To build a healthy cultural infrastructure, it’s important to clarify your cooperative decision-making process, adopt conflict tools, and commit to the ongoing development of collaborative skills in your group.
After a communitarian’s love affair with line drying starts to wane, and eventually withers, she leaves community—partly to pursue an evolving relationship with a clothes dryer.
Because of their commitment to a culture of personal and community cleanliness, the Shakers largely escaped the cholera epidemics which plagued the rest of the country in the 1800s.
A community may achieve an ideal balance by drawing upon deep cultural roots to inform its structures and common life, while remaining vitally open to fresh insight and creativity in response to the present.
A small culture gap between a new resident and the community correlates with greater chances of a long-term fit; a large culture gap makes this much less likely, but not impossible.
Full immersion in a residential intentional community transforms over the course of a decade and a half into a much wider experience of community.