We did much work on this at the winter meeting in Albuqurque. Especially the sharing of what a typical day looks like, which is similar to the Excercise #2 described below. --Diane Schurr 13:54, 6 Feb 2008 (MST)

Many of us have expressed the feeling that this is a very important topic and work on this needs to be done before any of the other issues can be tackled. I have attemepted to collect some of the suggestions and comments that have been made by e-mail and on other parts of this wiki, so that we have them all in one place. --Diane Schurr 10:53, 8 Mar 2007 (MST)

This topic was discussed at the Kansas City meeting (March 23-25) and some clarification was added.

We did list some of our non-negotiables (raw notes point # 6).

And we did recommit to our purpose of founding one community together.

For the meeting Diana T. and Jason had brought some questions for us to answer in order to delve deeper into this topic. Although we did not have time to share all of our answers, I believe that many of us did answer those questions. So I would like to suggest that we all share our answers now. I have created a wiki page where we can do that, and supporters can share their answers on the e-mail list. Please go to Excercise #1.

Another excercise that I have found very helpful is to ask each person to imagine what a typical day at our future community will be like and write about it. I believe it would be very helpful to compile the results of that excercise here: Excercise #2.

Below are some other suggestions that were shared before the Kansas City Meeting:

Vicky suggested these questions to ponder in an e-mail on 2/9:

Some questions for us to ponder:

• Will our RIC be a model demonstration project for sustainable living?
• What role does the "healing center" play? Who among us resonates with the idea of it being a "teaching center" for radical healing of Earth as well as people? Would this be included in our service projects?
• How shall our RIC manifest its commitment to political activism? What will that look like? Does it include disaster relief, ala post-Katrina? etc.
• How strong of an agricultural focus will our RIC have? How much of our own food do we expect our RIC to produce? Are there some among our founding group who want to have, for example, a CSA as their business?
• What size are we talking about? Sibyl and I remember Barbara Joughlin, the woman who had lived in IC for 18 years off the grid in the Yukon, saying that it took approximately two dozen people to live completely off the grid. Is this what we're wanting to do? Do we want to live off the grid? Is that part of our vision? For if it is, it will determine SO MANY of our other choices.

Jason suggested the following topics to discuss under the theme of cooperative living arrangements:

• Desired relationships within community-private, family, village
• Children and parenting-schooling, nudity
• Domestic animals
• Shared facilities

And these are some other topics that have been suggested:

• Discussion about what it would look like to join an existing community versus creating our own

Diane/Cricket suggests that we can look at the values that were expressed at the Synergia meeting to help us flesh out what we want this to look like. (Values exercise) From looking at these values, maybe we could identify four areas:

• What we want this community to have (Physical)
• What we want this community to do within amoung ourselves (Internal Actions)
• What we want this community to do outside of ourselves (External Actions)
• What we want this community to be (Non-physical characteristics)

Sabo shared the following comments as part of our discussion about supporters, and how these issues of clarifying our vision affect that topic. I want to reprint her comments here, because I believe they are very pertinent in this discussion about clarifying our vision:

Sabo sez: Before we can answer these questions, we need a common understanding about what this community is, which is part of the vision. This is hard to describe - I've written and erased this a few times now... Let's consider two aspects of our mission, recognising that to meet our mission we need to balance our energy, focus and priority between creating a community for ourselves and serving the greater Reclaiming/activist community.

At one end of the spectrum, we could put all of our energy, focus and priority into creating a community for ourselves. We could still accomplish the service aspects of our mission by creating a healing center, but wouldn't include other people in our community.

At the other end of the spectrum, we could put all of our energy, focus and priority into serving the greater Reclaiming/activist community. We would still create a community for ourselves, but our focus would really be on creating a community for others.

The closer we are to focusing on building a community for ourselves, the more we will relate to supporters as a pool of potential members and interested friends. The closer we are to creating a center for the greater Reclaiming/activist community, the more we will relate to supporters as co-creators of the community, reserving only those aspects of community-formation that entail financial risk for the members.

As a group, we are between those extremes, so we will need to figure out in which aspects we are more to one side or the other. Once we figure that out, deciding what to do about different policy issues will be easier to decide. Until then, we will have apples vs. oranges arguments without surfacing our underlying individual assumptions. --Sabo 20:02, 6 Dec 2006 (MST)