Sharing Resources in an Intentional Community

Does everyone need their own wheelbarrow?

From 2005 to 2020, I lived in an intentional community and I loved it. A friend of mine called my home a hippie commune but that’s not quite accurate. While all hippie communes are intentional communities, not all intentional communities are hippie communes.

The Fellowship for Intentional Community defines an intentional community as follows:

An inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing communities, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, intentional living, alternative communities, cooperative living and other projects where people strive together with a common vision.

At my community, most of us lived in our own apartments. These ranged in size and layout. A handful of residents lived in rooms that shared a kitchen and bathrooms.

A new-agey vegetarian church with an eastern bent ran the intentional community where I lived, with meditation and yoga as the theme. Although my kids attended the church’s school and I lived in the community, I never joined the congregation nor felt pressured to do so. The community was pretty laid back.

You could participate in community life as much or as little as you liked and the only rule I remember was “No barbecuing meat outside.” (You didn’t have to be vegetarian to live there though.)

Some of the resources we shared at the community

Community gardens

The community ran a CSA (community supported agriculture) for residents who wanted to purchase a weekly box of organic produce during the growing season. The program began with produce from the community gardens and expanded after the church bought a farm.

This garden used to be a driveway

Community compost

This may sound like a little thing. But between working full time, shuttling kids around, cooking—and writing about cooking—I didn’t have a lot of spare time when I lived at the community. I really appreciated someone else taking care of the compost bin. (Go here for info on how to compost.)

Kitchen and community room

In the community kitchen four nights a week, willing residents cooked vegetarian dinners or cleaned up afterward. (Cooking, cleaning and eating in the kitchen were all voluntary.) Cooks and cleaners received a discount on the already inexpensive food. My daughter MK cooked often in the kitchen. I cooked occasionally.

In this large space, I also taught fermentation to my neighbors and held sewing bees. Some of us cut fabric on the two large kitchen islands while others cranked out reusable cloth produce bags at the dining tables. (Go here for sewing instructions.) We give these bags away at the farmers’ market to reduce plastic waste and raise awareness about plastic pollution—and build community!

The community kitchen

Childcare

When my kids were little, what would I have done without the other parents to watch them from time to time? I always found childcare at the last minute from another mom or a willing (and nice) teen in need of cash. And I often looked after my neighbors’ kids also.

Carpool

We community moms arranged a carpool to our kids’ school. That saved me at least an hour on each of the three days a week I didn’t have to drive. It also cut down on gas and wear and tear on my car. (I still have a car but I rarely drive it.)

Pet care

I didn’t have to put Baby Cat and Bootsy in a kennel when I left town. In the Bay Area, cat boarding can cost $50 a night! Per cat! I would pay my lovely neighbor Uma less than that to check in on and feed my cats twice a day and it helped us both out. Uma loved the cats and would get down on the floor to play with them. Uma was beloved in the community. She passed away in 2021.

Equipment

Some of this doesn’t vary much from any apartment complex. When a large group of people live together, each of us does not need our own ladder, hedge clippers, wrenches, washing machine and so on. Sharing in this way is “bad” for the GDP (an artificial construct) but great for the planet (very real) and our wallets.

Random stuff

I used to make my own liquid laundry detergent (similar to this) in a huge pot. Rather than spending hard-earned cash on a huge pot that I might use half a dozen times a year and trying to find space for it in my small galley kitchen, I borrowed a gigantic pot from the community kitchen. Of course, you can borrow stuff from neighbors—if you know your neighbors. A lot of us don’t.

Communities come in different forms

Community can help mitigate many environmental and social problems. Organizing neighborhood block parties, planting natives in common spaces, tending community gardens and creating a forum in which to communicate are just some ways we can create community where we live. Not everyone wants to or can live in an intentional community. (But if you’re interested, search for them around the world here.)

Disconnected from one another—either in single-family homes, behind screens, working constantly or all of the above—many of us try to consume our way to happiness. Working together (and sometimes living together) in small communities can provide purpose and meaning. And it’s a lot harder to sell people more stuff they don’t need if they have purpose and meaning in their lives.