How do communities get started?
We can learn some general lessons by studying specific examples.
Taize
Brother Roger was 25 and in poor health when he felt called to live a simple life that exemplified the values of the Gospel. He also saw that a need existed to provide food and shelter to refugees -- those who had lost everything. With a small loan he bought a dilapadated house in the village of Taizé, France. Water came from the village well; the staple diet was soup made from corn flour bought from village mill.
Mondragon
In 1941 a young priest, Don José María Arizmendiarrieta, came to Mondragon, Spain, and began to talk of building an egalitarian worker society. Five of his students were inspired to go to university. After graduation in 1955 they bought a company that manufactured paraffin heaters, and transformed it into a community inspired by the priest's vision.
L’Arche
"L’Arche began in France in 1964 when Jean Vanier and Father Thomas Philippe, a Dominican, invited two men with disabilities, Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux to come share their lives together in Trosly-Breuil."
"Having first met them in an institution, Jean and Father Thomas believed that a warm and loving home would have a significant impact on the lives of these two men. Their desire was to create a home with them in the spirit of the Gospel and of the Beatitudes."
"Today, there are over 120 L’Arche communities in 30 countries throughout the world. From L’Arche's humble beginnings of the desire for two people with disabilities to have a home and share life with Jean and Father Thomas, L’Arche has now grown into an international network of communities."
Findhorn
"The Findhorn Community was begun in 1962 by Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean. All three had followed disciplined spiritual paths for many years and had been specifically trained to follow God's will."
"Peter and Eileen's employment was terminated, and with nowhere to go and little money, they moved with their three young sons and Dorothy to a caravan in the nearby seaside village of Findhorn."
"Feeding six people on unemployment benefit was difficult, so Peter decided to start growing vegetables." <#>
Missionaries of Charity
"She [Mother Teresa] was on a train to Darjeeling in 1946 when she heard her second call ... 'I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order.'"
"Her first school was a bare patch of ground, where she drew Bengali letters on the earth with a stick. for five or six children."
"The slum families took notice, and some tables appeared, then benches and a blackboard. And more children. We see here an important pattern which has continued over the years. Mother Teresa sees a basic need, and begins to address that need directly with what there is."
Camphill
"When Dr. Karl Konig, a student of the research of Dr. Rudolf Steiner (founder of the Waldorf movement), watched an Advent Garden at Sonnenhof in 1927, he decided then and there to devote his life to children in need of special care (physically and mentally handicapped children)." *<#>
The first Camphill community came into being in 1938, when a group of Nazi refugees around the Austrian paediatrician Dr. Karl König arrived in Scotland to live in a dilapidated house north of Aberdeen and to follow their intention to care for children with special needs, "handicapped children", for which there was no official provision in those days. In 1940 they were given Camphill House at the outskirts of Aberdeen to pursue their impulse, from whence the name "Camphill Community" sprang.
Read more in this newsletter:
Camphill Village, Copake
"Camphill Village was started in Copake, New York in 1961 at the urging of a group of concerned people that included parents of young adults with developmental disabilities. They had heard Dr. Karl König, the founder of Camphill, give a lecture in New York City about the growing Camphill Movement in Great Britain. These families wanted to establish a Camphill place in America for their grown children.
A small group of co-workers from Camphill places in Britain responded to this need. In the beginning, a small farm with two houses was donated to the initiative. Over the years other parcels of land were added and new houses and workshops were built. The Village now comprises 600 acres of hills, woods and pastures, 24 houses of different sizes, crafts workshops, farm buildings, a medical care center, culture and arts center, Bakery, Co-op, Café and Gift Shop. A total of 240 people live and work here together in dedication to the founding ideals." (link)
This is a typical account about the founding of other Camphill communities, a response by people within the Camphill movement to local needs.
Yasodhara Ashram
Swami Sivananda Radha was a German woman ordained as a sannyasin (renunciate) in India in 1957. She returned to Vancouver and began to teach her psychologically-oriented version of yoga. But she saw that her students wouldn't examine themselves very closely. They would come to her class for an hour and half or whatever, and then rush back to their busy lives, never going very deep. So she started an ashram way, way out in the country (the Kootenays) so that her students could get away from their busy-ness and have the time and space to go more deeply into themselves. Her motivation was to help her students; to give to them.
Hampstead Vihara
In 1977 the English Sangha Trust -- a group of English people who had a long-standing desire to bring Theravada Buddhist monks to England -- invited Ajahn Chah to stay in Hampstead, North London. Ajahn Chah saw how interested they were, and how much they wanted a group of Theravada Buddhist monks to live in England. So when he went back to Thailand, he left an American monk (Ajahn Sumdeho) and another Western monk to stay in Hampstead, supported by the English Sangha Trust.
Argenta Community
(Quaker community in British Columbia, Canada)
The Argenta community started when three Quaker families emigrated from the United States. They wanted to build a more cooperative way of life than was possible in McCarthyite America. They discovered that in the Argenta area they could buy 300 acres of land for $3,000. Within two years another four Quaker families joined them. They jointly built a Quaker meetinghouse and established an economic cooperative.
- Argenta meeting (link)
Hollyhock
"The Hollyhock land as a place of gathering, feasting and celebration begins with the Salish people of this coast. Their midden remains under Hollyhock's garden and beach. In 1969, the original homestead became Cold Mountain Institute, a gestalt therapy training centre. In 1982 the facility was bought by a group of friends led by a shared dream and named for the bright red hollyhocks growing in the garden. In 1989 a 115-acre greenbelt and neighbourhood was created.
Vision
Beginning as a retreat centre dedicated to “holidays that heal”, Hollyhock has become a cherished place for learning, rest, and leadership. The initial group of friends has become a wider circle of shareholders, growing the original vision of stewarding this land and making it accessible as a sanctuary. Hollyhock now works to catalyze positive impact on society."
Madonna House
"In 1947 Catherine and Eddie moved to Combermere, Ontario, amid the woods of Canada, to begin a new life and to engage in rural mission work. They lived in a small house they named Madonna House, in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Although life there was rigorous and hardly comfortable, people came to the rustic setting to join in, much to Catherine's surprise."
"Since Catherine's death in 1985, Madonna House has grown to number more than 200 members, with 23 field houses throughout the world."
Lothlorien
Here's another community in Scotland: Lothlorien. It is a community-style home for 8 mental health patients (schizophrenia, etc.) and staff, though the staff live offsite. The website doesn't say much about how it got started, except that it began as the work of a single family. It's now run by a group of Buddhists connected with Samye Ling. Because it's a mental healthcare facility, its funding comes from the government.
Iona Community
George MacLeod came from a famous ecclesiastical family but was disturbed by the gap he saw between the rich and the poor in the Scotland of the 1920s.
In 1938 he had a vision that the ancient monastic buildings on Iona should be restored, and that the restoration itself should be a restoration of a common life.
He utilized the skills of unemployed craftsmen, and persuaded trainee ministers to work as laborers.
Today, after decades of restoring the physical buildings, the Iona Community is visited by 150,000 people a year from all over the world.
Los Horcones
Los Horcones began in 1971 as a school for mentally retarded children. Its teachers and psychologists hypothesized that the difficulties the children experienced were exacerbated by an adverse social culture. In 1973 seven of them established an experimental community around the school to explore what a healthier alternative to mainstream culture might look like, and how this might benefit the children.
Bruderhof
The Bruderhof ("brother-place") communities began in 1920 with Eberhard and Emmy Arnold and Emmy's sister Else. They wanted to live in the true spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, and were inspired by the communal life of the early Christians described in Acts. They moved out of the city to a rural area and rented a run-down house and lived off oatmeal. At 6 a.m. every morning they would gather in silence for listening payer, and in the evenings they would talk with the many guests who came to see what they were up to. They had so little accommodation that guests would sleep in the haylofts of neighboring farms. Their income came from making children's furniture and accessories for the disabled. Nowadays there are Bruderhof communities in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, England, Germany, and New South Wales.
Alpha Farm
Alpha Farm was founded by four people from Philadelphia in 1971. Unlike many experiments in community from that era, this one is still going. They saw their chief job as being to begin the transformation of the world by transforming themselves.
Their income comes from community-owned businesses such as a contract for rural mail delivery from the U.S. postal service, and operating a bookstore-cafe in a nearby town.
The community is less overtly spiritual than it once was. "One might say that our group 'spiritual practice' is actually to express, moment to moment in our work and our relations with others, qualities of cooperation, respect, nurturance and helpfulness."
Forget-me-not
Ozay discovered enlightenment in a prison cell. After release from prison he returned to normal life. Some years later he came across a woman on the internet named Ahiranta. She was suffering from myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). Ozay looked after her, as she needed total care. Ahiranta then came into a small inheritance. She decided to use it to build a free healing and retreat center. She found a dilapadated house in Sweden on the internet. It had not been lived in for 10 years and had no running water. Intuitively she knew this was the place. This intuition was confirmed by some psychics Ozay had befriended, Jane and Craig Hamilton-Parker.
The four of them -- Ozay, Ahiranta, and Jane and Craig Hamilton-Parker -- developed plans for the center. In the summer of 2005 they will visit the house, now named "Forget me not," to put their plans into action.