[Sdpg] Ecovillages & Intentional Communities Slide Show & Talk With Diana Leafe Christian Aug 19-30 LA, Ilydwild, Ojai, SB, SLO, Alameda, SF

Wed Aug 17 21:08:02 PDT 2005

SANTA BARBARA PERMACULTURE NETWORK
Presents:
Ecovillages & Intentional Communities
Slide Show & Talk
With Diana Leafe Christian
THUR Aug 25 7pm Santa Barbara Downtown Library 
(More Dates  and times listed below for  LA, Ilydwild,Ojai,SB,SLO,Alameda,SF )

        What works and what doesn't work in forming Intentional Communities
and
EcoVillages? Diana Leafe Christian, author of "Creating a Life Together,
Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities", will do a
lecture and slide show on Thursday, August 25, 7-9pm at the Santa Barbara
Downtown Public Library, Faulkner Gallery, about the process of forming these
kinds of new communities. Gleaned from dozens of successful communities in
North America, she shares the nuts and bolts of beginning one and how to avoid
fatal mistakes that cause these kind of communities to fail. Discussed will be
creating vision documents, decision-making and governance, buying and
financing
land, and the organic process of growing a community. 

An intentional community is a group of people who have chosen to live with or
near enough to each other to carry out their shared lifestyle or common
purpose
together.  Ecovillages are intentional communities that aspire to create a
more
humane and sustainable way of life.  Typically, an ecovillage builds
ecologically sustainable housing, grows much of it’s own food, recycles waste
products harmlessly and generates it’s own off-grid power.

        Diana Leafe Christian is the editor of Communities Magazine
(http://fic.ic.org/cmag/cmaglist.html), the Fellowship for Intentional
Community’s quarterly national publication about intentional communities in
North America, since 1993.  For the past six years she has led workshops on
the
practical steps to form intentional communities.  She has been interviewed by
NPR and the BBC about intentional communities.   Her articles on Ecovillages,
financial and legal aspects of communities, children in community and
communication and group process issues in community have appeared in
publications ranging from Mother Earth News to the Permaculture Activist, and
Canada’s Time Magazine. She presently lives in the Earthhaven Ecovillage in
North Carolina.

Public Talk Locations with Diana Leafe Christian
Donations $5- $10
FRI Aug 19 7:30 7:30 pm: Public talk and overview $15 LA Ecovillage 117 Bimini
Pl. LA 90004 Lois Arkin crsp at igc.org 213/738-1254 crsp at igc.org
Sat/Sun, Aug. 20-21, 2 day workshop: How to Start a Successful Urban
Ecovillage, 10 am - 6 pm, $150, LA Eco-Village, 117 Bimini Pl., Lois Arkin,
reservations required, crsp at igc.org

TUES Aug 23 ldyllwild , 7:30 pm Idyllwild Park Nature Center Auditorium, 25225
Hwy. 243, Idyllwild, CA 92549 "Scott Horton" <lasemillabesada at hotmail.com>
phone 951-659-5362

WED Aug 24 7pm Ojai Kent Hall Help of Ojai 111 W Santa Ana St, (Next to Ojai
City Hall) Turn off Hwy 150 onto Blanche St between Bank of America and Star
Marke sbpcnet at silcom.com 805-962-2571 $10
THUR Aug 25 7pm Santa Barbara Downtown Library sbpcnet at silcom.com 805-962-2571
$10 

FRI Aug 26 7pm San Luis Obispo Downtown Library Bob Banner hopedance at aol.com
1-866-749-7819,805 544 9663 $10

Monday Aug 29 7pm Alameda Point Collaborative 677 W. Ranger Ave. Alameda, CA
94501 Douglas Biggs <dbiggs at apcollaborative.org> www.apcollaborative.org
510.898.7849

TUES Aug 30 (Tentative) San Francisco Commonwealth Club 595 Market Street SF
(www.commonwealthclub.org) Eric Corey Freed <eric at organicarchitect.com> (415)
474-7777 

For Tour updates contact Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
sbpcnet at silcom.com,
805-962-2571,www.sbpermaculture.org
SPONSORS- Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, LA EcoVillage, LA Permaculture
Guild, Ojai Permaculture Guild, The Alameda Point Collaborative, ADSPR,
Organic
Architect, & Hopedance Media.

Additional Information about the book & author:
Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional
Communities, by Diana Leafe Christian, editor of Communities Magazine,
foreword
by Patch Adams. 2003 New Society Publishers, 272 pp.,

About the Author:
Diana Leafe Christian has been editor of Communities magazine, a quarterly
publication about intentional communities in North America, since 1993. She
has
been interviewed by NPR and the BBC about intentional communities and has
contributed a chapter on forming new communities to Creating Harmony (Gaia
Trust, 1999). Her articles on ecovillages, financial and legal aspects of
communities, children in community, and communication and group process issues
in community have appeared in publications ranging from Mother Earth News to
Communities magazine, the Communities Directory, and Canada's This Magazine.
Diana leads workshops for forming-community groups and educational centers
nationwide and at communities conferences, on the practical steps to create
ecovillages and intentional communities, including the land-purchase, zoning,
and legal stages of these projects.
She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina, one of the "successful 10
percent" communities she began researching for this book.

MORE ABOUT BOOK AND BOOK REVIEWS 
Creating a Life Together is an overview of the process of forming new
ecovillages and intentional communities, gleaned from founders of dozens of
successful communities in North America formed since the early '90s. This is
what they did, and what you can do, to create your community dream. It
attempts
to distill their hard experience into solid advice on getting started as a
group, creating vision documents, decision-making and governance, agreements
and policies, buying and financing land, communication and process, and
selecting people to join you. It's what works, what doesn't work, and how not
to reinvent the wheel. This information is not only for people forming new
communities - whether or not you already own your land. It can also be
valuable
for those of you thinking about joining community one day - since you, too,
will need to know what works. And it's also for those of you already living in
community, since you can only benefit from knowing what others have done in
similar circumstances." 
Diana Leafe Christian is author of Creating a Life Together: Practical
Tools to
Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities (New Society Publishers, 2003),
about forming communities in today's financial and zoning climate, based on
the
experiences of successful community founders in the 1990s. She has been editor
of Communities magazine, the Fellowship for Intentional Community's quarterly
national publication about intentional communities in North America, since
1993. For the past six years she has led workshops on the practical steps to
form intentional communities. Diana is a member of Earthaven Ecovillage.

"Wow! The newest, most comprehensive bible for builders of intentional
communities. Covers every aspect with vital information and hundreds of
examples of how successful communities faced the challenges and created their
shared lives out of their visions. The cautionary tales of sadder experiences
and how communities fail, will help in avoiding the pitfalls. Not since I
wrote
the Foreword to Ingrid Komar's Living the Dream (1983), which documented the
Twin Oaks community, have I seen a more useful and inspiring book." --Hazel
Henderson, author, Creating Alternative Futures, and Politics of the Solar
Age.

"A great deal of research and trial-and-error has been assembled here, and
every potential ecovillager should read it. This book will be an essential
guide and manual for the many Permaculture graduates who live in
communities or
design for them." --Bill Mollison, co-originator of the Permaculture concept,
author of The Permaculture Designers Manual, Ferment and Human Nutrition. 
"A really valuable resource for anyone thinking about intentional community. I
wish I had it years ago." -- Starhawk, author of Webs of Power, The Spiral
Dance, and The Fifth Sacred Thing -- and committed communitarian. 
"Creating a new culture of living peacefully with each other and the planet is
our number one need--and this is the right book at the right time. Creating a
Life Together will be instrumental in the ecovillage courses I teach. I can't
wait to tell people about it." --Hildur Jackson, cofounder, Global Ecovillage
Network (GEN); co-editor, Ecovillage Living: Restoring the Earth and Her
People. 
"A comprehensive, engaging, practical, well-organized, and thoroughly
digestible labor of love...This book is a gift to humanity, helping to move
forward the elusive quest for community, fueling a quantum leap towards a
fulfilling, just, and sustainable future." --Geoph Kozeny, 30-year community
activist, producer/editor of video documentary "Visions of Utopia: Experiments
in Sustainable Culture." 
"Before aspiring community builders hold their first meeting, confront the
first realtor, or drive their first nail, they must buy this essential
book: it
wil improve their chances for success immensely, and will certainly save them
money, time, and heartbreak. In her friendly but firm (and occasionally funny)
way, Diana Christian proffers an astonishing wealth of practical information
and sensible, field-tested advice." --Ernest Callenbach, author, Ecotopia and
Ecotopia Emerging 
"While anyone can build a village, a subdivision, or a housing development,
the
challenge is filling it with people who can get along, who can reach
agreements, and who can achieve far more together than they ever could alone.
If your aspiring ecovillage or intentional community gets even this far - and
this awesome book will show you how - then maybe you have a realistic
chance of
living sustainably, and by example, of changing the world. My appreciation
grows daily for this thorough, practical, and engaging guide." --Albert Bates,
Director, Ecovillage Training Center, and Board member, Global Ecovillage
Network 
"Developing a successful community requires a special blend of vision and
practicality woven together with wisdom. Consider this book a marvelous
mirror.
If the abundant, experience-based, practicality in this book delights you then
you probably have the wisdom to realize your vision." 
--Robert Gilman, founding editor of In Context, A Quarterly of Humane
Sustainable Culture 

Review by Geoph Kozeny 
        If Creating a Life Together had been available in 1972, probably it
wouldn't have taken me five tries to start a community that would last for
more
than 13 months. But with no such "how to" resource available, my cohorts and I
plunged into it the hard way-by trial and error. After flailing around through
those first four attempts, then living for ten years in a community that
succeeded, and subsequently visiting 350-some communities to figure out what
worked for them and what didn't, I was resigned to the idea that someday I'd
have to write the definitive manual on creating and sustaining intentional
communities. I'm eternally grateful that Diana Christian did it first. 

        As I compare the topics featured in Creating a Life Together with my
ancient annotated list of things to include in my intended book, I'm
thoroughly
impressed with how she covered the bases. It's all here-from conceiving a
community, through building a vision and gathering a group, to finding and
buying land, and ultimately how to get along together and make it work. (See
excerpt, "Accountability and Consequences," pg. 16.) Further, it's written
in a
readable, captivating style that makes extensive use of interviews and
vignettes from the everyday life of real communities. (As a testimony to
Diana's thoroughness, pithiness, and the relevance of the information, the
publisher, a former communitarian himself, chose to publish a book twice the
length he'd originally agreed to once he read the manuscript.) 

        The breadth and depth of this work should come as no surprise to
anyone
familiar with Diana's credentials. As editor of Communities magazine, she's
perused scores of insightful and practical articles over the last ten years,
and, always looking for a good story, has sought out and interviewed dozens of
veteran communitarians, especially community founders, about what went wrong
and what worked well. (Not to mention learning many hard lessons firsthand,
through the break-ups of two community start-ups she was involved in before
joining Earthaven, one of the communities profiled in the book.) 

Creating a Life Together includes abundant examples from thriving ecovillages
and communities as well as numerous anecdotes from groups that failed
(although
the latter sound strikingly familiar, they're usually presented as fictitious
models) - making for a very effective community-building guidebook. 

        Information is presented logically, using the metaphor of growing a
successful garden: Planting the Seeds of Healthy Community (major bases to
cover and planning pitfalls to avoid); Sprouting New Community (techniques and
tools); and Enriching the Soil (communication, working with conflict, adding
and sustaining members). However, this seemingly straightforward order is
offered only to make the concepts easy to digest. "Don't assume these steps
are
linear," Diana cautions. "The process of growing a community is more organic -
simultaneously ongoing and step by step." She makes it clear that
circumstances
may dictate swapping the order, doing many steps at once, skipping steps if
appropriate, and even adding new ones of your own. 

        The "Seeds" section examines basic concerns, including a general
overview of what has worked and what hasn't, the founder's role and its
challenges, crafting a clear vision, raising start-up funds, and establishing
effective and empowering decision-making structures. The "Sprouting" section,
comprising the bulk of the book, focuses on the critical importance of good
documentation, legal structures, working with lawyers, finding and buying
land,
zoning, refinancing, balancing privacy with group involvement, and setting up
internal community economics. The "Enriching" section digs into the most
critical aspects of sustaining a community once it's established: how to work
with the beliefs and emotions that underlie conflict and agreements for
handling conflict, constructively offering and receiving feedback, and how to
help each other stay accountable to the group. Additionally, a very helpful
appendix features numerous sample documents of community visions and
agreements, several dozen extremely helpful community-building resources, plus
links for finding hundreds more on the Web. 

        Creating a Life Together is a comprehensive, engaging, practical,
well-organized, and thoroughly digestible labor of love. Hopefully scores of
wannabe community founders and seekers will discover it before they launch
their quest for community, and avoid the senseless and sometimes painful
lessons that come from trying to reinvent the wheel. This book is a gift to
humanity-helping to move forward the elusive quest for community, fueling a
quantum leap towards a fulfilling, just, and sustainable future. 
Geoph Kozeny, a 30-year community activist, is producer editor of Visions of
Utopia: Experiments in Sustainable Culture, a two-hour video documentary on
intentional community. geoph at ic.org; http://www.store.ic.org. 

For lots of interesting book reviews, workshop raves and other testimonials
about Diana Christian's book and workshops, see
http://www.creating-a-life-together.org/

-end- 
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
(805) 962-2571
sbpcnet at silcom.com
www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to
grow." - Anonymous

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