Resource Links

Core Resources & Organizations

This first list contains our most relevant and referenced resources and organizations for the legal, logistical, social, ecological, economic, and collaborative aspects of creating intentional community:

• Soul Fire Farm – “An Afro-Indigenous centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system.”
• Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land
• Foundation for Intentional Communities (FIC) – Resources for finding, creating, and/or supporting intentional communities.
• Intentional Communities Magazine – Quarterly magazine and primary resource for information, stories, and ideas about intentional communities—including urban co-ops, cohousing groups, ecovillages, and rural communes.

Educational Media

The remaining links contain various educational and resourceful articles, lectures, books, and other media primarily geared toward preparing oneself for intentional community and decolonization. Please note that we do not agree with everything posted here verbatim and the opinions expressed belong to their writers; however we have found these resources useful tools for reflection on the path to our own truths and values and offer them in case they may help you as well. Organizing them is a loose/subjective affair since our categories interrelate and overlap. Please reach out if you encounter any issues, and remember to check with your local library for books, ebooks, and audiobooks.

The Self

• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds – by Adrienne Maree Brown – “Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live.”
• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good – by Adrienne Maree Brown – “How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Drawing on the black feminist tradition, […] Brown finds the answer in something she calls ‘pleasure activism,’ a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work.”
• Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy – Multiple translations and a 2020 revision of Prof Jem Bendell’s original 2018 lecture/paper, which has inspired a global movement of stillness, necessary grieving, de-growth, and direct action in response to one’s personal awakening to an unpopular, systematically hidden reality.
• The Pressing Need for Everyone to Quiet Their Egos
• Exercises to help you stop believing your unwanted automatic thoughts.
• How to Reconnect With Your Body In Spite of the Impact of White Supremacy
• Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy – “As digital technologies have made information abundant, our attention has become the scarce resource – and in the digital “attention economy,” technologies compete to capture and exploit our mere attention, rather than supporting the true goals we have for our lives.”
• We Are All Very Anxious – Six theses on identifying and transmuting anxiety and social stressors as a transformative community effort
• Decolonization and the Question of Subjectivity – On gender, race, and binary thinking.

Relationships

• Friendship is a root of freedom – “Freedom was once inseparable from interdependence, close ties, and kinship: I am free because of others I can depend on.”
• A case against marriage – “Speculation about whether or not marriage is obsolete overlooks a more important question: What is lost by making marriage the most central relationship in a culture?”
• The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake – “The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.”
• Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let’s Break It. – Further examination and Feminist critique of family structure, drawing partly from and expanding on the above article.
• Erotic Intelligence: The Paradox of Intimacy and Sexuality – Essentially a lecture on non-attachment in erotic relationships, which can be expanded to many types of relationships.
• Ancestral Medicine – Text and course by Dr. Daniel Foor. Building relationships with the Earth and our ancestors in order to heal ancestral trauma serves the individual as much as it serves our human and non-human world.

Community & Society (including history, activism, economics, and law)

• An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States – “Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.”
• Unsettling America: Allyship & Solidarity Guidelines
• Accomplices Not Allies – An Indigenous Perspective and Provocation
• Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto – “Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not the ending of colonialism?”
• Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native – Russell Means had a complicated history, however his reflections as an Indigenous person may be useful to read.
• Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism” – Russell Means had a complicated history, however his reflections as an Indigenous person may be useful to read.
• Communalism: a Liberatory Alternative to the Present System – “The all-encompassing term given to a comprehensive theory and practice that seeks to reconstruct society along ecological lines.”
• The Work that Reconnects – “A breathtakingly new view of reality arises from deep ecology, systems thinking, and the resurgence of nondualistic spirituality.”
• Black Anarchism: A Reader by Black Rose Anarchist Federation – Important perspectives. Be aware, contains pro-nationalist content.
• Decolonization Resource Collection: Sample Syllabi – Identifying course resources on decolonization.
• Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it
• Transition Town Totnes – A successful, modern, circular local economy.
• The US city preparing itself for the collapse of capitalism – “The way you change a system nationally is you do thousands of local things, and eventually the system evolves.”
• The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy – by Murray Bookchin
• America Loves the Idea of Family Farms. That’s Unfortunate. – The historical racism and unsustainability of homesteading
• When People Who Harm Don’t Consent to Transformative Justice
• How to Share: 300 Guides to Help Your Community Thrive – “Shareable’s growing collection of how-to share posts, which can help you save money, reduce waste, and build community through sharing.”
• Riot Medicine – A free manual for practicing insurrectionary medicine.
• Weave: The Social Fabric Project – “Weaving is a way of life and a state of mind, not a set of actions. It’s about the spirit of caring you bring to each interaction with someone else.”
• Why Most ‘Utopian’ Community Projects Fail – “Perhaps the irony is that many of the administrative and managerial forces that individuals are running away from within mainstream society are exactly the organisational tools that would make intentional communities more resilient.”
• Your Community and The Law – The five legal entities most communities use are HOA, LLC, Housing Cooperatives, Non-Exempt Nonprofits, and 501(c)3 Nonprofits. Excerpted from the Spring 2019 edition of Communities, “Community Land”—full issue available for download (by voluntary donation) here.
• Black Commons, Community Land Trusts, and Reparations – “The community land trust is a tested and known entity for holding working lands in a commons while at the same time facilitating leaseholders ability to build equity in homes and other improvements on the land.”
• Choosing the Right Nonprofit Type – “Learn more about the 27 different types of nonprofit designations and the requirements that pertain to each one.”
• A Legal Alternative to Modern Living in a Changing America – “According to the tax code, 501(d) organizations are ‘religious or apostolic associations or corporations, if such associations or corporations have a common treasury or community treasury, even if such associations or corporations engage in business for the common benefit of the members.’”
• Audit Guide for 501(d) Organizations
• Example of a Successful 501(d) Organization – Acorn Community
• Advantages of the 501(d) Nonprofit Status

Ecology & Environment (including agriculture and domestic sustainability)

• Indigenous Agricultural and Environmental Knowledge Systems – Collection of educational resources. Some may require further sourcing where publications were unavailable.
• How the DO MORE mindset is ruining the planet On the De-growth Movement.
• Relationships with water in Harie village, Japan
• Triggering social tipping points for climate action
• Permaculture and Indigenous Cultures – “Isn’t it time permaculturists acknowledge where our knowledge has come from and show greater respect towards the indigenous people who have grown polycultural stacked food systems for millennia?”
• Tips For Starting an Urban Garden
• How to Set Up a Squash Growing Co-Op
• Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative – “Strategic legal analysis, policy research, and educational resources to empower Indian Country through food sovereignty, agriculture, and economic development.”
• DIY Automated Solar-Powered Off-Grid Irrigation System
• DC Microgrids and Rethinking Energy – Energy alternatives installed by Living Energy Farm, an intentional community and education center.
• Growing Corn, Beans, and Squash in Harmony – Great info, but a fairly white and non-native explanation of The Three Sisters.
• Removing Lawn to Make Way for More Habitat – If Home Owners Associations keep you from converting your front lawn into a vegetable garden, you can still make your yard more sustainable.

Spirit

• Converting Hidden Spiritual Racism into Sacred Activism: An Open Letter to Spiritual White Folks
• Panpsychism: A philosophy on the consciousness of the universe
• Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology – by David Abrams – “Explore the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth.”
• Is it Cultural Appropriation for White People to Drink Ayahuasca? – “Ayahuasca shamanism is a health care profession practiced by individual practitioners for any client willing to pay them. Amazonian indigenous people […] are concerned about the degradation and devaluation of their profession and the bastardization of their traditional ceremonies by practitioners they consider imposters, regardless of skin color.”
• Remember Wholeness: Ayahuasca and the Structural Violence of Modern Life
• Understanding The Need For Integration After Ayahuasca
• Dr. Claudio Naranjo’s final talk: Ayahuasca and the Problems of the World
• Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism – by Rita M. Gross – Reminds readers of the role and power of the feminine principle in Buddhism, and that “the most adequate language about ‘things as they are’ is non-dualistic.”
• Impurity Culture: On Sexuality & Sin – A Christian discusses her struggle with Christianity’s culture of sin.