Unrealistic Expectations of Community and LVECby Marc Tobin 4/29/09
The word "community" is sort of like the word "love", "freedom", "nature" or "sustainability", in that for most people it has positive connotations, but is also very vague. Therefore, it can act as a "projection magnet" for people's most idealist expectations. People will often have strong ideas of what community means, thinking "a healthy community would do ____" or "____ isn't community". One challenge with those expectations is that while they seem obvious to the person holding them, often 5 people attracted to community will have 5 different sets of expectations- they will all fill in the blanks with different answers. Every community has different takes on the issues raised below. The Federation for Intentional Community (FIC) is a great source of listings for various communities. The FIC, LVEC, and other long time communitarians strongly advise those seeking community to examine their specific expecatations of community and see if they are compatible with a specific community. If they aren't, rather than expending energy attempting to convince one community it is doing it wrong, we suggest putting that energy into finding a community that is a good match.
Here are some examples of expectations people often bring to the idea of community and things to consider about these expectations, especially in the context of the LVEC community:
Unrealistic Expectation 1: Everyone will feel connected to everyone else in community at all times.
To Consider: Living in community at LVEC does not guarantee that everyone will always feel connected with everyone else. Many residents of LV have realized that it is very difficult to maintain very close connection to everyone in a group of over 6-12 people. The scale of LVEC's land, infrastructure, business operations, and community goals require that the LVEC community maintain a population more in the range of at least 35-50 residents. This is neither "bad" nor "good". There are benefits and drawbacks of any particular size or scale of community. The ideal size for an eco- village is over 60 people, in order to have diversity of skills needed to have a full range of features present in the village. With that number, there is not enough time in the day for everyone to maintain deep emotional intimacy with everyone else. The ideal size for a feeling of intimate family with everyone in a community is 4-12 people, so the ecovillage ideal is not inherently compatible with deep intimacy with everyone in a community. There are lots of great co-operative houses and small intentional communities where there is close intimacy with everyone. And, one would not use the word "eco-village" to describe those. This does not mean that people in ecovillages, rather than smaller communities do not experience close connection. They do, but generally with a subgroup of the residents rather than with all of them. Therefore, in the case of LVEC, people who seek that deep intimacy with a group of people either need to find that with a sub-group of people at LVEC or find a smaller community. While the population dictates that there will be subgroups with greater intimacy, one of the goals at LVEC is to not allow the subgroups to be "cliques". Various factors help keep subgroups from being cliques such as:
a. Individuals are part of various overlapping subgroups in different way. For example, John Doe is in a musical band with 4 other people, has a wife and 2 children who aren't in the band, is very good friends with 3 other people in the community who aren't in the band, and shares a passion for beekeeping with yet another group of about 5 people in the community.
b. Some of these subgroups are more fixed and some more fluid- John Doe's nuclear family subgroup is fairly fixed, the band is open to a couple new members, but only if they have the musical skills neccessary, he may be open to making new close friends when he has more time, and the beekeeping group is open to anyone with an interest in bees.
c. Subgroups have a spirit of cooperation, rather than competition or comparision with each other. John Doe might have to choose betwen a band jam and bee meeting on the same day, but it is only his own scheduling competition, there is no sense externally of "the band versus the beekeeping club". Everyone supports both, but priortizes their time based on their personal priorities and committments.
d. Over time, there are enough different happenings and fluidity that everyone eventually finds themselves at some point being in some type of small group context with everyone else in the community. This does not need to be planned or managed, but will happen organically if there is enough variety of small group happenings.
The number of residents at LVEC is a great match for people who enjoy a diversity of different people, and new people coming and going regularly. One can usually easily be on a friendly "first name basis" with everyone in the community at any given time. However, people who are primarily seeking an experience of a small group of people who all maintain continual deep emotional connection with each other, generally come to realize that they'd be better served by a community or shared house of 4-12 people with much less land to manage that isn't also running an educational and conference center business. Again, this is not a "good" or "bad" thing. Neither LVEC or any intentional community or ecovillage is going to be all things to all people.
Unrealistic Expectation 2: Community means everyone doing the same thing at the same time.
To Consider: Community does not always mean collectivity or conformity. Some people seem to primarily experience a "sense of community" when everyone is doing the same thing at the same time- i.e. collective conformity. Without seeing this as inherently good or bad, it does conflict with the fact that other people experience "a sense of community" primarily through a group of diverse people doing diverse activities in their own unique ways towards a common vision. Over the last few years, the community at LVEC has been moving from the idea of "everyone doing the same thing at the same time" to an approach of celebrating both the commonality of vision and diversity of roles that people in the community play in going about that common vision. One reason for that is that the population of LVEC needs to be larger than is convenient to get everyone's logistics and schedules aligned. Another reason is that many residents were reporting that too much large group activity was causing them to lose their own internal fuel needed for connecting deeply others. At LVEC we now have more support for the fact that residents have different personal needs for big group time- some people simply thrive on more personal time than others and it is not anti-community to support people in that. It is very easy for any resident to initiate a social activity on any given night or weekend and get anywhere from 1-15 people to join them. At the same time, it is extremely difficult or near impossible for any resident to get absolutely every other resident to come to any particular time and place at the same time. One can choose to look at the glass at part way full or focus on what part is absent. Either way, the person who is okay with this will generally enjoy their experience at LVEC more than the person who is not. Attempts to change this phenomenon and get everyone to do everything at the same time have generally seemed to leave people frustrated, whereas those who enjoy knowing that some of their community mates are off doing their own thing at a given time, can find contentment.
Unrealistic Expectation 2: Living in community means that anything in my life that hasn't worked for me in other contexts will work fine.
To Consider: Many people find that at LVEC, certain things that have always troubled them in their lives seem to magically disappear. At the same time, some things they hoped would go away remain. Also, sometimes living in community brings new challenges. The community at LVEC aims to correct some of the flaws of the modern mainstream U.S. lifestyle as best that it can. However, no two residents agree exactly on what these flaws are and how to correct them. It is a work in progress. The LVEC community is not a utopia and it is also not an escape from society. Residents still need to be responsible, still need to do chores and housework and be responsible for their own finances, livelihoods, emotions and relationships. Residents are not given employment in the LVEC businesses simply by virtue of being a resident or because of need. They must apply and be accepted to a job position based on merit and skill.
Unrealistic Expectation 3: Living in community at LVEC will allow me to "escape" U.S. mainstream society.
See above. In addition, LVEC exists within the larger U.S. social, legal, and financial contexts. While aiming to take a healthier approach to these things, we still interact with them, pay taxes, follow the laws of the state and country, and we operate a business for the public. This means that LVEC community residents continually interact with guests who are visiting the community, education or conference center and residents are expected to be respectful, polite, and non-judgmental towards the guests, who come from a large variety of backgrounds and are not always communitarian "politically correct". The LVEC community is not a good match for people who are looking for a community that is "off the grid", "under the radar", "play entirely by its own rules", or "creates a society free of corrupting mainstream influences". There are many other communities out there that are more geared towards an "under-the radar" or "get away from society" way of life than LVEC. For obvious reasons they are harder to find, genreally via word of mouth, rather than advertising like LVEC does, because have no reason to advertise. If that is what you seek, it will be worth your effort to seek those places out. LVEC does have a goal of being more sustainable, and that included increase our self sufficiency in some ways. However, this is not with the intention of shutting ourselves off from the rest of the world, but instead is partially in order to demonstrate permaculture techniques to a wide range and large number of visitors and students. The LVEC community is a great place for people who are excited about the ability to joyfully interact with and affect the lives of a variety of people from the public through a broad and non-dogmatic approach to sustainability education.
Unrealistic Expectation 4: I will always feel accepted in community.
To Consider: No matter how much emphasis a community puts on connection and acceptance, it is very rare in any community that everyone feels fully accepted by everyone else. Some people have unconscious internal psychological blocks to feeling accepted by others or themselves and only internal work, rather than external validation will change that. Simply joining a community is no guarantee of universal acceptance. One must also take the time and effort to build trust through their actions.
Unrealistic Expectation 5: Intentional community is just like one big family.
To Consider: In some traditional cultures, "family" means the same thing to everyone. In modern intentional communities, people come from all sorts of different family backgrounds with different associations of the word family. Community provides a context for us to work towards co-creating aspects of our vision of a healthy family, but it will not guarantee that we will always feel like our most idealized vision of a family. Different intentional communities have different amounts of emphasis on a "family" feeling. At LVEC, over years, it has appeared that people who come to the community hoping to feel a sense of close family with everyone at all times become strongly disillusioned, whereas people who are content to feel family type bonds with some portion of the residents, but not all, seem to be more satisfied with their community experience over the long haul. Also, an ecovillage is not a family, just as a traditional village is not a family. A village in inherently on a scale larger than a single family, even an "extended family". A village is composed on numerous families as subsets, but in the case of traditional villages and modern ecovillages. These various extended family subsets may not be nuclear families, and they may not be blood related, they may even continuall shift, and they will hopefully have healthy and positive relationships with everyone in the village, but the dynamics that are possible on the scale of 4-12 people can not simply be scaled up to 30-60 people without some changes in group dynamics, which are not inherently good or bad.
Unrealistic Expectation 6: Mainstream society appears to be in a precarious situation. Living at LVC will guarantee my safety in the event of social, economic, or ecological collapse.
No one at LVEC is has the ability to predict the future or to offer solutions that will guarantee that individuals or the comunity will successful navigate an potential society changes in the next decades. Some residents at LVEC believe society will gradually shift to a more sustainable form without collapse scenarios, while others believe that there will be more serious disruptions. Everyone in the LVEC community hopes that LVEC will be resilent and successful in dealing with whatever changes happen, but no one at LVC has all the answers for how to withstand any imaginable societal shifts. People who are seeking a community that is focused on preparing for one particular set of future scenarios will probably be happier elswhere than LVEC. LVEC seems to be a better match for people who believe that we should do what we can to make our lives more ecological and socially healthy and that in doing so, we will hopefully increase our resilence for a wide range of potential futures.
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