter,!special! educator,!Irlen!Diagnostician!and!owner!of!a!private!practice!and!consulting!company!Abilities!

OT!&!Irlen!Diagnostic!Center!in!Baltimore.!She!is!wife!of!over!34!years!to!Aaron,!mother!of!6! adult!children!and!grandmother!to!6.!All!except!one!daughter!now!live!in!Baltimore.!Education,! teaching,!Torah,!traveling,!healing!arts,!and!pottery!have!been!lifelong!passions.!!

Adam'Shapiro!is!interested!in!nature!and!growing!food.!Originally!from!the!Philly!area,!I!studied! ecology!and!sustainable!agriculture!at!Prescott!College!in!Arizona.!Currently,!I'm!the!ecological! groundskeeper!at!Isabella!Freedman!Jewish!Retreat!Center.!

Yoshi'Silverstein!is!Director!of!the!JOFEE!Fellowship,!Hazon’s!training!and!certification!program! for!Jewish!outdoor,!food!&!environmental!education!professionals,!and!founder!of!Mitsui!

Design,!which!strengthens!Jewish!connections!to!nature!through!landscape!design!and! community!engagement.!A!landscape!designer,!writer,!and!educator!with!over!thirteen!years!of! experience!in!JOFEE!and!related!fields,!Yoshi!holds!a!Master’s!degree!in!Landscape!Architecture! from!the!University!of!Maryland!and!a!B.A.!in!European!Cultural!Studies!and!Near!

Eastern/Judaic!Studies!from!Brandeis!University.!Yoshi!was!previously!Education!Director!at!the!

Pearlstone!Center!(back!when!it!was!still!Kayam!Farm)!and!has!taught!throughout!the!US!and!

Israel,!including!several!seasons!as!a!Teva!educator!and!stints!at!Camp!Wise!in!Cleveland!and!

Camp!Solomon!Schechter!in!Olympia,!WA.!Originally!from!Spokane,!WA,!Yoshi!now!lives!in!the!

Bushwick!Plains!of!Northern!Brooklyn!with!his!wife!Abby!and!their!pup,!Norman!Jellybean.!

Roger'Studley!is!convener!of!Berkeley!Moshav,!a!forming!Jewish!cohousing!community,!and! founder!of!Urban!Moshav,!a!nonprofit!development!partner!for!creating!Jewish!cohousing.!

Roger!and!the!Moshav!projects!were!selected!for!the!inaugural!cohort!of!the!Hakhel!Jewish!

Intentional!Communities!Incubator!(Hazon/UJA).!Roger!has!also!been!an!organizer/leader!of! independent!minyanim!(including!San!Francisco’s!Mission!Minyan),!coEchair!of!a!Hazon!Food!

Conference,!and!a!board!member!of!Berkeley!Hillel.!He!is!married!to!Rabbi!Chai!Levy!and!looks! forward!to!moving!into!Berkeley!Moshav!with!Chai!and!their!almost!five!yearEold!son!Ezra!in! the!next!few!years.!

Ezra'Studley=Levy!is!a!maggid,!pirate,!Jedi!knight,!and!allEaround!chamudi.!He!loves!Legos,!light! sabers,!baseball,!and!drawing!EE!especially!pictures!of!Berkeley!Moshav,!where!he!can't!wait!to! live!in!community!and!run!around!for!years,!minimally!supervised,!with!a!dozen!of!his!closest! friends.!

Ari'Witkin!is!a!native!of!Minneapolis!who!spent!much!of!the!last!decade!living!in!Baltimore! working!as!a!community!organizer!and!Jewish!educator!as!well!as!living!and!working!in! community!at!Pearlstone.!Currently!he!lives!in!Philadelphia!and!is!a!second!year!Rabbinical!

Student!at!the!Reconstructionist!Rabbinical!College!where!he!is!a!Wexner!Graduate!Fellow.!!Ari! also!works!as!the!Rabbinic!Intern!at!Hillel!at!Drexel!University!

Casey'Yurow!recently!returned!to!Pearlstone!to!serve!as!program!director!after!5!wonderful! years!in!Berkeley,!CA.!When!asked!what!his!job!is!here,!he!often!responds!with!"Court!Jester",!

"Resident!Minstrel",!or!"Minister!of!Beverages".!What!moves!Casey!these!days!is!exploring!the! ways!that!experiential!education!rooted!in!nature!connection,!farming,!and!handsEon!skills!can! help!revitalize!human!culture!and!sprout!into!the!possibility!of!a!healthy!and!vibrant!world.!He! currently!lives!in!an!intergenerational!cohousing!homestead!with!his!wife!Rivka!and!his!parents,!

Susan!and!Scott.!

Rivka'Yurow!was!born!and!raised!in!a!little!holy!city,!just!a!bit!east!of!Baltimore,!called!

Jerusalem.!Rivka!also!just!returned!from!5!gorgeous!years!in!Berkeley,!CA,!and!is!making!her! way!through!nursing!school!en!route!to!becoming!a!midwife.!Rivka!loves!hot!springs,!tehina,! and!singing!songs!around!a!shabbos!table!or!campfire.!She!also!lives!in!the!aforementioned! intergenerational!cohousing!homestead!with!her!husband!Casey,!and!his!mom!and!dad.!

Sara'Zebovitz!currently!serves!as!the!mazkira!klalit!(loosely!translated!as!Director)!of!Habonim!

Dror!North!America.!A!PhiladelphiaEarea!native,!she!spent!time!as!an!English!for!Speakers!of!

Other!Languages!tutor!for!the!School!District!of!Philadelphia!and!was!the!Director!of!Habonim!

Dror's!Philadelphia!chapter!for!two!years.!She!lives!in!a!Jewish!collective,!a!Hakhel!incubator,!in!

Brooklyn!with!seven!other!Habonim!Dror!alumni.! ! ! !

Three Aspects of a Healthy, Thriving Community

By Diana Leafe Christian (Excerpted with permission from “Transparency, Equivalence, and Effectiveness — How Sociocracy Can Help Communities, Part I,” Communities magazine, Fall 2013.)

I believe three crucial, mutually reinforcing aspects help intentional communities (and other organizations) become healthy and thriving.

One I call Community Glue — taking time to do shared enjoyable activities that tend to generate feelings of gratitude and trust, and which also tend create the “pleasure hormone” oxytocin. Research shows that oxytocin in the bloodstream generates feelings of trust and gratitude towards the people one is with, although it may be experienced simply as “feeling good.” And these feelings cause a person to secrete oxytocin into the bloodstream, keeping the “feeling good” going throughout the enjoyable shared activity.

Thus, community meals, shared work tasks, singing, dancing, drumming, playing music, playing games or sports, group meditation, storytelling evenings, describing emotionally meaningful aspects of one’s life to friends and colleagues, making decisions together smoothly and effectively, accomplishing community goals — all tend to produce these feelings in the group. And this — the good will, the sense of “us” or “community spirit” — is like having good credit or a “community immune system” of trust and good will. The more trust and good will a community has, the more effectively its members can respond to and resolve conflict when it comes up. When a community draws on abundant community glue, it may be easier to just talk to each other simply and figure out how to resolve things.

A second aspect of a healthy, thriving community, in my opinion, is Good Process and Communication Skills. While this is obvious to most experienced communitarians, the need for these skills becomes obvious sooner or later in newer communities too. By “communication skills,” I mean the ways people talk with each other, both in groups and meetings and one on one. By “process skills,” I mean the ways members gather together specifically to get to know each other better, consider ideas, understand each others’ emotions or upsets, or discuss and resolve conflicts.

Nowadays I recommend what I believe are the two most effective communication and process methods for communities: Nonviolent Communication, a way in which people speak to each other that tends to create a sense of connection and reduces conflict, and Restorative Circles, a conflict-resolution method similar in some ways to Nonviolent Communication.

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The third aspect, Effective Project Management, is obvious to founders of successful communities and cohousing professionals but often less obvious (or even invisible) to more idealistic or countercultural folks. It’s comprised of the ways a community creates and maintains its legal entity(s); the ways it finances, purchases, and physically develops its property (including, for example, hiring any outside professional for design or construction work, bookkeeping, website design, or other work); organizes and tracks its internal community finances and member labor requirements; attracts, processes, and orients new members; and maintains the community’s documents, policies, and decisions. These are all actions that wellorganized businesses or nonprofits use too. Sooner or later members of new communities learn that clear, thorough, well-organized management is necessary not only to found their new community but also to successfully maintain it.

I believe these three aspects of community mutually reinforce each other. If a group has abundant community glue, for example, people will tend to feel connected enough and harmonious enough so that most of the time they’ll get along well and not need to speak so carefully, and will probably need less conflict resolution as well. But if a group’s reserve of community glue is low — perhaps because they don’t yet realize how important it is or don’t have enough time to schedule enjoyable group activities often enough — they may have to choose their words more carefully, and may need to resolve conflicts more formally and more frequently.

Similarly, if a group has effective project management, the sense of accomplishment they’ll feel when people experience the community moving towards its goals can create more community glue — increasing their feelings of trust and gratitude and thus reducing their need for super-careful ways of speaking and more frequent conflict resolution sessions. But if a community is managed poorly — for example, if they miss important opportunities; experience unexpected or un-prepared-for legal problems, bookkeeping snafus, or financial shortfalls; lose documents or records of meeting decisions — this can create anger, resentment, blame, shame, and demoralization, which of course erodes the group’s sense of trust and connection. A group in this situation will, once again, need to speak to one another more carefully and will probably need to resolve conflicts more often too.

I advise groups to go for all three, of course. !

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"An Appalachian Forest Gardener’s Year by the Jewish Calendar" by Zev, Jewish Intentional Communities Conference, November 2015 Contact Zev: zevkudzu@gmail.com, 828.279.2870 www.livingsystemsdesign.net www.permacultureinaction.com www.schoolofintegratedliving.org All Year: Harvest pigeons, rabbits, duck eggs Swale maintenance Harvest chaga mushroom sclerotium Soak shiitake logs during warm spells for fruitings as needed (then put in root cellar or basement until fruiting is complete) Reevaluate and reassess Shevat (January-February): Coppice Moon Winter pruning Cut and stack wood for next year Make maple taps from sumac or order metal ones, inventory maple syrup equipment Drink chestnut beer Dig sassafras root and cut black birch twigs Harvest winter oyster mushrooms Selective logging projects Finish craft projects Adar (February-March): Maple Moon Gather compressed leaves for garden mulch Tap maples, make syrup Felling oak for shiitake inoculation Dig and process kudzu root Check bees on warm days Coppice nitrogen fixing trees Stone work Nissan (March-April): Fill in cover crop in tomato/squash beds Start tomatoes, peppers, basil, tulsi Harvest first sochan, nettles, ramps, poke sallet, chickweed, dandelion Plug shiitake logs, harvest first shiitakes Felling tulip poplar for basket making and oyster mushroom plugging Fell dying hemlocks for Ganoderma Tsugae (Applachian Reishi) innoculation Tap birch, make syrup Make dandelion kraut for spring digestive tonic (need some brassica to instigate ferment).

Iyar (April-May): Ramp Moon Eat salads of ramps, chickweed, basswood leaves Make ramp pesto, use olive oil or bear fat Cut cover in tomato and squash beds Peak ramp harvest; process and store ramps Plug oyster mushroom logs Coppice basswood and process fibers, eat basswood leaves from coppiced stumps Plug G. tsugae hemlock logs Hunt morels Make low alcohol spring tonic meads Sivan (May-June): Poplar Moon Harvest basswood coppice for friction fire wood, bark, and leaves Cut sochan flower stalks to maintain harvest Gather and dry nettles and basswood leaves for eating, teas, and fertilizer teas Eat salads of redbud blossoms and squished wood nettles Make wild kim chee of basswood leaves, hemlock tips,day lilly buds, daisies, and asian cabbage Harvest Appalachian Reishi fresh tips for eating Plant milpa First honey harvest (poplar) Harvest black locust flowers for fritters, soda Resist going insane with activity, leave time for rest Tammuz (June-July): First Sweetness Moon Get Tulip poplar baskets into form Harvest juneberries (serviceberries), strawberries, wineberries, mulberries, cherries, plums Harvest elderberry blossoms for fritters, soda, medicine etc.

Harvest/coppice lamb’s quarter and amaranth greens Harvest mature Reishis for medicine Harvest Tulip poplar bark Hammock siestas Swimming Av (July-August): Swimming Moon Harvest saucing apples, make sauce Remember to save seeds of tomatoes, summer squash Pickle green beans Harvest garlic Harvest wineberries, strawberries, mulberries, raspberries Freeze some berries and make wine and jam Eat amaranth and lamb’s quarter greens

elderberries,

early

blueberries,

Elul (August-September): Dark Berry Moon Harvest Elderberries, make syrup Can peaches Gather wild blueberries, peak harvest Prune raspberries Repair or borrow apple press Dry apples Aronia berry harvest Start native koji, hanging nixtamal in corn husks under warm moist building eaves Process quantities of annuals such as tomatoes, okra.

Harvest honey Tishri (September-October): Apple Moon Clear areas where you are planning to plant, sheet mulch or cover crop them Buy straw for winter apple storage Dry pears, make pear sauce Harvest winter squash Practice shooting for hunting season Harvest groundhogs for meat and skin Cranberry harvest Prune ginseng leaves to circumvent poachers (use leaves for tea and medicine!)

Make mead with excess fruit and honey Start sauerkraut and other winter veggie salt-based ferments.

Cheshvan (October-November): Forest on fire with beauty moon Harvest wild persimmons, make fruit leather and freeze raw persimmon pudding Gather keeper apples Hunting deer (check exact seasons yearly) Chestnut harvest, make chestnut koji, make chestnut amaranth beer, shell and dry chestnuts, store in a bug-proof manner (layer between dried wormwood foliage).

Milpa harvest Harvest, dry, and store acorns Harvest Maitake Slaughter turkey for storage (or slaughter throughout winter to avoid storage issues) Kislev (November-December): Deer Moon Plant and transplant berries and trees Prepare holes Spring tree and shrub planting with put deer guts and hocks Harvest Polonia leaves for super-high-nutrient mulch Hunting deer and wild turkey (check exact seasons yearly) Process, process, process food; abundance is busy.

Start at least 1-3 craft projects Make native miso.

Sleep unabashedly.

Tevet (December-January): Firewood Moon Make wreaths for sale out of invasives climbing up trees: honeysuckle, bittersweet, and kudzu Continue to chop kindling Coppice Autumn olive for basket materials Coppice most tree species.

Do bulk of craft project work.

Drink chestnut beer.

Transform spiritual sugars gathered during growing season into starches that can fuel a renewed sprouting and flowering in the spring.

Sit by fire, read stories, tell stories about previous year, feel emotions, don’t medicate with coffee all the time.

Some references on Jewish ecology and eco-spiritual living Yigal Deutscher and 7Seeds Nigel Savage and Hazon, most well-known American Jewish food activist and organization Rachel Cohen and Jewish Intentional Communities Kayam Farm at Pearlstone Center, Jakir Manela Mia Cohen, work with kids and teens (Shoreshim) Joanna Macey, deep ecology and marriage of Buddhism, eco-psychology with mystical Judaism Gersham Winkler- wild and indigenous Jewish ritual Ruach Ha’aretz- bi-annual conference on Jewish spiritual ecology Vandana Shiva- renowned Indian teacher on women's empowerment and cultural continuance through permaculture Rabbi Jill Hammer, Tel Shemesh Rabbi Goldie Milgrom Martin Prechtel, approaching our own indigenous roots

Torah of Place - Landscape Extensions for place-based Jewish learning Judaics Consultation with Rabbi Tonti has guided the Judaics component of the project towards integration with upcoming units leading to the holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. Students will be asked to link traditional sources of wisdom and knowledge such as the codified texts of Torah with modern wisdom and knowledge. They will specifically consider what Jewish knowledge we are building today in relationship to landscapes throughout the world.

Knowledge and wisdom about the Gesher landscape will be documented and transmitted utilizing modern technology, with an understanding of how technology in the past enabled transmission prior wisdom to future generations. Students will also be empowered to share their own individual knowledge and relationships as they take part in collectively building a body of knowledge regarding the Gesher community and landscape – the Torah of (this) Place. (see additional Melton Tanakh standards below, with extensions bridging traditional Tanakh study to place-based Jewish learning) Melton Standards and Benchmarks for Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) learning Standard 1: Students will become independent and literarily astute readers of the biblical text in Hebrew.

Extension: Students will develop independent relationships with the Gesher landscape and astute observers of its unique character and ecology, particularly in contrast with landscapes described in Tanakh.

Standard 2: Students will be engaged in the learning of ancient, rabbinic, and modern modes of interpretation of the biblical text and will see themselves as a link in this ongoing chain of interpretation.

Ext: Students will engage with experiential, interpretive learning in the Gesher landscape and compare/contrast their experiences with ancient, rabbinic and modern modes of Jewish landscape experience. They will see themselves as a link in this ongoing chain of landscape interpretation and explore innovative modes of modern interpretive transmission.

Standard 3: Students will appreciate Tanakh as a multivocal text with a complex history of development.

Ext: Students will appreciate landscape as a complex, interdependent web of systems and interaction – a palimpsest of both human and non-human development and interactions throughout recent and ancient history. Students will understand their own role as individual voices contributing to ongoing Torah and the growing body of knowledge linked specifically to the Gesher landscape.

Standard 4: Students will view Tanakh as the formative narrative of the Jewish People—past, present, and future.

Ext: Students will understand how the landscapes of our ancestors shaped the development of their beliefs and relationship with the divine, and how our relationships with landscapes around the world continually shape our own Jewish communities and personal perceptions, biases, and beliefs. They will understand how the wisdom they document and transmit will inform future generations of Gesher students.

Standard 5: Students will, through the study of Tanakh, understand and value that the Land of Israel informs and shapes the historical, theological, and sociological experiences of the Jewish People.

Ext: Students will understand and value the holiness inherent in all places, as well as how Judaism creates holiness through distinction and separation. They will appreciate the inherent tension in this dualism.

Standard 6: Students will develop an appreciation for the sacredness of Tanakh as the primary record of the meeting between God and the people of Israel and as an essential text through which Jews continue to grapple with theological, spiritual, and existential questions.

Ext: Students will appreciate the role of each individual Jew in receiving, documenting and transmitting wisdom and divine inspiration; they will explore uses of modern technology for documenting, transmitting and engaging with both new and traditional forms of Jewish wisdom.

Standard 7: Students will understand, through the study of Tanakh and its interpretations, the role of mitzvot [commandments] in the shaping of the ethical character and religious practices of the individual and the Jewish People.

Ext: Students will learn how traditional understanding and observance of the mitzvot has changed and adapted over the millennia, and consider how modern interpretation and innovative application of mitzvot, particularly in relation to landscape, connect with the ethics and values described in Tanakh.

Standard 8: Students will develop a love of Torah study for its own sake and embrace it as an inspiring resource, informing their values, moral commitments, and ways of experiencing the world.

Ext: Students will develop a relationship with landscape for its own sake and embrace it as an inspiring resource that informs their values, moral commitments, and ways of experiencing Judaism.

Exhibit

1 (b)** 2 (g)

3

(d) 4 (k) 5 (p)

Breishit Connection (what was created?)

Chesed (Loving Kindness)

Sefirah Connection What is special about this place?

Essential Question(s)

Pokeach Ivrim; Shema Sound Mapping

(ONGOING)

JOURNAL

GRAPHICS: Photo Snapshots; Sound Maps

AR Media Content

Forest

Location

A place-based Omer experience Essential Concept Yom HaRishon – Light

Transect line inventory;

TEXT: Meet a tree description; VIDEO: Describing trees; CHART/GRAPH: Transect Line inventory

Student Activity

Connection; Emanation

Gevurah (Justice)

Why do different habitats exist? How can we tell them apart / what are the boundaries?

GRAPHICS: Seed Sketch

Forest -> meadow

Structure; Discipline

Yom HaSheyni – Sky / Heavens

Find the seed + sketch

Meadow

Tiferet (Compassion)

Harmony; Inclusion

Why do grasses get special mention in Breishit? What are "grasses of the field" and why are their seeds to important?

Yom HaShlishi – Waters separated from dry land; seeds; grasses of the field (Ch 2)

GRAPHICS: Light Study charts; TEXT: Cycle descriptions

Meadow

Sun-dial Light Study

Meadow / Forest

Netzach (endurance)

Cycles; Endurance

Meadow / Forest

What evidence of time cycles do we see here? What season is it now? How do we predict things will change?

Yom HaRivi’i – Luminaries (sun, moon, stars); day & night; week / month / year / seasons

WEB: Links to plant species found in area; TEXT: Students' PlantNames

Hod (Humility)

Humility

Yom HaHamishi – Fish & Birds

Yesod (Bonding)

Video Responses

Plant/tree sketch; leaf How would you name these rubbing; Name Giving; things if you were given this Follow-up: research plant task? What's the power of a name in English, Latin, name?

Hebrew What Torah wisdom did you learn from the Earth in this place?

Meadow / Forest

PHOTOS: Micropark "Macro" Shots; GRAPHICS: Section Drawings?

Yom HaShishi – All other animals; humans; speech

Malchut (sovereignty)

VIDEO: Responses

Micro-parks; to-scale section drawings?

Foundation; Communication

Yom HaShabbat – Rest

When do you feel small?

When do you feel big?

Shabbat; Appreciation

PHENOLOGY

6 (r) 7 (t)

*sessions are framed by week, but multiple “weeks” may happen during a single session if needed. ** Hebrew letters for each week are based on the Kabbalistic framework of the “double” letter family (not the normal numerical alef-bet equivalents).

These letters are organized together because each has a double form – one with the dot (dagesh), the hard pronunciation; and one without, the soft pronunciation. In Sefer Yetzirah, Kabbalah uses the letters of the alef-bet as a metaphor for the building blocks of creation – the world around us. So one might think of the makom kodesh space as formed by the “double letters” and the students as the “dagesh” – they change the nature of the space when present. (The other letters are organized into either 3 mother letters (a / c / m) or 12 elemental letters forming emotions and structures of time and the boundaries of the universe).

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference December 4, 2015

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Community Brainstorm: Disappearance of Community (and Family) from Modern Life and How to Restore It Over millions of years, from hunter gatherer beginnings through the pre industrial era, humankind evolved to live in community. Only in recent centuries have we abandoned the connectedness of community, leaving a void between the intimacy of family and the impersonal nature of modern society.

This session will be a communal brainstorm to make the argument that IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. With an eye toward crafting an essay, speech, or video, we'll bring our collective knowledge and ideas to the table. How did community disappear from modern life, and how can we bring it back? Does religion have a role? In a society dominated by transactional relationships, how do we understand what is missing and create the networks of mutual, sustained, and caring interrelationships the communities that will restore meaning and purpose to our lives?

PRELIMINARY OUTLINE I. Evolution: We evolved to live in community.

II. Research: Living in community makes sense from what we know of human nature from neuroscience, anthropology, etc.

III. What villages really used to look, feel, and operate like.

IV. What happened? Why have we abandoned community? Why did we throw the baby out with the bathwater?

V. Why restore community? What is to be gained?

VI. What would healthy communities look like?

VII. How can we restore community?

PRELIMINARY IDEAS I.

We EVOLVED to live in community.

FIND: Estimates of community size and brief description of daily encounters (Much from https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology/Society) Hunger gatherer tribes – Three million years ago (stone age, Paleolithic) – Carried food home to consume (unlike most animals) – Aided by ability to communicate Agriculture and settlement: Pastoralist (domesticated livestock) Horticulturist (cultivation of crops using hand tools) Agrarian (adds animals/machines to crop cultivation) – Starts around 11,000 BCE (stone age, Neolithic) – Separate emergence in different parts of the world – Characterized by settlement

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference December 4, 2015

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Industrial: – Industrial revolution (involves capitalization): 1760 CE – Increased food surpluses more developed hierarchies and…

– Division of labor, mechanized manufacturing – Migration to urban environments?

Post Industrial: – Service oriented work – Outsourcing – Information, knowledge, and creativity are the new raw materials of the economy

II. RESEARCH: What the science literature tells us.

Matthew D. Lieberman. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect – Connection Mindreading Harmonizing – Our default brain network is social. "Our brains are built to practice thinking about the social world and our place in it."

– Size of neocortex ratio is best predicted by group size (not individual innovation or even social learning) Robin Dunbar, evolutionary anthropologist (early 1990s) Group of 5 10 dyads. 15 100 dyads. 45 1000 dyads Humans: 150 10,000 dyads. This is predicted by neocortex ratio.

Village size converges around 150 in estimates from 6000 BCE to 1700s CE. "Ancient and modern armies organize around units of about 150 people."

– Connection: The brain treats social pain just like physical pain. Mechanism to avoid social rejection and keep connected to the group.

– Empathy = Mindreading (what is being experienced or needed) + Affect matching (sympathetic sharing of another's feelings) + Prosocial motivation to act on behalf of others without weighing costs/benefits to oneself – Harmonizing: Striving to fit in and support the group Susan Pinker. The Village Effect: How Face to Face Contact Can Make us Healthier and Happier – Social bonds improve outcomes of chronic diseases – "Longevity as a team sport" – Face to face contact matters: tight bonds of friendship and love heal us, help children learn, extend our lives, and make us happy. Looser in person bonds matter, too, combining with

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference December 4, 2015

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our close relationships to form a personal “village” around us, one that exerts unique effects. Not just any social networks will do: we need the real, in the flesh encounters that tie human families, groups of friends, and communities together.

Most of us have left the literal village behind and don’t want to give up our new technologies to go back there. But, as Pinker writes so compellingly, we need close social bonds and uninterrupted face time with our friends and families in order to thrive—even to survive.

Others?

III. The VILLAGE Is it true that they were as close knit as we imagine them, or is this idealized – Does this differ in town v. agricultural settings – Harvest festivals and gatherings Centered around places of worship?

What exactly are we trying to restore?

EXAMPLES of prototypical villages IV. WHAT HAPPENED: The Breakdown of Community Disappearance of Community – How have we lost community?

– Why don't we know our neighbors?

– Transportation, communication, and modern economies: Aren't these good things?

Why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Could we have maintained community while harnessing these developments?

– Industrial Revolution: Gail Collins, NY Times, 5/16/14: "Ever since the industrial revolution, when Americans abandoned small town life for anonymous cities, they’ve bonded by talking about celebrities. In 1800, people chatted over their back fence about the neighbors. In 1900, the guys on the assembly line no longer shared mutual friends, but they all knew that boxing champion John L. Sullivan was a terrible drunk, and had opinions about singer Lillian Russell’s generous figure."

– Linda Poon, Why Won't You Be My Neighbor? Citylab (Atlantic Monthly): "A third of Americans say they've never interacted with the people living next door. Only about 20 percent of Americans spent time regularly with the people living next to them. A third said they’ve never interacted with their neighbors. That’s a significant decline from four decades ago, when a third of Americans hung out with their neighbors at least twice a week, and only a quarter reported no interaction at all. … In a separate 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, researchers found that 43 percent of Americans know most or all of their neighbors. But nearly a third said they know none by name:

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference December 4, 2015

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Is diversity also a culprit?

Jason DeParle. Why the U.S. Is So Good at Turning Immigrants Into Americans. The Atlantic: Paul Collier, an Oxford economist, in In Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World, cautions that diversity can also have “corrosive effects” on trust, cooperation, and the willingness to redistribute income. He highlights research by Harvard’s Robert Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame, who has found that diversity reduces trust not only between ethnic groups but also within them. “Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends … and to huddle unhappily in front of the television,” Putnam has written.

Deterioration of Family – Stephen Marche, The Atlantic, July/August 2013. Home Economics: The Link Between Work Life Balance and Income Equality: The central conflict of domestic life right now isn't men versus women or mothers versus fathers; it's the family against money.

– Two full time working parents… Where is the time for family connection?

Relationships: – Caring v. transactional; Love v. power; covalent v. ionic.

– Empathy V. WHY communities?

Pirkei Avot, Hillel: Al tifrosh min ha zibor; Do not separate yourself from the community.

Charles Montgomery. Happy City: Transforming our Lives Through Urban Design. People have been shown to be happier when they live a connected life, establishing casual but regular relationships with the people they meet through simple residential proximity.

Jewish Intentional Communities Conference December 4, 2015

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Jonathan Hari argues that addiction is a response to disconnection, not to the chemical properties of drugs. "Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.'

A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else. " "Posses" of 10 kids with mediocre credentials achieve remarkable success in college. (The Posse Foundation) VI. WHAT would healthy, successful communities look like?

Cohousing – Other models?

Robert Putnam has a distinction between "bridging" (cross culteral) and "bonding" (intra cultural). How much of each do we need?

– Buber: Communities of communities Why Jewish?

– R' Yonatan Cohen: We must not only question, but also dare to ponder and reflect upon, a wisdom that insists that Torah need be at the very center of our people’s national life. Given our history and past, and given the richness of our traditional path, it would be unwise (even foolish) for us to become like all other nations of the world. The wise child’s rigid particularistic approach reminds us to never give up the very things that may set us apart, for these very things also make us who we are.

Diversity? Pluralism?

– See Jasen DeParle, above – Tom Friedman: What is pluralism? I like the definition that the Pluralism Project at Harvard offers on its website: “pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity” because “mere diversity without real encounter and relationship will yield increasing tensions in our societies.” … Pluralism, it also notes, “does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind. ... It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another.

Diana Butler Bass, Finding God in the Neighborhood. The Atlantic. "Across the nation, neighborhoods became more homogeneous in taste and worldview, even while sometimes becoming more racially or ethnically diverse. … And that is what a tribe is: people who are, in some way or another, alike and band together for common purpose. Human beings feel safer when they are near those who understand them, whose lives are enmeshed socially and economically, and who share a common outlook. Tribes are as old as human history. … Although “tribe” is often a negative word in contemporary usage, it is helpful to remember that “tribe” is a rich source of history, identity, and solidarity among native peoples. The problem is not the idea of tribe per se, but what happens when tribes become exclusive (when belonging is based on some form of superiority) and interested primarily in their own survival (when other tribes are viewed as a threat)."

Eight Antidotes for Structural Conflict “Structural Conflict” arises when a forming-community group doesn’t put certain crucial processes in place during its early stages. These include the community’s shared Vision and Mission, a clear governance and decision-making method, a clear membership process, and so on. (See “Eight Crucial Structures,” below.)

I learned this when I compared the roughly 10% of forming-community groups that succeeded* with the roughly 90% that failed.

Founders of communities that succeed put these structures in place — because one or more founders know these are crucial for effective project management.

Founders of communities that fail usually don’t put these structures in place, perhaps because they don’t know how important they are.

Eight Crucial Structures: 1. Identify your community’s shared Vision and Mission and your shared values. You learn and use this as a basis for decision-making and when talking with others about your envisioned community. You put it on the website and in promotional materials. (See handout, “Community Vision, Mission, and Aim.”)

2. Use a fair, participatory governance and decision-making process. If it’s Sociocracy or Holacracy (both are governance structures with decision-making methods) get trained in it first.

If it’s consensus (solely a decision-making method, not governance too), get trained in it first. If you choose consensus, please use the N St. Consensus Method. (See handouts, “Sociocracy Overview,” and “The N St. Consensus Method.”)

3. Use a clear, thorough membership process for choosing cofounders and new members of your group. Have requirements, criteria, steps and a period of “exploring member” or “provisional membership” time. Ideally select people for resonance with your group’s values, community Vision and Mission, anticipated lifestyle, willingness to abide by your agreements, and demonstrated ability to get along well with others. (See handout, “A Clear, Thorough Membership Process.”)

4. Create “community glue” through enjoyable shared group activities (not just meetings.)

This builds a sense of trust and connection in your group.

5. Create clear agreements, in writing.

6. Help each other stay accountable to agreements. And use a graduated series of consequences. (See handouts, “Helping People Stay Accountable to Agreements” and “A Graduated Series of Consequences.”)

7. Learn good communication and process skills — make communicating clearly and empathetically and resolving conflicts a priority. Learn and practice Nonviolent Communication process, and the Restorative Circles process for conflict resolution Create and abide by your group’s communication agreements. (See handouts, “Nonviolent Communication Overview,” “Restorative Circles Overview,” and “Communication Agreements.”)

8. Learn the necessary head skills and heart skills to create a successful project. Heart skills: Creating “community glue,” communication skills (NVC, Restorative Circles). Head Skills: Effective project management tools — agreements, legal entities, budgets, strategic plans, cashflow projections, financing methods, tax requirements, zoning regulations, building codes, etc.)

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Structural vs. interpersonal conflict. Structural conflict looks and feels like interpersonal conflict. It can seem like one member is behaving that way and another is behaving this way.

The conflict may also occur among several or many people, not just two.

While people’s less-enjoyable, reactive, defensive. or aggressive behaviors can arise as a result of the absence of crucial structures, these behaviors are not the cause of structural conflict. (Thus using Nonviolent Communication, or organizing mediations, conflict resolution sessions, or Restorative Circles tends not to help because these don’t address the real reason for the conflict.)

What helps? Knowing that these eight structures are crucial for the success of a project, and putting them in place. (And . . . structure #7 above is knowing and using good communication and conflict resolution skills.)

Resolving — and Preventing — Structural Conflict 1. Learn the difference between Structural Conflict as compared to interpersonal conflict. (It looks the same.)

2. Understand the three primary aspects of any successful community: (1) Effective project management, (2) Creating “community glue,” and (3) Good process and communication skills — with an effective governance method as the foundation of all three. (See handout, “Three Aspects of a Healthy, Thriving Community.)

3. Understand the central importance of community governance, and the difference between governance (what you make decisions about) and decision-making (how decisions are made).

4. Understand the crucial relationship between your group’s shared (1) Vision and Mission, (2) membership process, and (3) decision-making method. (Demonstrated in the “Community Board Game” exercise.)

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* “Succeeded” meaning the group bought (or rented) property, lived there together, and began achieving their community goals.

If it was a non-residential community, they and began achieving their community goals.

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[Revised!7.22.14]!

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Sociocracy – “Effective, Efficient, and Fun” ‘Sociocracy” means “governance by peers or colleagues.” It is an increasingly popular governance and decision-making method based on the values of transparency, equivalency, and effectiveness. When a community uses it correctly and uses all seven parts, it tends to experience more high-energy, effective meetings than when they used consensus.

“We’ve made more decisions in the past two months than we have in the past two years!” —Davis Hawkowl, Pioneer Valley Cohousing, Amherst, Massachusetts fun!”

“A visitor said she’d never seen a community meeting be so effective, efficient, and —Hope Horton, Hart’s Mill Ecovillage, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

“I would never have joined the community if we didn’t use Sociocracy! It’s our saving grace.” —Kreel Hutchison, Baja BioSana Ecovillage, La Paz, Mexico “We have better follow-up to our decisions, and information flows better. Our meetings are faster and lighter and have a rhythm that feels satisfying. And at the end of our last meeting, we started dancing for joy!” —Anamaria Aristizabal, Aldeafeliz Ecovillage, Colombia Pioneer Valley Cohousing Assesses Sociocracy after 18 Months. This survey was conducted to see if Pioneer Valley members liked Sociocracy and wanted to keep it. Previously, the same relatively few members did almost all the administrative work. But after implementing Sociocracy far more members contributed labor and became involved in community governance. More people took on leadership roles, including newer members who had not participated in community governance before. An overwhelming majority reported in the survey that they were ”highly satisfied” with Sociocracy.

In 2014 Baja BioSana Ecovillage in Mexico began a two-year trial period; they like it and will keep it too. In August, 2015 Windsong Cohousing in Canada started an 18-month trial period with Sociocracy.

The seven parts of Sociocracy. Gerard Endenburg, a Dutch electrical engineer, inventor, and cybernetics expert, designed Sociocracy in the 1970s by to help his company, Endenburg Elektrotechniek, function more harmoniously. It is sometimes called “Dynamic Governance” in the U.S. It is not a modification of consensus.

Sociocracy has many parts, but in my opinion, the following seven parts are the minimum needed to provide checks and balances against potential abuses of power. They work together synergistically, each mutually the others. These are four meeting processes — (1) proposal-forming, (2) consent decision-making, (3) selecting people for roles/elections, and (4) role-improvement feedback — (5) a governance structure of “double-linked” circles, (6) clear aims or objectives for each circle, and (7) “plan/implement/evaluate” feedback loops built into every proposal.

Double-linked circles. Semi-autonomous, self-organized circles (committees), organize work tasks, both administrative and physical labor. Each circle provides a specific, concrete function for the community re its ongoing work tasks; for example, a Membership Circle, Finance Circle, Land Use Circle, and so on. Most circles are relatively small, with perhaps four to eight members.

The General Circle creates each main functional circle — determining its area of responsibility, aims (objectives), and budgets. The General Circle provides longer-term planning for the whole community — coordinating and overseeing the work of the functional circles — very much like whole-community business meetings, however, General Circles usually have fewer members, perhaps eight to ten people. The

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! community will probably also hold whole-community meetings several times a year.

“Double links” are two people who are each members of two different circles, and who convey information between the two circles. This ensures a direct, two-way flow of information between the General Circle and each functional circle, and helps all the various work areas of the community function smoothly and synergistically in relation with one another and not work at cross-purposes.

Each functional can create more focused and specific functional circles if needed. For example, a Promotions Circle could create separate Website and Newsletter circles to accomplish these more specific promotions tasks. Again, there are double-links between these circles. These smaller, more specific functional circles may have just a few members, and sometimes, only one person.

Each circle uses consent decision-making and the other three meeting processes noted above.

Domain and aims. Aims (objectives) are what the circle produces or provides for the community. A Finance Circle, for example, with the domain of financial management for the community, would have the aims of providing financial services. Specifically this could include paying the community’s taxes and other annual fees like utility bills, insurance premiums, and so on, and invoicing and collecting dues and fees from members. A Promotions Circle would have the domain of community promotions and advertising, and would have the aims of providing promotions and advertising services for the community in order to inform and inspire potential visitors, neighbors, and the general public about its mission and activities. Specifically the Promotions Circle could do this by creating and managing its website, blog, online newsletter, brochures, tours for visitors, and so on.

Aims are not goals, which have a beginning and end. Rather, aims are ongoing and continuous.

Aims are crucial because when circle members make proposals, object to proposals, and resolve objections to proposals, they do so based on how the proposal may or may not support their circle’s aims.

Plan/implement/evaluate feedback loops. Engineers and inventors use feedback loops to create and test their ideas. First is a design or plan. Then a prototype is made to try out the design — the implementation. The prototype is measured and evaluated to learn how it works in real-life circumstances — the evaluation.

Feedback loops are built into Sociocracy too, because the wording of every proposal includes criteria for how it will be measured and evaluated for effectiveness after it is implemented, and dates of upcoming meetings when these evaluations will occur. Criteria for measuring proposals can include “how much” and “how many” questions, while criteria for evaluation are more subjective, and might include questions such “Do we like it?” “Is it working well?” “What do community members say about it?” and so on.

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Excepted( from( articles( appearing( in( the( Communities( magazine( series,( “Busting( the( Myth( That( Consensus=with=Unanimity( is( Good( for( People,”( 2012= 2013,(and(from(revisions(of(chapter(6(the(French(and(Russian(editions(of(Creating-a-Life-Together(by(Diana(Leafe(Christian.(

What Can Go Wrong in Consensus Decision-Making Note: I call the classic form of consensus, in which one can block a proposal for any reason and there is no recourse if someone blocks, “consensus with unanimity.” —Diana

Consensus trainers often claim that, when done well, consensus decision-making, in contrast to majorityrule voting, can transform meetings from overlong, frustrating, draining sessions that go nowhere and elicit people’s worst behaviors, to spirited, stimulating events where everyone’s ideas are valued and the group comes up with surprisingly creative and workable solutions.

However, in my years of consulting with communities in conflict and participating in meetings of my own community, I’ve seen consensus and some modifications of consensus also create overlong, frustrating, draining sessions that go nowhere and elicit people’s worst behaviors. Consensus advocates often claim that because everyone’s agreement is required to pass a proposal, this naturally results in trust, harmony, and connection among group members.

But I have seen many communities using consensus-with-unanimity (or some of its modifications) get just the opposite.

Consider the 15-year-old community that still doesn’t have a pet policy because a member with several dogs blocks any proposal to create a temporary committee to even draft a pet policy. Or the 20year-old group which still has no community building after several members blocked a proposal to build one because of their abhorrence of debt — even though the community borrowed money to buy its property in the first place. Or the community that has no labor requirement because one member blocks every proposal to create a labor policy, believing that if it’s a real community everyone would work for the community voluntarily.

These communities not only have no pet policy, community building, or labor policy, they also have no consistent experience of trust and connection, as this is destroyed regularly when a few fellow community members stop what everyone else wants.

Threatening to Block and “Premature Proposal Death” And sometimes, even if no one has ever blocked, conflict and discouragement still occurs because the possibility of blocking exists — since everyone knows anyone could block a proposal if they wanted to.

This happens when someone threatens to block before a proposal has been presented in a meeting.

This can happen directly —“I’ll never support that!” It can also happen as an implication, such as when someone shows disapproval or disdain for an upcoming proposal through facial expression, tone of voice, or body language. This can even happen when someone is just voicing an idea that hasn’t even become a proposal yet.

When either of these occurs — directly threatening to block a proposal or idea, or an implication that someone might do so — the community suffers. People lose heart for their new ideas and drop them.

Community members don’t get to illuminate the issues in a meeting through discussion. An idea that could have benefitted the community or shed light on an important issue is abandoned before it’s ever considered — dying before it was born.

Reasons People Block Inappropriately I believe this happens because people often misunderstand and mis-use the blocking privilege. It is certainly appropriate, and desirable, to block if a proposal clearly violates the community’s values, underlying principles, or mission, and the person can clearly show why. Or to block if implementing a proposal would harm the community in some real, demonstrable way, and the person(s) can clearly show why.

Tim Hartnett, author of Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making (New Society Publishers, 2010), is the first consensus trainer I know of to say publicly that the benefits of consensus-with-unanimity are often

outweighed by its negative consequences. He observes, and I have seen also, at least three reasons people block inappropriately: (1) The blocking person interprets the community’s stated mission or purpose differently than other community members. Some members in one community, for example believed its purpose was to create a rural agrarian village and grow and raise much of its own organic food. Other members believed their community purpose was to protect the Earth from human impact, and so blocked most proposals about farming and agriculture. Still others knew theirs was primarily a spiritual community devoted to processing conflict and emotions in meetings.

(2) A proposal violates a member’s personal values rather than the community’s agreed-upon shared values. In this same community people have blocked proposals because of a personal distaste for the insurance industry, a devotion to ecofeminism, or a contempt for small cottage industries offering onsite jobs for members.

(3) The blocker has a perhaps subconscious wish for attention — even negative attention — or to otherwise express a painful but suppressed emotional issue.

People can also block inappropriately because they need more time to consider the proposal, or because a proposal seems too confusing to understand what it actually means. In these cases, rather than blocking, the person simply needs ask for more time to consider the proposal, or request that it be revised for clarity.

For whatever reason, when people block proposals inappropriately, it demoralizes the group.

Having “Complete Power Over the Group” “Requiring unanimity,” Tim Hartnett writes, “is usually intended to ensure widespread agreement.

When unanimity is blocked by a small number of people, however, the group actually experiences widespread disagreement which has toxic effects on the group.”

He observes that no matter how well and accurately a group practices consensus-with-unanimity, doing so does not ensure unanimous approval of the final, modified proposal. The blocking principle, he says, is often considered a way to equally share power in a group, but he notes that giving people equal power to control the group’s ability to make a decision can actually create inequality. “It necessitates that all group members have the ethics and maturity to use this power responsibly,” he writes. “This may not be a realistic expectation.”

He advocates that true equality may be better secured “by a system that ensures that no group member ever has the power to individually control the group.” (Italics mine.)

Caroline Estes also cautions that consensus “allows each person complete power over the group.”

When someone blocks, she adds, “they should also examine themselves closely to assure that they are not withholding consensus out of self-interest, bias, vengeance, or any other such feeling.” (Communities Directory, Fellowship for Intentional Community, 1991.)

You can see the effects of individual power over the group when committee members have worked long, hard hours on a proposal, then spent time in a series of whole-group meetings to modify and improve it, and most community members look forward to approving and implementing it. When the proposal is blocked by one or two people, most members don’t feel harmony, trust, or connection. They’re more likely to feel devastated. And when this kind of blocking happens often, it can result in distrust, low morale. and dwindling meeting attendance.

Many communities chose consensus-with-unanimity because — wanting to spread power widely — they value fairness, mutual respect, trust, compassion, and equality.

But fairness, mutual respect, trust, compassion, and equality are often not what they get. Political activists and people in the communities movement have come up with a name for what they get — “Tyranny of the Minority.”

“Tyranny of the Minority” Tim Hartnett points out more consequences of “Tyranny of the Minority.” I’ve seen each of these dynamics too.

* People able to endure more conflict may prevail, creating “decision by endurance.” Sometimes community members who can endure high levels of conflict have a greater chance of prevailing over those who can’t bear conflict for long. When this happens, it is sometimes the ability to tolerate conflict — rather than the ability to seek deeper understanding and to collaborate — that determines whether or not a proposal is passed. “More obstinate participants may more frequently get their way,” he says. * Disproportionate power to whoever supports the status quo. If most people in a community support a proposal to change one or more long-standing policies, they cannot do so until they convince everyone in the group. If one or two people don’t support the proposal, no matter that everyone else may want it, the original policies will remain. This gives exceptional power to anyone who doesn’t want the community to change. * The community may stagnate, unable to evolve. For this reason there may be little chance of revising outdated agreements. Thus whatever the group put in place in its early days — the status quo — may remain in effect for years beyond its actual effectiveness for the group. * Power struggles may drive out some of the group’s most responsible, effective members. When people with high levels of initiative and leadership make proposals in a community they often expect and require a timely response. If there are underlying values differences in the community, or people block for personal reasons or as subconscious bids for attention, the high-initiative people tend to stop going to meetings. They don’t have the patience to spend time processing other members’ anxieties or emotions.

When this happens repeatedly they are often too discouraged and frustrated to stay in the community, and so leave.

Usually it is the most responsible and effective members — the community’s natural leaders — who leave first.

When Using Consensus Is Inappropriate . . .

Most community-based consensus trainers advise groups not to use consensus unless they meet the specific requirements for it. In my experience, relatively few intentional communities actually meet these requirements (or know they exist). “(Consensus is) not appropriate for all situations,” cautions community-based consensus trainer Tree Bressen on her website. It works best “for groups that have a shared purpose, explicit values, some level of trust and openness to each other, and enough time to work with material in depth,” she says. (www.treegroup.info) Caroline Estes teaches that using consensus requires a community to have a shared common purpose, equal access to power, and training in how to use consensus properly.

Tim Hartnett is even more specific, noting that the smaller and more homogeneous the group, the easier it is to reach agreement when using consensus-with-unanimity. “Participants must trust each other and value their relationships highly,” he writes. They “must be trained to participate responsibly . . . must put the best interests of the group before their own.” And, he adds, to keep their relationships open, clear, and healthy they must a lot of time processing emotions in the group. And . . . as we’ve seen, not everyone enjoys doing this.

“Granted, only a small proportion of groups have the necessary conditions to effectively use . . . consensus,” write the authors of Building United Judgment (Fellowship for Intentional Community, 1999).

“Such groups are small, cohesive, and cooperative. . . . If attempted under the wrong circumstances or without a good understanding of the technique,” the authors add, “the consensus process can result in confusion, disruption, or unrest in a group.”

Using It Anyway Why would a community use consensus-with-unanimity if they aren’t small, cohesive, and cooperative or don’t have a shared purpose, explicit values, some level of trust and openness to each other?

Or they don’t agree on what form of consensus they’re using and haven’t been trained in how to use it, or some have been trained and others haven’t? (Only a handful of communities I’ve seen require new incoming members to get adequate consensus training before they have the right to block proposals).

Nevertheless — no matter how often consensus books and trainers have cautioned against it — in recent decades many communities have chosen consensus-with-unanimity even though they don’t qualify to use it. They chose it, apparently, because they weren’t aware of its requirements. Or because they thought their only other choice was majority-rule voting, and the claims for consensus-with-unanimity appealed to their aspirations for fairness, equality, and a better world.

Or . . . because they weren’t aware of the more recent consensus modifications and other new alternatives.

Consensus Modifications Many consensus trainers no longer advocate consensus-with-unanimity and suggest newer methods instead.1 1. Supermajority vote as a fallback if consensus cannot be reached at first. Consensus has two parts. First is the process — an agenda and proposals, a meeting facilitator, the intention to hear from everyone, and people asking clarifying questions, expressing concerns, and discussing, modifying, and improving the proposal.

The second part of consensus, the decision rule, occurs when the proposal is decided. The decision rule is the percentage of agreement needed to pass a proposal. “Supermajority” means a percentage higher than 51%. The percentages used in supermajority voting typically range from 90% to 65% and anything inbetween.

A community can use supermajority voting as the next step after a proposal is blocked. Many cohousing communities in North American have a supermajority voting fallback if they don’t reach consensus.

2. Using a supermajority vote instead of testing for consensus. When it’s time to make the decision the facilitator doesn’t ask if anyone will stand aside or block; instead the group simply votes. Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina does this.

3. Blockers and proposal advocates co-create a new proposal. When it’s time to decide, the group first tries for consensus. If there are one or more blocks, those who’ve blocked and one or two people who support the proposal hold a series of solution-oriented meetings to create a new proposal that addresses the same issues as the first proposal. They must do this within a certain time period, such as two or three weeks or months. If they create a new proposal it comes to the next meeting. If they don’t create a new proposal the original proposal comes back to the next meeting for a supermajority vote.

4. Criteria for a Valid Block. The community has both an agreed-upon criteria for what constitutes a valid block (sometimes called a “legitimate block” or a “principled block”) and a way to test blocks against this criteria. (I don’t recommend this method for reasons noted below, but describe it since it’s sometimes mentioned in consensus resources.)

Some consensus trainers suggest the following criteria for a valid block: (1) The proposal could harm the community in a specific way, such as legally, financially, or in terms of its physical safety or its reputation, and the blocking person can show why. (2) Or the proposal violates the values or mission and purpose of the community, and the person can show why.

One way to test a block against this criteria is for the facilitator to go around the group several times asking each person in turn whether or not they think the block meets the community’s criteria for validity, and why. After two or three rounds of hearing everyone’s opinions, they vote, with a supermajority decision rule of, say, 85%. In this case, if 85% or more considered the block to be valid, it would be declared valid and the proposal wouldn’t pass. But if 84% or fewer people considered the block valid, that wouldn't be enough for it to be valid. The block would be declared invalid and the proposal would pass.

Some communities test a block by requiring the blocking person to convince at least one other person in the meeting (other than their spouse or partner) that the block is valid. If at least one other person is convinced, the block is declared valid and the proposal does not pass.

Another method for testing a block is to ask the community’s steering committee to decide whether or not the block is valid, which they do in the next steering committee meeting.

Although testing for a block’s validity may seem reasonable (and Dancing Rabbit uses it and likes it), I dislike this method because it can sometimes introduce more conflict. People can argue about what does or doesn’t constitute harm to the community or how the proposal does or does not violate its values or its mission and purpose.

For example, people with different levels of tolerance for risk will have completely different ideas of what is meant by “harming the community.” Consensus trainer Tree Bressen suggests it is legitimate to block a proposal if passing it would pose a grave danger to the community, but not if it would only create risk. Especially cautious, risk-averse members could see a proposal as “posing grave danger” whereas others could see the same proposal as merely offering an acceptable risk, and vice-versa.

Confusion and conflict can also occur when trying to determine how a proposal might violate a community’s values or its purpose and mission statement.

The idea to have criteria for a valid block was originally created for activist groups with a single, specific, clearly defined mission, such as political or environmental activist groups. Let’s say, for example, an anti-war/peace activist group committed to nonviolence was considering a proposal to create a dramatic media event where they would throw chicken blood on politicians who wanted a war. It would be reasonable — and necessary — for one or more people to block, because this proposal clearly violates their value of nonviolence and mission as advocates of peace.

But unlike activist organizations, intentional communities are complex, multi-faceted organizations that provide many tangible and intangible benefits which fulfill many needs, and thus the group will have many different purposes. These can include community members, housing, roads, parking, a community building, shared ownership of land and equipment, a place to live and express one's values and enjoy a sense of community, a place to raise children and to grow old safely, as well as a place with policies for finances, labor contributions, land use, membership, promotions, conflict resolution, and of course governance and decision-making. Rural communities are also places to grow and raise food and create cottage industries. Communities with an educational mission are also places to offer tours, classes, and workshops.

There is so much room for interpretation of the values and purposes of entities as complex and multi-dimensional as this that some community members could argue a proposal violates their mission while others could equally argue it fulfills it. Especially if — as is often the case — the community’s mission statement was so vague, idealistic, and theoretical that people could project onto it anything they want, like the community where some thought they were supporting agriculture, or stopping agriculture, or doing neither but processing emotions in meetings instead!

I believe that trying to use criteria to assess a block’s validity in an intentional community can be too murky to determine easily and the group can end up with even more confusion, frustration, and arguments than they might have had in the first place.

Two decision-making methods, the N St. Consensus Method and Sociocracy’s Consent DecisionMaking, bypass all this.

The N St. Consensus Method simply requires those who blocked a proposal and some who supported it to cooperate enough to create a new proposal. Thus people who’ve blocked get several opportunities to contribute to a solution, and if they don’t, the community is not stopped but moves forward anyway.

Sociocracy’s Consent Decision-Making requires that when there are objections to a proposal (and objections are not blocks and serve a different purpose), people resolve the objections, which can include modifying the proposal.

1 Two older methods are consensus-minus one, in which it takes to people to block a proposal, and consensusminus-two, in which it takes three people to block a proposal. However, I don’t recommend either of these because they can lead to many of the same problems that occur when using consensus-with-unanimity. !

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Sociocracy – “Effective, Efficient, and Fun” ‘Sociocracy” means “governance by peers or colleagues.” It is an increasingly popular governance and decision-making method based on the values of transparency, equivalency, and effectiveness. When a community uses it correctly and uses all seven parts, it tends to experience more high-energy, effective meetings than when they used consensus.

“We’ve made more decisions in the past two months than we have in the past two years!” —Davis Hawkowl, Pioneer Valley Cohousing, Amherst, Massachusetts fun!”

“A visitor said she’d never seen a community meeting be so effective, efficient, and —Hope Horton, Hart’s Mill Ecovillage, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

“I would never have joined the community if we didn’t use Sociocracy! It’s our saving grace.” —Kreel Hutchison, Baja BioSana Ecovillage, La Paz, Mexico “We have better follow-up to our decisions, and information flows better. Our meetings are faster and lighter and have a rhythm that feels satisfying. And at the end of our last meeting, we started dancing for joy!” —Anamaria Aristizabal, Aldeafeliz Ecovillage, Colombia Pioneer Valley Cohousing Assesses Sociocracy after 18 Months. This survey was conducted to see if Pioneer Valley members liked Sociocracy and wanted to keep it. Previously, the same relatively few members did almost all the administrative work. But after implementing Sociocracy far more members contributed labor and became involved in community governance. More people took on leadership roles, including newer members who had not participated in community governance before. An overwhelming majority reported in the survey that they were ”highly satisfied” with Sociocracy.

In 2014 Baja BioSana Ecovillage in Mexico began a two-year trial period; they like it and will keep it too. In August, 2015 Windsong Cohousing in Canada started an 18-month trial period with Sociocracy.

The seven parts of Sociocracy. Gerard Endenburg, a Dutch electrical engineer, inventor, and cybernetics expert, designed Sociocracy in the 1970s by to help his company, Endenburg Elektrotechniek, function more harmoniously. It is sometimes called “Dynamic Governance” in the U.S. It is not a modification of consensus.

Sociocracy has many parts, but in my opinion, the following seven parts are the minimum needed to provide checks and balances against potential abuses of power. They work together synergistically, each mutually the others. These are four meeting processes — (1) proposal-forming, (2) consent decision-making, (3) selecting people for roles/elections, and (4) role-improvement feedback — (5) a governance structure of “double-linked” circles, (6) clear aims or objectives for each circle, and (7) “plan/implement/evaluate” feedback loops built into every proposal.

Double-linked circles. Semi-autonomous, self-organized circles (committees), organize work tasks, both administrative and physical labor. Each circle provides a specific, concrete function for the community re its ongoing work tasks; for example, a Membership Circle, Finance Circle, Land Use Circle, and so on. Most circles are relatively small, with perhaps four to eight members.

The General Circle creates each main functional circle — determining its area of responsibility, aims (objectives), and budgets. The General Circle provides longer-term planning for the whole community — coordinating and overseeing the work of the functional circles — very much like whole-community business meetings, however, General Circles usually have fewer members, perhaps eight to ten people. The

!

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! community will probably also hold whole-community meetings several times a year.

“Double links” are two people who are each members of two different circles, and who convey information between the two circles. This ensures a direct, two-way flow of information between the General Circle and each functional circle, and helps all the various work areas of the community function smoothly and synergistically in relation with one another and not work at cross-purposes.

Each functional can create more focused and specific functional circles if needed. For example, a Promotions Circle could create separate Website and Newsletter circles to accomplish these more specific promotions tasks. Again, there are double-links between these circles. These smaller, more specific functional circles may have just a few members, and sometimes, only one person.

Each circle uses consent decision-making and the other three meeting processes noted above.

Domain and aims. Aims (objectives) are what the circle produces or provides for the community. A Finance Circle, for example, with the domain of financial management for the community, would have the aims of providing financial services. Specifically this could include paying the community’s taxes and other annual fees like utility bills, insurance premiums, and so on, and invoicing and collecting dues and fees from members. A Promotions Circle would have the domain of community promotions and advertising, and would have the aims of providing promotions and advertising services for the community in order to inform and inspire potential visitors, neighbors, and the general public about its mission and activities. Specifically the Promotions Circle could do this by creating and managing its website, blog, online newsletter, brochures, tours for visitors, and so on.

Aims are not goals, which have a beginning and end. Rather, aims are ongoing and continuous.

Aims are crucial because when circle members make proposals, object to proposals, and resolve objections to proposals, they do so based on how the proposal may or may not support their circle’s aims.

Plan/implement/evaluate feedback loops. Engineers and inventors use feedback loops to create and test their ideas. First is a design or plan. Then a prototype is made to try out the design — the implementation. The prototype is measured and evaluated to learn how it works in real-life circumstances — the evaluation.

Feedback loops are built into Sociocracy too, because the wording of every proposal includes criteria for how it will be measured and evaluated for effectiveness after it is implemented, and dates of upcoming meetings when these evaluations will occur. Criteria for measuring proposals can include “how much” and “how many” questions, while criteria for evaluation are more subjective, and might include questions such “Do we like it?” “Is it working well?” “What do community members say about it?” and so on.

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After each evaluation circle members can keep the implemented proposal as it is or change it as needed or even dismantle it (if possible). So when circle members are creating or considering a proposal, they know that, depending on the proposal, they may later be able to keep it, change it, or throw it out. Thus no proposal or decision has to be perfect, but only “good enough for now” and “safe enough to try.” This flexibility reduces the fear of making a mistake or not creating an “ideal” proposal. Because this takes the pressure off people to “get it right,” meetings tend to be much more relaxed than when using consensus, since in consensus it is so difficult to change a decision once it’s been agreed on.

Consent decision-making. This meeting process includes going round the circle to each person, called a “round,” with a round for consenting to or objecting to the proposal. This is followed by resolving objections by modifying the proposal then conducting another consent round and alternating these steps until there are no more objections — which means the circle has consented to the latest modification of the proposal.

As noted above, the checks and balances provided by these seven parts of Sociocracy prevent power abuses in decision-making. When consent decision-making is practiced correctly, no member of a circle can stop their circle from approving a proposal because it violates their own personal values or lifestyle choices.

Objections to proposals are part of consent decision-making. They are desirable and indicate a need to modify the proposal before continuing. There is no blocking, “personal blocking,” or “threatening to block.”

Each of the other three meeting processes are based on consent decision-making.

Proposal-forming. Circle members draft one or more proposals about an issue that relates to the circle’s area of responsibility and aims.

Selecting people for roles (elections). Circle members choose people for roles in their circle, and their choices are based on the specific tasks and requirements for each role.

Role-improvement feedback. Circle members give feedback to other circle members relative to their fulfilling the specific tasks and requirements of the role.

Values of equivalence, transparency, and effectiveness.* Equivalence — circle members have an equivalent voice in decisions in their circle. * Transparency — policy decisions are known to everyone through the double-links. * Effectiveness — when practiced properly, Sociocracy tends to take less time and help people accomplish their goals more easily than with other methods.

How Sociocracy is best learned and implemented successfully. The positive responses in communities and member-led groups using Sociocracy seem to occur only under certain circumstances: (1) The group understands the need for ongoing training or periodic reviews, such as with an ongoing Sociocracy study group or in-house coach, or consultations with a Sociocracy trainer.

(2) Most group members learn Sociocracy (and those who don’t nevertheless agree to support it).

(3) The group uses all or mostly all of its parts.

Sociocracy tends to not to work well when people understand it partially, some understand it and others don’t, or the group uses just a few of its parts. Or — the worst — if the community creates a hybrid of Sociocracy and consensus, which tends to not work well at all and annoys everyone.

!

Feel free to copy & distribute this handout free of charge as long as you include this credit line & info • DianaLeafeChristian.org • EcovillageNews.org •Diana@ic.org • 828-669-9702!

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A Milpa Lifeway: A Fledgling Handout For Re-growing An Ecstatic Bioregional Culture of Self-Reliant Living In the Midst of Climate Chaos Milpa Farming Series, Earthaven Ecovillage, April --> November 2015 Author: Zev Friedman Contact: zevkudzu@gmail.com, 828.279.2870 www.livingsystemsdesign.net www.permacultureinaction.com www.schoolofintegratedliving.com May this writing sprout and take root in your heart This stewpot full of words contains lots of practical information on growing nutritionally balanced food, medicines, fiber and so on as part of a truly sustainable, integrated, multi-generational horticultural system involving annual and perennial plants, animals and fungi. It also contains speculation and the current status of multi-year, half-cooked experiments that I'm in the middle of (but which I believe still provide alot of insight to share). When I remember to, I have tried to indicate when something is based on my own confident experience, the stories of others, or books, so you can make your own choices on how to receive those ideas. Of course when it comes down to it, even the most experienced farmers are frequently improvising because there are always new combinations of variables in each site, community and season.

But what good farmers and permaculturists and earthskillers and naturalists have in common, perhaps what is the most meaningful definition of indigenosity, is that they don't get fundamentalist about any practice and they know how to pay attention and adapt, in order to survive but also in order to take care of the larger living earth.

As we emphasize in permaculture classes, "Permaculture is not a collection of techniques like rainwater cisterns, biochar composting and forest gardening. Permaculture is a way of thinking." Someone who learns to use all their senses to carefully observe nature and people before making judgements, use intuition and subtle sensing instead of reductionist thought to make choices and guide relationships, articulate and adhere to goals and priorities, and pragmatically mimic the elegant and effective patterns found in natural ecosystems and in organisms, this person is almost indigenous. When this approach transforms that person into a hopelessly lovestruck human who wants more than anything else to serve the village and serve the bigger story of life as visible in the body of the earth around them, then I think that person is indigenous.

So to echo that theme, the deepest purpose of this document is not to attempt to somehow teach you every possible variation on how to grow or cook milpa or ripen a group of people into a culture. What it is attempting to do is provide you with enough details to get started and have some chance of "success" or at least failing on a small enough scale to not despair, and to start pointing your attention to the vast, intricate beauty and the type of grand possibilities that lie within this type of farming and living, in hopes that you then employ your own imagination and love to layer on your own practices and ideas, which you then please report back to the rest of us!

And speaking of reporting back to us, I implore you to please adopt the practice of tracing the lineage of knowledge as you distribute it in the world. What the academic world calls "citing sources" is often an egodriven practice that is about people's pride and ability to sell themselves to industry. The indigenous storyteller on the other hand usually wants to speak the lineage of a story or way of doing things because the longer that lineage is, the longer it has survived which to the indigenous way of thinking means it's more valuable and dense with wisdom (and more interesting). So from that perspective my idea of "honeycomb" milpa, explored below, is only a fledgling, unproven idea (about 5 years old), as compared to the concept of a milpa in general 1

which is thousands of years old, but if you each try honeycomb milpa and think it's a good idea and share the idea and speak its lineage, then over time it will take on a richer story.

How Farming Isn't Necessarily Evil In the big picture, maybe annual crops are the comfort of refugees, of those dwelling off the debris at the tattered edges left by the last pass of the constantly starving monster of empire, those who don't have the privilege to stay in one place long enough to expect to eat from pecan trees or olive trees or vineyards or silvapastures. Unlike the deep place-based story of those who can live in one place for many generations, harvesting olives or acorns or chestnuts or hazelnuts from the same root systems as the great-grandparents did, these opportunistic annual crops let us plant in a different place each year- we can be one step short of nomads.

Also let's face it, some of these foods are ecstatically wonderful foods. A rich dark bean and huitlacoche stew with smoky chile and corncob ash salt, cooked in pig fat or bear fat or butter or fresh-pressed sunflower oil, wrapped in fragrant, toasty fresh tortillas with tangy char-speckled tomatillo salsa and tender amaranth greens piled high on the side, a thick slab of sweet and complex candyroaster squash with pumpkin seed oil and drizzled honey for dessert- this meal, cooked in clay pots on a fire while we laugh and sing and tell stories, reminds me of why I aspire to be human. Planting the seeds in a pack of singing people in the spring, telling stories and carrying rituals that teach us how to live by mimicking the plants, carefully parenting these seedlings and watching in awe as they grow to dwarf us in the summer, now members of a plant village in a way that we wistfully contribute to but never belong to until we become soil ourselves, this cycle has many lifetimes of spiritual lessons to offer and deep nourishment to provide for all the species involved in the collaborative ecosystem that agriculture can be at its best.

But at first glance, falling in love with annual crops is a kind of adolescent pleasure, something that feels so good, yet all the feedback is telling us that it can't last. Permaculture is well known for its focus on tree crops and small animals for food production, rather than annual crops and large animals. In many regions of the world, tree crops and small animals have essential advantages over annual crops, and they end up accumulating rather than eroding topsoil, while annual farming usually degrades the land and ultimately leaves it uninhabitable. Read Jared Diamond's book Collapse if you want to review the historical evidence of how agriculture divorced from a cultural focus on ecology has led to deforestation, social collapse and violence over and over again in the past five thousand years.

However, this article describes a form of annual cropping that is very productive, truly sustainable, and totally integrated with other long-term regenerative forest practices. In central America, this style of farming is called by the Nahuatl word “milpa”, which literally means “field”, but in actuality it is not just a field but a sophisticated technique for growing staple corn (dent, flint, parching, flour and popcorn as well as a few unique regional types), storage squash, dry beans, sunflowers, Cleomes, tomatillos, sweet potatoes, potatoes, chiles, cotton, tobacco, quelites (mixed feral pot greens such as amaranth and lamb's quarter), chia, and other annual crops in an inter-planted agro-ecology that allows them to benefit from each other and avoid the soil depleting and mono-cropping pitfalls of modern agriculture.

The “Three Sisters” cropping system is a simplified version of milpa that has been popularized by the U.S. organic farming movement, based on the common emphasis on corn, beans and squash in many native cultures.

Not all corn growing people have grown both beans and squash, cultural allegiance to particular species have changed over time, and many other crops were mixed in depending on endemic regional food species such as sunchoke and sumpweed. The basic idea though is that corn provides a living trellis for the beans to grow their vines up and enough shade to allow the squash plants to establish themselves early in the season; beans fix nitrogen into the soil for the benefit of the corn this year and mostly in future years. Squash spreads its large vines and leaves out over the soil surface, minimizing weed pressure, keeping the soil moist for the corn and beans and perhaps discouraging herbivores by the action of rough squash leaves on the tender noses of bunnies 2

or deer. In addition, the yields from these plants when processed correctly provide a storable, complete nutritional profile of proteins, carbohydrates, most B vitamins and some fats.

This core technique, adapted in many ways from place to place, allows us to grow large quantities of high quality, storable foods for the winter, and it allows us to do it with less industrial machinery (or none) and less offsite inputs, all by imitating natural ecosystem patterns.

The “milpa” system prevalent in Mexico, central America, and parts of south America-- and indeed a related version which the Tsalagi/Cherokee right here in the southern Appalachians developed— uses more species of annuals, as well as a cyclical relationship with forested land via Fire as a sacred intermediary, to achieve even better crop yields and a remarkable increase in topsoil quantity and quality over multiple human generations.

Essentially, the milpa system is a system of “managed disturbances in a forest agriculture system”. “Slash and burn” agriculture, where sections of forest are cut with chainsaws and heavy machinery and burned in large, high-oxygen burns that leave only ashes for a short-term burst of fertility but at the cost of long-term soil depletion, is rightfully ridiculed by the U.S. environmental movement. Slash-and-burn is the ignorant little brother of the milpa system: an example of the most destructive aspects remembered while the life-giving story and full cycle (which require a long-term tribal memory, subtle observation of ecologies and generous imagination) is forgotten. This pattern of life-sustaining culture rapidly transformed into desperate, destructive behavior by genocide and deliberate cultural erosion is not unique to America's First People, but has also occurred in most groups of indigenous Europeans, Asians, Australians and Africans, and is a predictable result when the imperial syndrome destroys an intact culture and forces the survivors of that culture into long-term emergency mode where elders, youth initiations and ritual and mythological life can't be maintained in the grief-stricken survival panic.

In the traditional milpa system common before steel tools came along and allowed people to cut and burn large swathes of trees, a family establishes a multi-generational, long-term rotation system of 8-10 sites, a system that cycled over 70-100 years in a forested region. They cleared one spot through controlled burning (actually not technically a burn, but a smothered burn, or pyrolysis, which creates more charcoal than ashes; unlike ashes, charcoal retains nitrogen and phosphorus from the wood and makes it available to plants, and the microcrystalline structure of charcoal persists in the soil, acting as a coral reef for soil micro-organisms, retaining water and water soluble nutrients, building a friable texture and increasing microbial diversity, and sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere for thousands of years- see “Biochar” for more on the importance of charcoal as a soil amendment).

The “family” (usually more like a multi-generational tribe of 20-100 people) then farmed that site for 7-10 years using the sophisticated inter-planting and crop rotation milpa methods described further down (of which the commonly known Three Sisters, corn, beans and squash are a remnant). These practices included incorporation of pottery shards, crushed animal bones and composted human feces into the soil. When the elders determined it was time, they moved on to the next site and pyrolicized there. Meanwhile, the previous site of course began to naturally return to forest. But, they didn’t let it return without guidance. As tree seedlings came up, they selected for known food, medicine and otherwise useful trees, shrubs and forest plants by pruning out trees, popping in seeds and nuts from desired species, and sometimes maintaining swale-like pathways for water retention.

They then guided this succession process for decades, through different species profiles yielding different products, until eventually the cycle came back to that site, they pyrolicized it again and this time the soil was further improved by the addition of yet more charcoal. In this way, soil was gradually and steadily improved over the generations, allowing them to grow preferred annual foods without exhausting nutrients, all while using the natural growth of forests to meet the bulk of daily needs and create biomass for soil building. As one 3

demonstration of the sophisticated understanding of forest and trees underpinning these practices, in one study described in the spring ’09 Permaculture Activist magazine, Guatemalan milpa farmers made finer distinctions between tree species than European botanists did.

Primary permaculture principles informing milpa 1) Observe and interact 2) Work with succession (ecological and cultural!)

3) Use and value diversity 4) Use edges and value the marginal 5) Creatively use and respond to change, and accept feedback 6) Stack and pack

Practical implementation of milpa The actual crops in milpa are all extremely sun-loving crops that require low watering in "regular conditions" (non-drought, or about 1" rain/week in the southeast U.S.) and cover soil aggressively once they are established, reducing weeding. Indigenous people who use the milpa system rarely grow salad or cooking greens, as all of these come from the forest or as feral plants in the milpa. Instead, they grow the following crops: corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, tomatillos, peppers, sweet potatoes, sunflowers, tobacco, cleomes, and now some grow okra (from Africa), Chenopodium spp. (spinach, lamb’s quarter etc.) as a cereal, amaranth species for greens and seeds, yacon tubers, cotton, and other regionally appropriate crops. I would add groundnuts to this list for our region.

Carefully examined, this array of species is a breath-takingly elegant example of a natural pioneer ecosystem analogue. There are plants that fill most niches that would be filled in a non-anthropomorphic situation where a fire took down a section of forest. Beans and groundnuts fix nitrogen into the soil, and vine around onto anything vertical. Corn is a rapidly growing, strong-stalked grass plant which draws heavily on the soil and generates a huge amount of biomass. Squash vines around mostly on the ground in the interior of the milpa, spreading their broad leaves to prevent competition, thereby holding down weeds and savoring the part-shade under the tall plants. Tomatoes, peppers, tobacco and okra fill a similar nutritional niche to corn, spacing the corn out and breaking up pest populations, as well as bringing in diverse pollinators. Potatoes thrive in piles of loose organic matter (pulled weeds, dead leaves, poor soils) and break it down into soil that can be used for heavier feeders next cycle. Sunflowers, Chenopodium, Amaranth and Cleomes are planted thickly on the edges, holding the boundary between outside and inside, conditioning soil for any expansion that might occur the following cycle, providing the thick bushy habitat for beneficial insect predators such as praying mantises, and attracting birds, who predate pest insects in the milpa and bring their life-giving, phosphorus rich feces. Sweet potatoes spread their vines out on the sunnier edges even past the sunflowers, punching down their roots to seek new territory and develop new tubers.

Growing Milpa in Mounds The physical format which the Cherokee used for the milpa was different than the raised beds or rows in conventional American annual garden spaces. It was based on “mounds” rather than beds. There were several reasons for this arrangement. Mounds of corn are spaced far from each other, thereby ensuring that the mounds of corn don’t compete with each other for light. The mounded soil gives all the plants access to larger quantities of looser soil and more nutrients than dense planting in rows would do. The mounds prevent water logging in areas like ours where there can sometimes be too much rainfall. By planting 6 mounds of corn/beans to every 1 4

mound of squash, with the squash mound centered in a hexagon of corn mounds, the squash vines evenly disburse through the corn mounds, adding their soil protective benefits evenly.

Disadvantages of growing milpa in mounds include: reduced horizontal area for growing, since spaces between mounds are essentially wasted space; increased edge for weed pressure due to the mound pattern; drying out of the mounds during drought; loss of soil and potential water storage during big rain events.

Growing Milpa in Rows Rows, on the other hand, increase growing space relative to mounds by filling the whole horizontal space with plants. They create access for machine planting and maintenance. The are easy to count, track and quantify. If done on contour on a hill, they can catch water during rain events via tractored trenches between rows. They increase the chances of good corn pollination rates.

On the other hand, a main disadvantage that I’ve noticed with rows is that the corn, tobacco or sunflower plants compete with each other for light. The fact that the rows are tightly parallel and stacked against one another causes the plants to grow tall and skinny in a constant search for light. Tall, skinny corn plants blow over more easily in the wind and are more susceptible to animals such as raccoons and skunks pulling them over to eat the ears. I’ve done a comparative study in which I grow the same corn in the same soil the same year using mounds and rows, and the rowed corn is taller and skinnier, with smaller ears and more blowover , while the mounded corn is shorter and thicker stalked, with larger, more abundant ears and less blowover.

In addition, rows don’t provide any opportunity for even distribution of poly-cropping benefits. A row of squash planted in between two rows of corn will put just as much energy into climbing all over each other as they will into covering the soil around corn plants. Also, the dense planting of rows provides an easier target for catastrophic pest damage, as insects can more easily hop from row to row and plant to plant than they can in mounds.

Honeycomb Milpa After growing milpa in mounds and contoured rows for years and trying to figure out how to get the best of both worlds, finally one day in an inspired moment while installing sheets of foundation wax into honey supers for my beehives, I hit on the idea of the honeycomb milpa.

In the honeycomb milpa, the soil is literally shaped into a honeycomb geometry. The cells of the honeycomb are about 5.5’ from one “face” of the cell to the opposite face. The edges of each cell are raised slightly by soil that is scooped out of the center of each cell, thereby creating a shallow depression which catches water.

In the interior of the milpa, corn and beans are grown on the ridges on the edges of the cells, while squash is grown inside the depression in a contoured crescent berm that is mounded up in the depression, bisecting the depression and thereby creating 2 spaces and causing water caught in the depression to be distributed even more evenly. I plant corn at 3” spacing and thin to 6-8”. I plant beans 2 weeks after the corn sprouts, and I ideally plant squash starts 1 week after the corn sprouts.

On the exterior of the milpa, I grow tobacco, cotton and Cleomes on the ridges of the south end of the milpa and sweet potatoes in the interior crescent mound. On the west and northern edges I grow sunflowers, yacon, and amaranth.

5

This idea is only about 7 years old, and I'm still definitely refining it, but it does seem that the benefits of honeycomb milpa are real. Because the rows of corn are not parallel, they don’t compete with each other for light. The depressions catch water and store it distributed throughout the milpa. The honeycomb milpa is beautiful to look at and can be very productive. A major advantage of honeycomb versus rows that I didn't anticipate at first is that when the corn is planted in a hexagon, the plants in each cell can be tied gently together in late summer into "tipis" when they're at full height, so the group of plants is stable, thereby preventing "lodging", or falling over of the plants due to loose, wet soil and/or strong wind. This single action can save your whole crop from animals and fungal rot.

It's also complex, and dependent on good timing of each action-push. For instance, if the squash don't get planted soon enough, the corn will get too tall too fast and stunt the squash, which will never spread out and suppress weeds, in which case weeds will become an issue. Or, if the beans are planted too soon (or are the wrong variety for the corn variety) they will grow too fast and overwhelm the corn, actually pulling it down (squash plants can do this too, which is a good reason to prune squash vine tips once or twice- which also causes the squash plant to put more energy into fruit and less into rampant vegetation). Or, if you are growing a weak-stalked or tall corn variety and it's a windy, wet year and you don't tie the corn plants in each honeycomb cell together at the top to stabilize them, many of them will blow over and you will have a vast, confusing tangle of rotting corn and bean plants.

Each year we make little changes based on our accumulating experience, such as adding contoured swalepathways a couple years ago to allow better access (we had not pathways before, which was fine once the squash spread out, as long as no watering was necessary, but then we had a big drought and getting into the interior to water was very difficult), or deciding not to plant squash in the middle of every honeycomb cell.

6

image credit: Dr. Anabel Ford Timing is everything: from charcoal to spring jump to summer love to winter cover Understanding the timing of each action in the milpa is essential to success. This means not the mathematical timing (plant corn on the 1st of June, or beans 2 weeks after corn) which is pretty arbitrary since plants grow in response to conditions, not counting of days, but the biological sequence (plant beans when the corn is hand high, tie corn up when tasseling and so on).

1) September-November- site selection, determine scale of growing, source animal manure, make or source charcoal availability, establish winter cover-crops, ascertain fencing needs, assess or acquire seeds, prelim design layout and shape paths and beds, consider strategies for managing weedy edges and weeds in general depending on site history, plan associated animal rotations through following spring.

2) Winter- observe water flow onsite, re-seed cover crop where necessary, make char and biochar and add urine/animal manure to biochar, identify biodynamic action date options throughout year using calendar, gather compost and seeds and tools; harvest dry kudzu vines for stropharia innoculation 3) March- broadcast charged biochar over winter covercrop 7

4) Mid-April-mid May- fell and rake covercrop (save patches for seed-saving and/or food saving), finesse path and beds edges, spread and lightly fork in biochar; harvest poplar and basswood for retting for fiber for tying corn up later- big push 5) Mid May-early June- hoe weeds then 3-5 days later plant corn, squash, sunflowers- big push 6) Immediately after planting- defend corn sprouts from corvids via plastic owls and hawks, real owls enticed through owl houses, decoy cereal seeds sprinkled elsewhere, scare crows, flashy tape ("bluejay disco tape), hanging CD's, trained Mountain Curr dogs, camping in tree house or tarped clearing in middle or on edge of milpa and shooting with pellet guns or blowguns etc.- big push 7) 2-3 weeks later (when corn is 1 hand high or a little higher and has ostensibly survived birds)- hoe weeds, corn hilling, bean planting, plant tobacco, cleomes, yacon, cotton, sweet potato starts; broadcast amaranth and molokhia on sunny edges if these plants are not present already- big community push 8) Late June/early July- 1st hoeing, train beans, add stropharia innoculated mulch (ex: dry kudzu vines); carefully think through appropriate storage facilities for various yields and create infrastructure if you don't already have it (see below) 9) Late July/early August- 2nd hoeing if necessary, trim squash vine tips out of paths, train beans; release ducks into milpa and they can now roam freely in milpa until harvest time 10) late July/early August- tie corn plants together in honeycomb cells, tight enough to make tension not so tight to prevent sun access 11) When silking begins (August)- do any hand pollination necessary, innoculate huitlacoche, hand cut and remove undesirable seedy weeds; thin corn ears via Green corn harvest 12) Late August- begin animal defense strategies 13) September --> late October- harvest time (depending on varieties and planting time)- big community push 14) Late October --> November- have a big feast and eat the last of previous year’s milpa foods;; shell corn and beans for storage; remove organic matter, separating into 3 piles: corn stalks, vines, seedy weeds; do big char including seedy weeds, can do in pathways to beat back weed seed bank in paths; covercrop and begin again!

Milpa Planting and Management Zones 1) Main milpa pattern- different cell size depending on corn variety and height, squash in the middle of some but not all cells, sweet potatoes or buckwheat or american groundnut in middle of other cells; quelites on edges nearest gates 2) South edge of each bed- tobacco, cleomes, quelites, cotton, yacon 3) North edge- sunflowers 4) Squash spacing depending on variety and intensity of growth habit 5) covercrop seed-saving zone in milpa during warm season 6) variations with sweet potatoes, millet, yacon and so on 7) live fences on edge- black locust and mulberry pollarded living posts (pollarded at 8-10' height), live willow, sea buckthorn 8) poultry runs and inclusion in the milpa (use chickens in spring before planting, ducks once corn gets knee high, chickens when corn is full height) 9) stropharia and other fungi in the milpa (grow stropharia under shade trees on dry kudzu vines, japanese knotweed, covercrop rye straw etc, spread out as mulch under corn once corn gets chest high) 10) Shade trees in center and on NE and NW corners, with tree houses for perching at critical times with a blowgun or pellet gun to hunt squirrels, crows etc.

11) Comfrey/angelica/sochan/ elecampagne/strawberry/egyptian walking onion/red clover guild around edges 12) Tiny seed milpas near the house versus big milpa farther away within walking distance versus milpa that you have to drive to; different plant varieties suited to each type

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Biochar amendment and Milpa in the Big Picture of Succession and Permaculture Why is biochar such a big deal that everyone is obsessed with? First of all, let's define "biochar". Alot of people use the word biochar to refer to simple charcoal. I think the use of the term in that way is confusing since it is simply inserting the prefix "bio" but there is no distinction between that substance and "char" or "charcoal".

Instead, I use the word biochar to refer to charcoal that has been crushed or sifted down to optimal soil amendment particle size (dust to small marble size, it's actually good to have multiple particle sizes together) and then "charged" by mixing with active compost and/or soaking with urine for at least 4-8 weeks. This charging fills the charcoal's microscopic porous coral reef structure with diverse soil microbes and water soluble nutrients that lightly bond to the crystalline carbon structure of the charcoal, awaiting plant root tips to scavenge them from the soil. This charged substance I call biochar. In this way, biochar becomes a useful word that means something unique, instead of just a marketing term for the commercial organic farming industry. Then other hybrid terms like "biochar compost" (charged biochar mixed with a higher ratio of composted animal manure), "chickenchar" (charcoal charged via proximity to chicken manure, see below), "seedchar" (biochar mixed with diverse seeds of pioneer annual and perennial crops and broadcast over soil) and so on can be used to really refine our language and created a useful shared vocabulary.

Biochar has a deep basis in the cultural history (and current life) of American First Peoples who have farmed corn as a sacred way of life. The whole biochar craze began after researchers began "discovering" soils that they called terra pretas (dark earths) in the Amazon rain forest, which typically has sandy soils with low organic matter content because insects eat the leaves and debris before fungi can break them down into humates. These soils were created exactly by the kind of milpa cycle described here, where successive accumulations of charcoal, feces, pottery shards and other "waste" created permanently rich, nutrient and water retaining soils. So by making and charging charcoal we are mimicking that process, perhaps even more effectively than some indigenous farmers' methods.

And of course making charcoal from wood and burying it permanently in the ground is maybe the single most effective strategy for long-term carbon sequestration that we have available to us. James Lovelock, the climate scientist and author of the Gaia Hypothesis, has stated that burying lots of charcoal might be the only way to avoid the most catastrophic trajectory of climate change. Of course this is only true if the charcoal is produced from forests managed in sustainable ways that don't cause topsoil loss or require other giant carbon footprints to produce, transport or process materials.

It's important not to apply charcoal that hasn't been charged, as it can actually soak up nutrients from the soil the first year and stunt plants due to low available nitrogen. Even if you do so, then in year 2 or 3 the yields should increase again as the saturated charcoal starts to give back to the plants. I actually had this sequence happen to me one year because I didn't get it together to charge the char first and just applied. Sure enough, the corn was stunted that year, but the following year it flourished and gave high grain yield.

As I've evolved in my personal and homestead scale use of charcoal, I've found just how broadly useful a substance it is, and that I can stack functions by letting it perform one or more cascading functions in the system which then leave it charged and ready to go as a planting medium. For instance, I learned in the past year from an excellent article entitled "55 Uses For Charcoal" by the Ithaka Institute that charcoal is actually an amazing insulative material because of all its tiny isolated air pockets (think fiberglass insulation, straw, styrofoam or felt), and that its usually alkaline pH is mold resistant (mold requires an acidic pH to thrive). They asserted that for this reason it could be used for food storage. So this past winter I packed winter squash into charcoal in a metal bin in an un-insulated crawl space. We had an extremely cold winter with temperatures below ) 0 degrees Fahrenheit and the squash are fine; moreover, the squash stored in the warmer house not buried in charcoal had mold problems but the ones in the char bin have no mold (by the way, the Ithaka Institute is also experimenting with charcoal as insulative wall infill material in buildings and as a mold resistant plaster on interior building 9

walls). After that initial use, as I'm using up the squash, I'm putting crushed charcoal from that char bin into a yogurt container with holes punched in the lid in the fridge, where it serves a second function of reducing humidity and ethylene levels in the fridge atmosphere, making food last longer. After a couple months of that application, I take out that char and put it in a 2-gallon bucket in the composting toilet outhouse to be used on top of deposits, about 1 cup per poop directly on top of the poop, with some sawdust on top of that. Charcoal is notorious for cutting odors because those odors are sulfur and nitrogen compounds (plant nutrients) which the char rapidly and effectively absorbs. Then when our composting toilet bucket is emptied into the composting bin, it's pre-innoculated with charcoal, which we're learning changes the ecology and food web of the compost bin and reduces smell, and by the time the compost batch is done the finished product is charged biochar compost. That's 4 cascading uses of the same charcoal before it even goes in the ground as biochar!

Another way I use char is by digging contoured urine infiltration trenches on the uphill edges of perennial and forest garden patches and filling them with charcoal (this could be cascaded charcoal as described above). The trenches are about 6" wide and 12" deep. I pee in a jar in my living space and every morning have a nice little ritual of walking out into the garden and pouring the pee onto the charcoal trench. The smell immediately goes away even on a hot summer day. Any urine that makes its way through the char without its nitrogen being absorbed soaks into the soil and percolates downhill towards the plant roots as nitrogen fertilizer for them.

Every 4-8 weeks I excavate this charged char (biochar) and use it in planting mixes or on top of freshly hoed beds. The act of digging out the biochar from this edge trench also serves to maintain the edge of the planting bed/path, where weeds tend to pop up and migrate into the bed from the path.

If I really get my timing down, I will have just weeded out an area of a bed that day, then I'll spread covercrop seed (buckwheat and cowpeas in the warm season, rye and winter peas and crimson clover in the cold season) on that freshly disturbed soil, then spread biochar over the top of the seeds where it acts to retain moisture and increase seed germination rates (without digging or even forking in the seeds or the biochar compost!) as well as increase soil temperature because of its dark sun-absorbing color (especially useful for germinating fall covercrops or marginally early summer covercrops). So between the previous 4 cascading uses in the homestead, then acting as seed germination enhancer, soil warmer and finally as long-term soil enhancer as it works its way deeper into the soil profile through layering, the charcoal is serving 7 cascading uses at different points in time. Add in a very beginning use of building a house with it, where it gets to sequester carbon and create a healthy indoor living environment for 50-500 years as part of the house, at which point the house falls apart or is torn down and can be used in the above sequence, and you've got a multi-generational sequence of 8 cascading uses. Back up our awareness into the making of the charcoal, when waste heat can be used to cook, heat water for domestic use or greenhouse heating, generate electricity and create salable co-products from the wood biochemistry, or where a primitive char can be wisely located based on previous observation to kill weed seeds and weed root systems and prepare an area physically for planting, and you have even more uses.

Just one more use to speak about with charcoal at this time is in integration with animals in your milpa (or other) system. Even with free ranged chickens or ducks or goats or cows or pigs used for managing succession, the animals usually spend some time concentrated in a shelter to protect them from weather and/or predators.

We use 30-50 chickens at a time, managed by a neighborhood chicken co-op of 10 adults, rotated through an 8 acre landscape with Premier electric fencing and a moveable chicken house on an old trailer frame, to scratch weedy areas back to bare soil in order to covercrop those areas and bring them back into managed succession farming (milpa). At night the chickens are trained to go into their house (a person has to close the door around sunset), which is also where they lay eggs in nesting boxes. This time in a concentrated location can be a major problem, creating bad smells, nutrient runoff and unhealthy animals, or it can be an opportunity where the irreplaceable resource of animal waste, which is nutrients that have been painstakingly accumulated and concentrated by the animals through their feeding and life cycle process, is harvested for use in feeding plants.

Charcoal is a major ally in the latter approach, for reasons described above. What I'm experimenting with is simply putting down a layer of charcoal on the floor of the chicken house where they roost at night. The 10

chickens scratch around and break the charcoal into smaller pieces for me. The poop falls on the char and when that layer of char is pretty much covered, I add another layer. Some research shows that having this bed of manure in their coop actually helps chicken immune systems and microbial health as long as it doesn't get out of hand. After 3 or 4 such layers, I scrape it all out and put it in a pile layered with straw or other high carbon, dry organic matter to compost. The charcoal captures the volatile nitrogen compounds from the manure, up to 80% of which will evaporate from a standard thermophylic compost pile, and thereby also reduces odor. Finally, according to the Ithaka Institute, a small amount of crushed charcoal (3-5%) directly added to feed can reduce parasite effects in poultry and increase the birds' health by increasing their ability to absorb nutrients from the food they eat. Then the manure comes out pre-innoculated with char! Similarly, in Belize, at least one farm is charring rice husks from rice they grow, then feeding those charred husks to pigs. The char cleans out pigs' digestive systems and yields pre-mixed pig manure biochar.

Once it begins to dawn on us how pivotal the role of crystalline carbon (charcoal) is in the matrix of biochemistry that we are part of, we quickly begin to wonder where we will get enough charcoal to do all the things we want to do with it. This is not a trivial question, as charcoal production (mostly for metallurgy and the autoclaving of lime for cement, not as a soil amendment) has been a main driver of deforestation, especially in central Africa, the middle East and western Europe, for about 5,000 years. In fact, it's likely that coppice forestry originated by accident from people doing their best to harvest enough wood for their needs from previously forested landscapes that had been over harvested. So instead of repeating the same mistakes over and over again, here are some ideas for generating charcoal renewably within an integrated succession farming system where we don't get to rotate our farming through a vast forested landscape without private property rights.

Coppice and pollard systems- coppicing is the phenomenon where a (usually deciduous) tree sprouts back from the cut or the ground after it is cut down. This natural survival mechanism probably originated as a way to outlive being eaten by a large herbivore. When we do it deliberately it's called coppice forestry, and it's a very old (at least 1,000 year) art in many places, most obviously in western Europe. Coppice sprouts are allowed to grow and thicken for 1-25 years depending on the desired end use and the species. When managed well, coppice creates pulses of wood, leaves, fruit, nuts and other yields that can be renewably harvested from the same root systems for centuries since coppicing actually prolongs the life cycle of the plant. In Britain for centuries there were "bodgers", coppice dwellers whose entire lifeway and economy was based on making buildings, furniture, charcoal, crafts, fences, foods, medicines, baskets and so on from coppice wood, sustaining themselves and selling those products to the town people. "Copses" (stands of coppice stumps planted at 6-10' spacing) can actually be more bio-diverse, with more types of habitat densely packed together, than more mature forests.

"Pollarding" is like coppicing but instead of cutting trees to within 12" of the ground, trees are cut at 6-15' height so they repeatedly sprout branches up high where browsing herbivores can't get to them; those branches are then cut in the summer to provide fodder for goats, sheep, cows and so on when the pasture production slows down in hot, dry summer weather. Both of these techniques create plentiful small diameter wood which for centuries has been charred down through a variety of char-making techniques. In the large milpa that I currently tend, we're creating a living fence around the milpa out of mulberry and black locust tree pollards spaced at 6'. The trunks are the fence posts for either a manufactured metal fencing material or a woven organic fencing material (wattle). The dense shading creating by the pollard branches will reduce maintenance along the fenceline, as sunny fencelines tend to demand much maintenance due to vining weeds whose roots become entangled at the base of the fencing material. These pollards will be cut back every 1-2 years to provide animal fodder, mulberry fruit production, black locust flower production, nitrogen release into the soil via the locust root dieback when pollard pruning occurs, and of course a renewable source of charcoal directly adjacent to the field. In general, whether using a pollard fence or some other technique, the low hanging fruit in terms of where to locate coppice and pollards is on existing edges. These edges are sunnier than in deep forest, they are usually accessible by road or path for ease of maintenance and harvesting of coppice yields, and we already put lots of energy into managing edges by mowing or trimming (if not, they soon cease to be edges and instead 11

become part of the forest as succession continues and pioneer tree species grow up), so why not have that maintenance energy be creating better yields? Only after you've worked most of your existing edges with coppice, pollard or some other strategy should you begin any additional forest clearing for coppice production.

In many successionally patchworked landscapes of America, there is enough existing edge space to get all of our firewood, charcoal and other coppice yields just from coppicing and pollarding on those edges, leaving interior forests intact or managed with other strategies.

Second renewable charcoal strategy: Applalachian Alnoculture?

This section is purely speculative at this time as I have no experience with the technique described (although this spring 2015 I did plant a small section with alders to begin a testing of this idea). The idea is based on an article on "Ligurian Alnoculture" that Dave Jacke published in the Permaculture Activist magazine spring 2012 issue based on his visit to the Liguria region of Italy and subsequent research. In this article he describes evidence of a historical (pre-industrial) integrated farming cycle involving alders (Alnus spp.), pastured animals and grain/vegetable production in a mid-term (10-15 year) cycle. In this system, Alder was planted at regular spacing of 10-20' and allowed to grow for 10-15 years, with animals grazing around the tree once it was beyond danger of herbivory, after which timespan the trees were cut down (coppiced). Because Alder is a highly effective nitrogen fixing genus, this cutting is assumed to release nitrogen into the soil from root tip decay corresponding to the cutting of the tree. Then annual crops were grown in that area until the alder coppice began to get tall enough to create prohibitive shade levels at which point the area returned to a silvopasture function for several years, until the trees were cut again and the cycle continued. Wood cut down was removed and used for furniture, building, crafting, firewood and presumably charcoal. This system seems to comprise a low diversity (low tree diversity that is), more quickly cycled version of the milpa successional farming technique, and could feasibly be achieved in a smaller scale landscape than the vast forested landscape with no private property boundaries that milpa farmers originally had to work with, since the tree cutting cycle is 10-15 years rather than 100-150 years. Combined with wise animal use for clearing planting areas, along with well-timed cover-cropping practices for weed control and for tight mineral and nutrient cycling, this could very well be an excellent model for integrated post-petroleum succession farming. According to Dave Jacke,"[...] other good candidates for Alder species are European gray alder (Alnus incana ssp.incana) or, in drier locations, Italian alder (Alnus cordata). European gray has more history as a fodder plant from what we can tell. The local species [in upstate NY] speckled (A. incana spp.rugosa) and smooth or mountain Alder (A. serrulata)." I had trouble finding diverse alder species for sale at bare-root prices, so I got what was available, which was Black Alder from Cold Stream Farm.

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