Networking organisation for residential communities
The Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC), formerly the Fellowship of Intentional Communities then the Fellowship for Intentional Community, provides publications, referrals, support services, and "sharing opportunities" for a wide range of intentional communities including: cohousing groups, community land trusts, communal societies, class-harmony communities, housing cooperatives, cofamilies, and ecovillages, along with community networks, support organizations, and people seeking a home in community. The FIC is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization in the United States.
Activities.
The FIC currently publishes the "Communities Directory", and the Intentional Communities web site. It also sponsors and presents periodic Community gatherings, including annual gatherings at Twin Oaks Community and other community-related events online and in various locations around the US.
Organizational history.
2019 – Present.
The summer 2019 Communities magazine issue reported a second name change for the FIC, this time to the "Foundation for Intentional Community." A new logo was created, an executive group of co-directors was instituted, and the FIC agreed to transfer Communities magazine to the Global Ecovillage Network – United States (GEN-US), a fellow GENNA Alliance member organization. With the Covid-19 pandemic beginning that year, most in-person community networking meetings ceased.
While the 1st Fellowship relied upon Community Service, and the 2nd Fellowship relied upon the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, the Foundation soon grew to be self-supporting through income from its own programs, especially the registrations for its online workshops, webinars, and trainings. The 2nd Fellowship had paid some staff members, yet with increasing income since 2020 the Foundation has been able to increase its staffing, providing improved and additional movement services.
Online community movement networking continued through the pandemic and after, and the new FIC began a series of virtual events, connecting people in community with each other, and connecting with those not in community who are interested in the lifestyle. The 2020 "FIC Annual Report" stated that the FIC’s online workshops and trainings attracted over 3,500 people paying sliding-scale registrations. Nearly a half-million people visited the FIC’s free online directory at IC.org, which presented over 1,000 intentional communities. 10,000 copies of free FIC e-books and guides were downloaded, and 1,500 books were distributed worldwide.
In 2020 the FIC created the BIPOC Intentional Communities Fund to encourage and support Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in joining or forming intentional community. Ten-percent of unrestricted donations to the FIC have been contributed to the fund. A BIPOC Council of interested persons was created to carry on outreach, and to set criteria for managing the fund and for granting awards. The Council began its first funding round in July, 2021.
The 2021 "FIC Annual Report" states the organization’s mission as, "We uplift, connect, and empower all those venturing to join, grow, and learn from intentional communities." And its vision as, "We envision a just, resilient, and cooperative world where everyone has the opportunity to thrive in community." That year the FIC began a series of very successful five-week courses on intentional community, which provides the largest amount of revenue of all the FIC programs, accounting for half of the organization’s income.
July, 2021 the FIC’s BIPOC Intentional Communities Fund began awarding grants to groups that have land or are ready to purchase land.
The FIC hosted over 100 online events in 2021, including webinars, workshops, trainings, courses, and networking, with over 10,000 attendees. Over 2,000 books, e-books, and videos were sold.
The 2022 "FIC Annual Report" states that the FIC added 109 new listings to the online Intentional Community database, and offered On-Demand Courses involving over 100 people, while 6,500 people participated in all of the FIC online events. The FIC sold 7,000 books in 2022, the Intentional Community Discussion Forum involved 1,000 users, and the Community Podcast presented 15 episodes, played 20,000 times for listeners in 51 countries. The BIPOC Intentional Communities Fund granted $15,000 to three BIPOC community projects in 2022.
1986 – 2019.
While the First Fellowship was begun by and largely sustained by Community Service and members of The Vale community, the Second Fellowship was largely sustained by the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC) founded in 1976, especially its largest member groups: Twin Oaks and East Wind. Both Community Service and the Federation devoted money and personnel to network the larger communities movement, for one decade in the case of Community Service, and for three decades in the case of the FEC.
When Charles Betterton undertook to reorganize the Fellowship ten years after the founding of the Federation, the Federation was well established and organized, and had been considering how to engage with the larger communities movement. The FEC was always and remains a small network of communities, with from 200 to maybe 250 people at the most. With both community-owned businesses and domestic reproduction integrated in a communal, gender-equal, labor-sharing, time-based economy in each community, the FEC contributed significant resources of time, money, and skills on a stable, long-term basis to the new community networking organization, the 2nd Fellowship.
Stelle Community in northern Illinois was started in 1973 with the intent of being a center for the survival of the human race beyond the disaster prophesied for the end of the millennium. One member of the community, Charles Betterton, began looking beyond Stelle to the idea that intentional community is important to the survival and growth of humanity, and thus began working for the intentional communities movement, looking to network existing organizations rather than form a new one.
During the years 1983 to ’86 Charles Betterton took a number of initiatives to build an inclusive community networking organization. Among them, he advocated the networking of existing intentional communities at academic conferences of the National Historic Communal Societies Association (NHCSA), now the Communal Societies Association (CSA), and negotiated with Twin Oaks Community to begin managing in 1984 "Communities" magazine, the movement journal that had been created at the 1972 Twin Oaks Communities Conference from a merger of three pre-existing publications: "Communitas", named after the 1947 book by Paul and Percival Goodman, published in Yellow Springs, Ohio; "Communitarian", a project of the Walden Three community in Providence, Rhode Island; and "Alternatives" journal, produced by the Alternatives Foundation or Alternatives Northwest at Limesaddle Community in Northern California. "Alternatives" was related to Richard Fairfield’s "Modern Utopian" newsletter and book. Several people at Stelle and elsewhere were attracted to Charles’ vision, working together to help realize it.
Charles Betterton attended the spring 1986 combined FIC/CESCI meeting at Tanguy Homesteads in Pennsylvania, also attended by: Herb Goldstein of Common Ground, VA, School of Living (SoL), Inter-Communities of Virginia (I-CV), and Community Educational Service Council (CESCI); Harvey Baker of Dunmire Hollow, TN; Allen Butcher of Twin Oaks, VA; representatives from the Camphill Village communities; and others. Charles announced that he would incorporate the FIC autumn of that year at Stelle, asking for interested persons to attend and form a board-of-directors. Allen suggested to Laird Schaub of Sandhill Farm, MO and the FEC that the Federation support the new FIC, and invited Dan Questenberry of Shannon Farm, VA and the newly reestablished I-CV, first active in the late 1960s and early '70s, to also support the new continental community networking initiative.
Five people attended the autumn of 1986 FIC incorporation meeting at Stelle and signed on as incorporators of the renewed FIC: Charles Betterton of Stelle Community; Allen Butcher of Twin Oaks Community, the School of Living, and I-CV; Laird Schaub of Sandhill Community and the FEC; Dan Questenberry of Shannon Farm in Virginia and I-CV; and Donald Pitzer of NHCSA and the Center for Communal Studies (CCS) at the University of Southern Indiana. One more FIC meeting was held at Stelle (spring 1987) before the Fellowship board was to go on the road, scheduling meetings to be hosted by different intentional communities. Charles Betterton soon dropped out of the FIC, later joining an Emissary community in Indiana called Oakwood Farm, and a four-person FIC administrative committee was created in his place.
At the 1988 Green Pastures, NH meeting a set of "Community Visit Report Guidelines" was created for FIC board members to make written reports of communities they visited as representatives of the FIC, with the intent of writing the report to be communicated to the group prior to the visit, assuring their right to review and respond.
Larid Schaub of Sandhill Farm, or simply Laird Sandhill, invited a number of community activists to the FIC board-of-directors, including Geoph Kozeny of Purple Rose/Stardance in San Francisco, Caroline Estes of Alpha Farm in Oregon, and Betty Didcoct of Linnea/Turtle Island Earth Stewards in Washington state, all three of whom had been active in the West Coast regional Earth Communities Network (ECN). Thus, the Fellowship for Intentional Community realized the ideal of a nation-wide representation of intentional communities in its organization.
Caroline Estes was a group-process trainer and consensus facilitator, Betty Didcoct lived in and was active in the community land trust movement, and Geoph Kozeny became the lead organizer for the 1990/91 Communities Directory, and created a two-DVD set of videos about intentional communities he had visited, titled "Visions of Utopia." The first volume published in 2004 presents an historical overview of intentional communities with profiles of seven contemporary groups, and the second volume published posthumously in 2009 by the FIC presents eleven more contemporary intentional communities.
Charles Betterton had taken out a CESCI loan to fund his publishing of "Communities" magazine, and was now in default since the publication could not obtain a sufficient circulation of paid subscriptions. By 1989 the FIC wanted to publish a new directory of intentional communities, since directories typically generated a positive cash-flow, yet did not have the money. At a CESCI board meeting Allen Butcher proposed making another loan to the FIC to print a directory. As soon as the proposal was approved, Dan Questenberry exploded with an incredulous expression of the group’s total lack of respect for orthodox business sense in our pouring of more money into something that had already lost a couple thousand dollars. Herb Goldstein’s smile at Dan’s faked protest expressed the sentiment that the group was doing absolutely what needed to be done. The FIC printed a succession of directories: 1990/91, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2016, all of which generated a positive cash-flow.
Gradually the FIC took on more and more movement activities, including publishing "Communities" magazine. Charles Betterton and staff at Stelle and elsewhere produced the magazine for eight years, until the FIC agreed to take it on, with Laird Sandhill serving as the Managing Editor, beginning with the fall/winter 1992 issue number 79.
The FIC organized a six-day, national conference called the "Celebration of Community" at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in August 1993, attended by about 800 people. The Celebration offered panel discussions, 160 workshops, and nine plenary presenters: Caroline Estes, Kirkpatrick Sale, Dorothy Maclean, Debra Lynn Dadd-Redalia, Corine McLaughlin, Gordon Davidson, Dr. Noel Brown, Patch Adams MD, and Catherine Burton. The event did a little better than break even.
In 1994 Elph Morgan (unrelated to the CSI Morgans) of the FIC acquired an Internet domain name, at IC.org, when it was still possible to get a two-letter domain. Along with Communities Directory book sales, the FIC created in 2004 an online, free, searchable database of intentional communities, supported by selling advertising on the website.
The FIC also took on management of the CESCI revolving loan fund, and took on the FEC's Community Bookstore, selling books online and at conferences of various community organizations. In 1997 the FIC began conducting a series of "Art of Community" weekend educational and networking gatherings.
Laird Sandhill reported an awareness in 2006 on the part of the "Communities" magazine staff of a significant change in the communities movement. Previously, there had been an assumption that most intentional communities were nonprofit organizations, including land trusts and communal societies. However, there was a growing movement of communities organized as forms of for-profit organization, especially cohousing communities using the condominium legal structure, which comprised about one-third of all the groups in the 2010 "Communities Directory". Another form of for-profit community is those in which the land is owned by one person, a couple, or a small group of members with others as renters. Data analysis of the 2010 "Communities Directory" shows that twenty-percent of the listings were of the owner/renter type, with the largest example being Ganas Community on Staten Island, NY. A name in use for this type of community is "class-harmony community," indicating that the group