On one of the first nice days of spring in New England, Madison Healey, Jo Fuchs, and Gabriel Futterman sit around a wooden table in Kailasha house, the space they share with four others, picking at a bountiful lunch and deep in conversation about what it means to live in a place like this.
Sun washes through a large bank of windows in the rear of the house, blanketing the numerous plants and multicolored textiles in the open-concept living and dining rooms with its warmth. The space is bright, big, and quite lovely, qualities you might not guess from the unassuming exterior — aging wood coats the outside of the home, and there’s no decoration to speak of. At the table, Healey, whose deep green tank top and floral skirt mirror the tulip stems emerging from the freshly thawed ground outside, talks about the importance of conflict resolution, while Futterman talks about his larger utopian vision. They are residents of the Sirius Community in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, an intentional community and ecovillage centered around sustainable living.
Sirius is one of thousands of intentional communities across the country and the world, where people who often share values congregate to live in a more sustainable, communal way. Intentional communities are incredibly diverse, and there are many ways of building these kinds of groups — it’s likely that no two look the same. Still, they hinge on a group of people sharing both space and ideas, working toward a common goal. If mainstream society is largely individualistic, encouraging single people or families to rely on themselves for their needs, intentional community is about refilling your neighbor’s cup, and knowing they’ll do the same for you.
But Healey, 30, Fuchs, 22, and Futterman, 25, are in the minority in intentional communities at large. While
young people lead the intentional community movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it’s less common now to see swaths of people in their late teens or early 20s opt for this kind of life. Still, young people online seem to be interested, even if it’s only expressed through internet trends. The rise of the
cottagecore aesthetic and interest in
trad wife content is often rooted (at least in part) in an attraction to a “simpler” life, one less dependent on technology and more connected to nature and tradition. For people in intentional communities, their lifestyle may be an alternative to a mainstream that many young people see as
increasingly broken.
“What we’re noticing in more dominant trends are these basic things we understand: Housing sucks, it’s hard to find, it’s not
affordable, we can’t live alone,” says Kim Kanney, executive director of the Foundation for Intentional Community, a “resource hub” for intentional communities. “[Youth today are] waking up to the idea that we need to do this differently.”
That’s what brought Futterman to Sirius, and why he wants to see interest in intentional community spread.
Read the full article at Teen Vogue
