Intentional Community Resource Hub

The ‘Future of Health is Local’ is a toolkit for building strong local economies while working to improve health in people and communities.

Designed by BALLE, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and in partnership with Kaiser Permanente, The Future of Health is Local field guide “gives health care providers actionable tools and examples on how to align the non-clinical assets of their organizations – such as procurement, employment, and investment – with local economic development strategies to improve human health and revitalize local communities.

The Future of Health is Local guide shows hospitals, health care providers, and other health institutions how they can be smarter with their business investments, improve health in their communities, and help build strong local economies at the same time. By connecting these dots, real economic transformation is possible.”

About this Workshop:
As someone interested in intentional communities, you want to welcome people from all walks of life, but how do you do it? Where do you find them? In this interactive workshop FIC Board member, Crystal Farmer, discusses some of the obstacles to recruiting people of different backgrounds. Whether you are a community leader or an interested seeker, this workshop will help you lay the foundation for a diverse and inclusive community.

Key points covered:
The basics of implicit bias and microaggressions
Practical tips for reaching out to people from different backgrounds
Ideas on how to resolve conflicts dealing with identity (maybe) an understanding on how housing segregation affects intentional communities.

Join Elliott Butler-Cisneros to explore the striking variety of ways that people express and live into their deepest cultural values, and how to bridge our differences. This is another powerful workshop in the Unleash the Power of Our Differences series.

This is critical session on reparatory justice and race within intentional community that explores how community land trusts can help with retaining existing lands with Black ownership and transitioning more land into Black hands.

Moving groups through tough decisions can be tricky, if not impossible, without a skilled and well-trained facilitator to hold folks through the process. Laird Schaub joins to talk about the how’s and why’s of excellent facilitation. You’ll learn from his 40+ years of lived community experience and training in facilitation, and leave with practices you can use in your community conversations.

Laird Schaub lived for four decades (1974-2014) at Sandhill Farm, an income-sharing rural community that he helped found. He also helped found the Foundation for Intentional Community and served as that organization’s main administrator for 28 years (1987-2015). In 1987 he created a self-insurance fund for health care needs among income-sharing communities called PEACH (Preservation of Equity Accessible for Community Health) that he ran for 22 years (1987-2009), growing it from a dream to a loan fund with net assets over $500,000. In addition to his expertise in community living, he’s parlayed his passion for good process into a consulting business focused on cooperative group dynamics, styled CANBRIDGE (Consensus And Network Building for Resolving Impasse and Developing Group Effectiveness), which he’s been doing since 1987. As both a consultant and a teacher he pioneered a facilitation and leadership training program, which he’s delivered the program 16 times in locations all across the US and Canada. Since 2007 he’s authored a blog that has more than 1200 entries, writing about group dynamics, intentional community, and his life along the way.

Economics is about how we get our basic needs met, how we generate & distribute resources, and the relationships & systems involved. It’s about how we make & spend money, how we organize & carry out labor, and how we relate to wealth & ownership.
Long-term communitarian and movement builder Sky Blue provides an overview of different types of economic models for intentional communities and how they apply to your group.

Find out what life is like in a cohousing intentional community. Rocky Corner Cohousing, Heartwood Cohousing and Washington Commons Cohousing each present in this cohousing event. Learn about each community through presentations, panel discussion, and Q&A.

Hear Ted Rau share how sociocracy brings an incredible opportunity to cooperative groups to embody higher levels of inclusivity through their governance.

Ted Rau is a trainer, consultant, and co-founder of the non-profit movement support organization Sociocracy For All. He grew up in Germany and studied linguistics before earning his Ph.D. in linguistics there in 2010. He moved to the USA and fulfilled a long-held wish to live in an intentional community where he still lives with his five children and 70 neighbors in a cohousing community in Massachusetts. Ted’s perspective is influenced by being transgender, by his interest in Nonviolent Communication and social justice, by being part of a global sociocracy organization at work, and a parent at home.

Columbia Ecovillage is an urban cohousing community in the Cully neighborhood of northeast Portland, Oregon, cultivating supportive relationships with each other, their community, and the Earth. This is a look into how they define their community’s teams.

Join workshop facilitator Meenadchi to learn how to deepen your emotional vocabulary and expand self-awareness through decolonizing nonviolent communication (NVC) practices. This training offers a framework of speaking in ways that feel true while acknowledging and unpacking how systems of oppression may be built into the ways we speak to each other. This intro-level training will provide tools for deepening your emotional vocabulary, understanding conflict as it emerges in your most intimate relationships, and practical exercises for expanding your self-awareness and ability to offer empathy towards self and others.