Intentional Communities are uniquely positioned to elevate its creative & collective organizing to address the systemic inequalities and disparities we face globally.
Many of us have lost community to the culture of hyper-individualism, mobility, and competition, and find ourselves longing for deeper human connections. At the same time, we are in a moment of cultural reckoning, with racialized capitalism, colonialism, and the affects of a profound disconnection from the natural world.
Building Belonging is both a practical guide for how to start a residential intentional community and a collective framework for addressing the racial, social, ecological and economic disparities affecting all aspects of the living experience for humans, land, and its co-inhabitants.
It offers an unprecedented perspective to creating intentional community that speaks directly to the reader who wants collective answers and who sees the deep benefit of community living as a key piece to addressing systemic issues.
Author Yana Ludwig brings wisdom and perspective from 25 years of intentional community experience and many years of training founders in starting intentional community. It is a give-back to the movement that nurtured Yana’s personal and professional growth for all those years, transforming her knowledge into a practical and honest guide unlike any other, uniquely built for its time.
The dream to create a more whole and connected life is one that awakens in people of all walks of life, with various histories and levels of access to land and wealth. The yearning to belong to a place and a people could be said to be inherent in our very nature.
Yana has 25 years of cooperative living experience, including four community start-ups. She served for over a decade on the Board of the Foundation for Intentional Community, and as a trainer, facilitator, and consultant for progressive projects since 2005. Yana is co-author of The Cooperative Culture Handbook: A Social Change Manual to Dismantle Toxic Culture and Build Connection and author of Together Resilient: Building Community in the Age of Climate Disruption, which won the 2017 Communal Studies Association Book of the Year Award.
Yana’s 2013 TEDx talk, Sustainable is Possible! (And it doesn’t suck…) kicked off an era for her as a public speaker and advocate for communities. She is a founding member of the Solidarity Collective, an income sharing community in Laramie, WY. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the North Coast Food Web in Astoria OR, where she lives with her partner, Matt Stannard, and a very large dog.
Find out more about Yana on her website: https://www.yanaludwig.net/.
Cooperative groups are our best hope for addressing climate disruption, racism, poverty, homelessness, oppression and even pandemics. The good news is that groups form every day to address these issues. The bad news is that they struggle with conflict, gridlock, power battles, and falling participation.
In short, we lack the skills to convert our passion and intelligence into effective action.
With 52 transformative group and individual exercises, here’s a practical toolkit for groups to solve problems, build community, and change culture towards greater empathy and authenticity. This is an essential resource for leaders, facilitators and changemakers to develop core practices in discernment, curiosity, communication and engagement.
Together Resilient is a book that advocates for citizen-led, community-based action first and foremost: why wait for the government when you can take action today, with your neighbors?
From small solutions to the full re-invention of the systems we find ourselves in, this book mixes anecdote with data-based research to bring you a wide range of options that all embody compassion, creativity, and cooperation.
Together Resilient looks at intentional community as a model for a low carbon future. While looking realistically at the state of the world and the realities of climate disruption, it finds hope in examples of communities that already live high quality lives that the planet can sustain.
It also looks at community as an essential element for surviving the coming (and already present) changes with more resilience and grace, and offers concrete examples of building community as a tool for reducing carbon emissions, outside the context of residential intentional communities.
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A residential project: people live here as their primary home.
An institution, business, network, or project that isn’t a residence (e.g. a learning center, farm, or network with no one living there full-time).
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