08/16/2025
INTENTIONEERING
I do not consider the class-harmony community design I am currently living to be my preferred lifestyle. I simply fell into this lifestyle when I was able to purchase this urban triplex in Denver, Colorado, at a time when I was not able to pull together a collective to create any other kind of community, which is apparently a common story.
This form of community, of one person or a small group owning land and housing rented to others (thus, two classes of members) is very common, comprising about 20% of the listings in past directories printed by the Foundation for Intentional Community. The largest example in the U.S. of the class-harmony community form is Ganas on Staten Island, NY. Common as it is, the only name I found for this type of community was "cross-class," which I thought was not very descriptive, so I coined the term "class-harmony community," to contrast with the class-conflict of communist theory.
Class-harmony community was not my goal when I moved to Denver in 1992. My intention, from when I dropped out of Ohio State Univ. to join a rural commune in 1975 (East Wind Community in the Missouri Ozark Mts.) was to find a form of intentional community (IC) that would be appropriate to the urban environment, because that is where most people live. It would surely not be good to empty the cities since then there would be no country. That might yet happen, given current trends, so the need is for creating urban community.
My goal has always been social change, and for that I felt that I needed to learn how communal society works. 8 years at East Wind then 4 years at Twin Oaks Community in Virginia gave me that understanding and background.
Living in communal society it became clear that communalism was not going to save the world, and I have since written about that, most recently in the paper I completed earlier this year, now on my Intentioneers.net website titled "Parallel Cultures."
I knew I had to leave communalism and apply what I learned in that form of community to the "Outside World," yet it was difficult after living totally immersed in cooperative culture all of my adult life to that point, to then survive in the dominant culture of competition.
I realize that my experience of transition from the alternative to the dominant culture has been much like what Native Americans experience when they leave the reservation to live in the city. Culture shock happens, even in my case of having started life in the Real World.
Now in my writing I make the point that communal society essentially takes us back to our prehistory, before money existed, since no money is used within communal society, only for exchange with the Outside World. Similar to how indigenous cultures trade crafts with the civilized world, we built collective or worker-owned businesses to make money to exchange with the Outside.
I have given the name "time-based economics" to the non-monitary economic system used in neo-tribal communalism and other sharing lifestyles. "Time-Based Economics" is the title of another paper I have written, which includes the kind of "labor-gifting" practiced in non-communal groups like cohousing, and which is similar yet different from the "labor-sharing" practiced in communal society.
Yes, in my effort to understand and explain what I have learned about sharing lifestyles I have had to coin several new terms and develop definitions for them. Having the goal of teaching community, I now have registered as a service mark the name "School of Intentioneering" (SoI) and am developing classes here at my Dry Gulch Ecovillage in West Denver. For my SoI classes I have all my writings on my Intentioneers.net website, as background reading or homework.
At this point I will add that my Dry Gulch Ecovillage is part of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), headquartered at Findhorn Cpmmunity in Scotland, and that I am the registered agent for our region, called GEN-United States (GEN-US). We print the quarterly magazine "Communities: Life in Cooperative Culture," for which I occasionally write articles. (See: www.gen-us.net) GEN-US is the fiscal sponsor for my SoI, and I refer people who want to donate to my cause to the GEN-US website, since I do not charge people for any of my writing or classes. People just have to state when making their donation that it is for SoI.
I am planning to emphasize the ecovillage identity, and use it to help with creating community networks, for both the Denver Metro Area, and for the Front Range Megalopolis. That is on my agenda, I just have to get around to it. I have the space for periodic gatherings, when one of my apartments is empty, so I need to get going with that.
The thing about the name "ecovillage" is that it says nothing about the type of community, so it is all-inclusive, which is good in some ways. There is no gradation of communities according to how more-or-less ecological they are. I suppose the idea is that any kind of human sharing is good for the environment, and therefore more ecological than living in competition. Yet I want, and I think most people want, some way to understand the variety of groups in the intentional communities (IC) movement, and calling them all "ecovillages" does not help. So that is what I am working on.
In addition to the sharing of private-property in class-harmony community, and the sharing of common-property in communal society, there are other forms of IC. A community land trust (CLT) is a mixture of private property and common property. I was on the board-of-directors of the School of Living Regional Community Land Trust for a couple years while I lived in the mid-Atlantic states.
When I moved to Denver in 1992 I joined the board-of-directors of the Rocky Mountain Cohousing Association, which then became the national organization, Cohousing Association of the U.S. I volunteered for the cohousing movement for ten years, recognizing that the design of a common house surrounded by private residences is not unique, instead that design is common among land trust communities. The most important innovation of cohousing is the use of the condominium legal design, which enables access to financing. It is great to see how cohousing accesses professional services like architects, developers, lawyers, and bankers for the building of intentional community.
Cohousing is actually a form of the sharing of private-property with no common property, even though they have a "common house." I explain in my SoI definitions of terms that this is because cohousing uses the condominium legal form, which calls the common facilities "undivided interest" of private property as opposed to legal communal ownership.
I do not claim that cohousing, as the coho movement defines itself is the best form of community for the goal of cultural change (considering that non-coho-movement people define "cohousing" in many different ways). For that I am championing the newest form of IC, called "real estate investment cooperative" (REIC) shortened to "land co-op."
The land co-op community form was invented in 2010 in the SF Bay Area. I have found eight land co-ops so far around the U.S. I classify land co-ops as a form of sharing privately-owned property, although some have land trusts (CLTs) connected to them.
Land co-ops use the cooperative corporation legal form, which provides for non-resident investor members, along with resident members who have equity accounts in the community. It is this format that I think makes for the best form of intentional community for cultural change, because it has a built-in method for financing growth of cultural innovation. Equity appreciation of REIC property is then shared among all of the members.
Many land co-ops are designed as limited equity co-ops, which is a form of mixed private and common ownership community.
Because of its equity-sharing aspects I expect that the land co-op movement will become the largest and fastest growing form of intentional community in the IC movement, eventually eclipsing cohousing, which is currently the largest and fastest-growing IC movement.
Advocating land co-ops is my priority. I support all forms of ICs, since I have been involved in the ecovillage, communal, land trust, cohousing, and now class-harmony movements, yet I will now be focusing on land co-ops.
I am also thinking of trying to co-create a class-harmony community movement, since one does not exist while that form of community is prevalent, yet I do not consider that form of private-property sharing to be the best community lifestyle for cultural change. I think that real estate equity-sharing is the best.
Equity-sharing can take the form of a small group co-buying a large house to share, in what I call a "cofamily," comprised of from three to nine people, using the tenancy-in-common legal form. Groups of ten or more people would become one of the other forms of community. I don't know that there is a limit to how many people can have a tenancy-in-common agreement, or a partnership agreement, yet for definitional and classification purposes I make an arbitrary limit of less than ten people, with or without children.
Larger forms of equity-sharing IC beyond the cofamily could be said to include cohousing, yet I am emphasizing the land cooperative form, because I think that equity-sharing is the most fair, accessible, and beneficial form of community.
That is my story. I feel that I am just getting started with my mission of culture change, having only recently gotten my ecovillage location set up for my school, with all my writings for my classes.
Actually, there is another dimension to my intention, which is the spiritual/religious aspect, my orientation to which I call "Partnership Spirituality." In addition to the intentioneering school I am also starting the Partnership Church here at my ecovillage. I have writings about that as well on my Intentioneers.net website.
I certainly want to work with other people on all this, with who ever feels aligned in any way with what I am trying to do. Although I have surely been working on all this a long time, this is very much a beginning! :-)
Contact me at: [email protected]
Intentional Cultural Engineering for Social and Environmental Responsibility
