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Strategies
Goal: To create a residential community small enough and with enough authentic opportunities for connection that members know each other well, and turn to each other for friendship and support.
What we are doing:
- We live in small living groups of two to eight people.
- We have frequent potlucks, and sometimes we have a dinner cooperative functioning, where we take turns cooking for each other.
- Once a month we have a "well-being meeting" for the purpose of getting to know each other better and communicating feelings.
- Some of us grow food collectively.
- We each have five hours per month to sponsor activities at our straw bale community center, to which other members of the community may be invited.
We offer each other mediation help when needed to resolve conflicts.
Our intentions:
- To use more of our available hours for the straw bale studio to create opportunities for connection with each other.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To create a community in which each person feels that he or she can influence the direction of the community.
What we are doing:
- Any person who feels a need for the community to make a decision about a topic can let folks know the topic before our monthly decision-making meeting. People who have an investment in the topic attend the meeting, where each person contributes to a consensus decision.
Our intentions:
- The ownership of Maitreya EcoVillage is currently private, with some residents being landowners and others being renters. As long as this continues, the landowners will have more actual power over decisions affecting the community. We hope to eventually create an ownership structure that is more democratic, or at least diffused, while still fostering our movement towards our other goals.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To create local small-scale businesses which promote our values while providing living wages.
What we are doing:
- More than half of our adults are working in home-based businesses such as carpentry, yoga and music teaching, permaculture and massage.
Our intention:
- We'd like to create one or more businesses in which we can work collectively here at Maitreya EcoVillage.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To improve our food supply by growing organic produce ourselves, and by fostering exchange relations with local farmers.
What we are doing:
- A significant portion of our land is devoted to growing organic fruits and vegetables, raising geese, rabbits and chickens, and bee keeping.
A woman who keeps goats delivers their milk to us weekly.
- We help local farmers with their work in exchange for produce.
Our intentions:
- We plan to use permaculture principles to further develop our land, planting more food-producing trees and hedges on the boundary with the streets, for example.
- We want to develop deeper relationships with farmers, perhaps by encouraging those who want to spend a night in town to stay in our guest cottage in exchange for an opportunity to stay with them at their farm.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To reduce our waste by using less, sharing more, recycling, and using waste products from one system as energy for another system.
What we are doing:
- All twenty-five of us fill just one trashcan each week that is designed to hold the non-recyclable wastes of an average American family.
- We receive inexpensive bus passes as residents of Maitreya EcoVillage, and many of us ride bicycles, walk or take the bus rather than drive.
- Many of us re-use our food storage containers and plastic bags, and buy much of what we need from thrift stores and yard sales.
- Many of us dry our clothes outside in summer, and hang them in our homes to dry in winter.
- We share tools, clothing, books and other items.
- We compost our food scraps and yard wastes, turning them into nutrients for our soil.
Our intentions:
- We want to replace our privately owned cars with cooperatively owned vehicles powered by bio-diesel.
- When city codes permit, we will unhook our gray water from the black water in one of our buildings, which was constructed with that in mind, and use it for irrigation.
- When codes permit, we'd like to compost our human manure.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To move towards living more sustainably in other ways, for example by considering true environmental costs in our choices of what we use, and by using renewable energy.
What we are doing:
- We use natural building materials to construct our buildings, such as sustainably harvested or recycled wood. While this costs us more in time and dollars than using wood that was clear-cut, our choices help preserve our forests.
- We used natural building methods to create a straw bale community center, a cob guest cottage, and earthen floors.
- We avoid using materials such as poly-vinyl chloride, which adds cancer-causing dioxin to our environment in its creation, use and disposal. We take the time to build our own window frames from wood, for example, rather than purchase vinyl windows.
- We have installed solar heating panels to heat water in several buildings.
Our intentions:
- Living a truly sustainable life is a daunting but worthwhile dream, which we intend to pursue in hundreds of small and large ways as we learn more, and deepen our commitment to devoting our time and resources to this goal.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To nurture our bodies, minds and spirits by hosting concerts, dances, classes, discussions, yoga, meditation circles and other growth opportunities.
What we are doing:
- Our straw bale studio, known as the "Mudlucious Community Center," is used for meditation practice, yoga classes, music rehearsals, gardening classes, dance parties, community meetings, celebrations, and other activities.
- Our cob guest cottage is sometimes used for solitary personal retreats.
- Rob and Melanie's living room is often the location of environmental activist gatherings to help our larger community in transitioning towards sustainability.
Our intentions:
- We want to continue developing the offerings of our community center so that more people are served.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To practice communication skills that help us live together cooperatively, growing though our differences.
What we are doing:
- New residents are asked to commit to working through conflict should someone request that of them.
- About five residents who are trained in conflict resolution skills such as Marshall Rosenberg's non-violent communication and the work of Byron Katie are available to the community as mediators.
- Many of us have participated in Lost Valley's "Heart of Now" workshops, co-counseling, Network for New Culture summer camp, and other opportunities for relationship skill building.
Our intentions:
- To view conflicts as opportunities to learn and grow with each other.
- To improve our communication skills through practice.
- To be continuously more transparent with each other about who we are.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To balance our needs for human connection with our needs for personal autonomy.
What we are doing:
- Our community began not with a coherent vision and agreement on how we will live together, but as a collection of individuals drawn to live in these particular buildings with the particular people who are here.
- Gradually we have made agreements about expectations for ourselves, for example our decision to each contribute fifteen dollars per month to rent our community center, and to participate in mediation if we're asked.
- We have a lot of personal autonomy compared to most places that call themselves "intentional communities," and a lot of interpersonal connection compared to the average American neighborhood.
- We have no required meetings, though folks are encouraged to attend.
- We have a three-hour per month work expectation from each resident to help with tasks that benefit the community.
Our intentions:
- To organically evolve our understandings and agreements about how we want to live with each other in response to situations as they arise.
- To keep our "Welcome to Maitreya" brochure current, which describes our agreements, so those who move here know what they are agreeing to.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To make our spaces beautiful.
What we are doing:
- We consulted a book called Pattern Language as we designed our spaces.
- We have used recycled tile in beautiful patterns when we construct or remodel our bathrooms and entryways.
- We place "urban fossils" such as kale leaves in concrete chunks when we are required by city code to construct parking lots.
- We grow food and other beautiful living plants, creating garden beds in fluid shapes such as spirals in places that used to be driveways.
Our intentions:
- We plan to continue tidying our grounds so that materials for reuse are hidden or aesthetically stored, and our gardens are more beautiful as well as productive.
- We'd like to create a city repair corner at our closest intersection.
Mission and Goals Top
Goal: To share what we've learned with others by offering workshops, presentations, apprenticeship, hospitality and tours.
What we are doing:
- Hundreds of students, travelers, and friends of friends tour our eco-village each year, and we host dozens of family and friends in our guest cottage.
- We sometimes give presentations or workshops on eco-villages or green building on college campuses and other learning centers.
- Rob, Melanie and Skye participated in a reality TV program called "wifeswap", sharing with millions of viewers their environmental lifestyle and perspectives.
- Melanie has taken a course called "Climate Masters" at the University, and in payment for this is volunteering in the community to help individuals reduce their carbon footprint.
Our intention:
- We intend to create and teach workshops focused on transforming the world economically and spiritually, and we plan to write a companion book for at least one of these presentations.
- Eventually we may decide to build an educational center on our vacant lot to be used as classroom and housing for apprentices and other students.
- We'd like to create a multi-media traveling show about environmental issues, especially global warming, using songs, skits, poems, video and interactive exercises.
Mission and Goals Top
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