Introduction
Welcome back to Community Resilience, a podcast created in collaboration with the EcoVillage Resilience 2.5 Degree Project, facilitated by the Global EcoVillage Network. I’m your host, Eva Goldfarb, inviting you to gather around the fire as we explore resilience, adaptation, and transformation in our time of deepening polycrisis.
Bill Hartzell’s initial venture into intentional community occurred when he became a resident of the Xanadu cooperative house at the University of Michigan in the late 1970s. 20 years later he and his partner Sandy joined the cohousing movement which was gaining popularity in Seattle, Washington, western USA. Taking their gained experience to the east coast ,to be with their aging parents, Bill and Sandy set out to create a cohousing community in rural Pennsylvania, where collaboration, land preservation, and sustainable practices were fundamental principles.
The result of their efforts is the Hundredfold Farm Community. Today, we are joined by Bill and one of Hunderdfold’s newer community members, Devon Kehler. Devon has been drawn into various expressions of communitarianism from a young age. The principle of interdependence is what keeps Devon steadfast in their commitment to communal living. At Hundredfold Farm, Devon is nurturing their skills and creative practices in facilitation, collaborative leadership, and gardening. How Devon shows up in community is deeply shaped by feminist mentoring, the power of queer kinship and a 20 year partnership with their beloved, Anna.
Together, Bill and Devon offer insight to how old memories and new memories can come together to build resilience and community.
Interview
Eva: Welcome. We are here today with Devon Keller and Bill Hartzell of 100-Fold Farm’s community co-housing. It’s so nice to have you here. Wanting to start by letting you both introduce yourself a little bit, who you are, how you found yourself here, and a few sentences. I know that’s a challenge.
Devon: No, it’s a welcome challenge. I’m Devon and I found myself at 100-Fold through a multi-year discernment process with my partner. We started seriously considering the intentional community movement in the United States about four to five years ago at the point we were living in Phoenix, Arizona and wanted to make a commitment to a more long-term residency somewhere and ended up moving to the more traditional market-based process for our housing at that particular juncture in our lives. But it actually didn’t sit that well with us as we moved through that process and didn’t totally reflect who we were as people with our and ended up almost immediately after we had closed in our house coming back to the drawing board together to revisit the possibility of folding in intentional communities more thoroughly. And at the same time, COVID-19 was just getting started and because life got so stripped down, we could actually quiet as a family and a couple to do more intense discernment work together, not just like one person or one partner bringing stuff to the other and trying to do a persuasive campaign to onboard them to the other three point. And that was pivotal for us to use those early months in COVID to connect with the Foundation for Intentional Community and move through some trainings with them on how to select a community that would reflect our values and ethics. And we were trying to prioritize a return to the East Coast of the United States at the same time. So, these moving pieces led us to Hundredfold by the end of 2020, December of 2020 is when we made our first site visit here. And from our site visit, we kept Hundredfold in play for the next year while we also considered other communities and were able to make the transition to Hundredfold by the end of 2021, beginning of 2022. We had a journey, but it’s really been a dream come true to be here.
Eva: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing. We have a hug for those listening and not seeing. You talk about your journey to coming to Hundredfold and it felt like something was missing in the other housing pursuits. Can you name what was missing and what you found at Hundredfold?
Devon: Yeah. So, we felt actually ecologically challenged to live out our ethics and Hundredfold has made that alignment possible to manifest every single day. We felt socially like we were not in the best situation either with our previous housing situation. And because we’re a really small community at Hundredfold, there’s only about 20 of us here. It’s a really good amount of people for my partner and I to be in close contact with. We learned through some of our other community explorations that the larger communities were not for us in terms of our nervous systems. And those were two really big drivers, ecological setup here, as well as our social setup.
Eva: Thank you for elaborating. I think we will get into the social and economic models a little bit later. Bill, do you mind sharing a bit your journey?
Bill: So, Bill Hartz, boy, my journey here began probably in the fall of 1980. It’s time being in university and living in a group home with a collaborative cooperative home in which I ended up meeting the person who I’ve been married to for 40-some years. But we, after university, found ourselves on the West Coast out in Seattle. And being a young family starting out, both my wife and I are East Coasters, ended up out there. And basically, finding ourselves where a lot of people, I think, that I’ve crossed paths with who found their way to the community, being surrounded by people, but being isolated. And I think I’m hearing what you’re saying. So, this was late 80s, early 90s. And we just happened to stumble upon the co-housing movement in the Seattle area, which was relatively new at that point. So, we were early participants in co-housing in the Northwest. We actually participated for over a year with one community that hadn’t broken ground, but ended up moving to another one that had been there for a while. So, our early introduction really as a family to the larger community beyond just a single roof was co-housing. And ultimately, family kind of drew us back as our parents and grandparents got older. We didn’t see them as often. We decided to make the move. And it was a huge decision on our part to come back East. But part of that decision was, if we’re coming East, we’re going to bring co-housing with us. So, we loaded up the truck with two little boys and two snakes and my wife. We drove back here in 97. And through just word of mouth, start talking about our experience out West in community. Eventually, the stars aligned here.
We had to push some of those stars in alignment. A group of us came together and bought this land in 2000. And we’re still here. So, we’re early folks. We’re the early members of this community. It’s been a 30-some year process to get here to this moment with you, Eva. Definitely a worthwhile journey.
Eva: I’m so glad you made it.
Bill: Me too.
Eva: I know we have a lot of parallel movements, but is there anything special in co-housing while you identify 100 Fold Farm as a co-housing community that you would like to share?
Bill: That’s an interesting one because for several years, I was a member of the Coho US Board. I was the president for four years. And honestly, it was a bit of a challenge to me because, boy, I’m more in tune with the world of FIC in terms of the types of communities. But for where we were at the time and co-housing being very new and more attractive to, let’s say, younger families in the 90s who had no experience with community, it was a good starting place and still is for many people. So, we wanted to do something different when we left that community, came back east. And even though being aware of the ecovillage movement and the definitions there and the expectations, we took the co-housing model and used it here because people were familiar with it. And we are still the only co-housing community in Pennsylvania. After all these years, there’s some other ones that have tried to start and have fallen to the wayside. We were so thrilled to take some of the things, not really realizing they fell into the realm of ecovillage in terms of the economic side of things, the ecological bit of things.
So, we’ve kind of become an ecovillage without that actually being the intent. Coming back with the GEN Project and realizing, wait a minute, this is who we’ve been all along. This is who we are. It’s been a wonderful experience to see that and seeing other people kind of go, oh, this is where we are. This is who we are. So, we basically took the co-housing model as something that was familiar to people, and we kind of did our own version of it. So, I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s kind of what I’ve got.
Eva: That answers my question perfectly. Thank you both so much. Anything to add, Devon? I know you’re more recent, but…
Devon: Yeah, I’d say actually just the couple-year view of the community has given me the perspective that we’re kind of the best of both models at this point. We still have some architectural design features, landscape features that I think signal strongly of co-housing, but our social design, our economic design, I think that tracks us more towards ecovillage. So, I think we’re a really good example of blending models.
Eva: Yeah, this is great groundwork. You also mentioned that you’re in Pennsylvania just to give people a geographical perspective of the conversation. And now to more or less set the frame for resilience, which is what this project has been talking about. We are defining resilience as the ability to cope with change. And while overall ecovillages and co-housing community ecovillages are acting as what we’d like to call living laboratories. So, modeling how we might live as humans in the future. I found through my work with this podcast that a lot of ecovillages have varying degrees of relationship with resilience and what it truly means to be resilient. And I’m wondering what your relationship with the word has been since you started this project. Was it already a theme in Hundredfold Farms, working with resilience, or is this something that has been woven more deeper into the conversation since you became involved with it?
Devon: Yeah, so I’m thinking back to some of the early workshops and activities towards the beginning of the research program that were really definitional in their orientation. And I feel like a lot of the community membership was leaning into keywords that maybe are culturally in place here in the US. When we think of resilience, folks were responding to the term itself as like, how do we problem solve? How do we strategize when we face change? And the benefit of doing this project all together is that we have now a common language and shared definitions of the keyword of resilience and its nested terminology of buffering, adapting, transforming in relationship to disturbances, where I’m not sure that language was at least at the collective level. We have a number of folks who are scientists by training and probably from their own professional life have that language available to them, but it is now the common discourse here at the community level, where I don’t know that it was before, but that’s one of the great benefits of having done this program together.
Bill: Until this project, I don’t think it were in the forefront, but it was a concept to a great degree already kind of ingrained in the vision for the community. So a lot of the things that we’ve done here, especially on the physical side, is as we found out, we feel ourselves more resilient in a changing world and kind of foreseeing some things coming down the pipeline 20 years ago influenced a lot of our choices about solar homes and our use of recycled water, not really realizing at the time how incredibly important it would become because 20 years ago, yeah, there was some conversation about climate change and we were starting to see changes, but it wasn’t quite yet at the forefront.
Eva: We’re digging into that history a little bit. One of the exercises you underwent during the project was the historical timeline, and you wanted to share a bit about that. I’m wondering what fundamental changes you’ve observed in the community over the years. This is probably a question for you, Bill.
Bill: I’m going to defer to Devon, and then I’ll kind of add to that if I may.
Devon: Yeah, that’s fine. And I think one of the fascinating parts of having the historical timeline activity early in this research project, again, was that it rose a kind of oral tradition of history and storytelling that is critical to have space and time set aside for. And then we have actually left that timeline up in our common house, where we hold meetings and common meals. It has stayed up for over a year. And the visibilization of that history shows some shifts around what energizes people. That was one of the things I was most struck by, tracking energy levels across time. And at least the night we did that storytelling around history, building and construction activities were one of the main markers people used to define the passage of time in the community. The phase where the group’s forming, there’s not yet a site selected, there’s no activity at the infrastructure level. The years of that kind of had a pre-build definition to them. And the energy for that is really different than when you’ve made the commitment to a place, you now need to work with each other on all the infrastructure development. And that was its own really distinct kind of energetic signature for folks in the community when the bulk of the houses were being constructed, when the infrastructure was being laid. And then what in some ways was characterized as like a post-build period, we have not had a new home built a hundred fold since 2010. And that for some folks really shifted again, the energetic signature to the community to not have that sort of activity, that construction activity to rally around. And that was something that I had not anticipated learning from the historical timeline activity that’s just really given me a better understanding of how some of the consciousness around community life has cemented for some folks. Though also in the timeline in our most recent history, over the year 2022, we had a turnover of nearly half the community. So there’s a shift in that consciousness connected to building. It’s not a lived experience for many of us at this point. It’s not like a bodily memory as it is for the folks like Bill, who have been here since the early forming period. So we have this very, it’s both a forward and a backwards kind of energy that I’ve been really sitting with since doing that activity, the things that are still with us because there’s some really clear energy memories connected to them. But then for the folks who are new and acclimating to the community like myself, we’re trading in different memories almost sometimes.
I wouldn’t have learned that, I don’t think, had not that activity happened.
Eva: It’s really interesting to divide it so clearly into these three phases, the pre-build, the building, the post-building. Do you have any verbs or action words that you could associate with these different phases that you learned through the timeline?
Bill: I’m having an emotional response thinking about the early years, like where you are now. It’s not an action word maybe, but I think of thrill. I just so love that early, the possibilities that exist. Back then, early on, these people sitting together and thinking, what are we going to do with this in a good way? We’re going to have this canvas to create something that no one’s created around here. To be able to share that with the larger community, to show how we can do things differently together. Excitement, just the thrill of that, to see that early on. That comes to mind initially, seeing that timeline, thinking about that period again, which I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Just to be able to create something new with other people and how exciting that is and energizing that is to do that. Well, to create anything on any scale, but to do what we did here, at least at that point, to start it without knowing whether or not you were actually going to accomplish it, which is a huge thing to set out on a journey with no guarantee and be with a group of people that all supported each other in that journey. We’re all sharing that emotional risk, but it’s worth it.
Devon: The excitement, the energy from that warming period, then once we get to the more outward physical construction phase, it’s for what I sense from the group, the energy of manifesting. That’s a very unique kind of action to be able to live into and claim as your action word for what you’re up to. I would also guess stressful. I’m not sure anyone named that, but that’s a period of disruption as well to be coordinating and juggling so many variables from the home construction to the infrastructure level to the greenhouse. We have a greenhouse on site that holds our wastewater treatment facilities. There’s a lot of moving pieces that were happening during that. I guess that would have been 2005 through 2010. Then after 2010, we are a community that still has capability for several more homes to be constructed and hopefully one on the way based on some recent developments on our end. With a very discerning person, we have that downshift in terms of what feels exciting, what feels like manifesting, because I think the physical signals are not so obvious anymore. It’s not that things aren’t happening, but they are at a more invisible level because now you’re really in this social cultural space of living into what you have designed. It’s just not often outwardly quite the sort of thing where you can point to and be like, yeah, that’s the thing we’ve done. Now we are in community together, which for some people I think felt like a drop, but for others, it was just the next stage in the plan for developing and maintaining a community. I felt there was a more disparate energy, if we can just stick to the language of the post. Yeah, that was more, I felt from the group, a little bit more of an uneven experience to shift into.
Bill: I think also, I mean, thinking about that timeline again, it’s so neat that we’ve left it in the common house, and I’ve actually proposed, we need to make it permanent. We need to paint it and keep growing it, just wrapping it around the rooms as it goes, so it’s always there forever for people to look at and not forget. The result of that, it’s easy, people who want comfort tours. I was just talking to somebody yesterday who wants to come for a tour, and they want to see the house. It’s always been a challenge to kind of, that’s here, it’s easy to see, it’s physical, you can touch it, but that’s really not what the community is. I mean, it’s a part of it, it augments the community, there’s decisions made about how things are built to kind of support communities, but the social side of it. But going back to the timeline, thinking about the social side, the timeline is kind of a series of events, the build, the post-build, COVID, all these things, it also made me sad, and I can see that, but I also remember all those people who have come into my life and left my life that got us all here, people who were involved early on who have since passed away, knowing that this is a collective process, and that’s the value of this, and that kind of rubs me a little bit about the houses, and your common house, and then going back to your question about co-housing. Now, maybe that’s kind of what I was trying to get at there, kind of like, for me, co-housing, it’s been a challenge to kind of be a spokesperson for the social side of that experience, because its origins was architectural, but I know I’m kind of drifting here, but…
Eva: The transition we were talking about, from co-housing to eco-village a bit, integrating the social and the cultural side as well, you briefly brought that in, Devin. I would love to hear if you think you’ve defined a culture, or if you’re building the culture now, maybe that’s your phase three.
Devon: Yeah, I think we’re actively in a social building phase. This project has inspired some things that are going to carry us, I think, a couple years out, where we’re going to be looking more closely at each of these dimensions of community life, that from GEN’s definitional model of eco-villages, we have, of course, the ecological.
Bill: We’re in a phase of rebirthing. Jen could not have come at a better time for us, because we had, even before GEN, we’re trying to kind of go back and revisit the vision for the community with such a substantial turnover of members, and a fear that newer people coming in, or wanting to make sure they felt a sense of ownership, and what and who we are, and wanting to go back and revisit this document that was the original vision for something that was drafted 20 years ago, and most of those people aren’t here anymore. So, it’s really important to me to kind of reopen that, because many of the newer people have limited community experience, in terms of intentional community. What Devin and their partner went through to kind of get here, I really, really appreciate. I’m excited about the possibilities that have come out of this conversation from GEN, because the next step for us is kind of taking what we’ve learned from this, what we’ve identified. Now, let’s go back and talk about the vision for this community, in light of what we’ve learned about ourselves, our new selves, from this process. So, thank you for that. It’s amazing how things kind of fall into place. You don’t know which way you’re going to go. Things just kind of happen. The universe provides. So many times here, so many times when you thought you were lost, and you didn’t know which way to go, something always kind of comes up. You kind of go, what?
Devon: Yeah, yeah.
Eva: Have you had any tools that have helped you in this process of revisioning that you would offer to another community, maybe a few years behind you in the process?
Devon: Well, from the Resilience Project Toolkit, I’d say when we did the Three Horizons activity, combined with the storytelling piece from that, that was a really excellent opportunity to do some visioning that will return to our personal community plans actually to initiate a strategic planning phase as soon as we wrap up our gen time. So, by late spring, early summer, we’ve already laid the groundwork for how we’ll move from this research program and pivot immediately so we don’t lose momentum, we don’t lose focus, we don’t lose energy into strategic planning. And I know the things that came up from that particular workshop, the Three Horizons workshop, will be revisited in that light since we’ll return to vision, mission, values very early on in that strategic planning phase for us. And we have, I found, very compelling visions of the future, like where we can track ourselves towards by 2050, the kind of community I still want to live in, the community that I think will be resilient enough to shift registers between buffering, adapting, and transforming as we continue to experience climate degradation.
Eva: I would like to maybe dig in a bit to that overall resilience and also passing on advice. Having lived in community, what do you see as gifts that the ecovillage movement or ecovillages in this project can give to the wider world, to someone living in a city?
Bill: For me, you’re asking ecovillage, but for me it’s community in all its flavors. What can be accomplished amongst people and with other people? I mean, especially here in the States, I mean, we’re so fixated with our mythology about the rugged individualist and you think anything has really been accomplished of great value and it’s been by a group of people. And even today, when people come together trying to accomplish something, there’s initial suspicion. But I think what communities have to share, if I can kind of keep it that broad, is just the value of that collaboration, that we don’t need to be isolated. We don’t need to try to live out this mythology because it really doesn’t work. So for us, it was really important to be not a gated community in any way, and to be a demonstration project of what people can do in an area of Pennsylvania that’s very conservative, very conservative, but to show that people can come together to look after each other. And look after a place and build resiliency in terms of relationships, but also how we exist in the world. And we’ve been pretty darn successful. I think, in that regard, people know of us and people have come to talk to us about how and what we do. Because we’ve done so many different things. We didn’t know any better not to make it as complicated as we did early on. No one told you can’t do all this stuff. Actually, we did have people tell us you can’t. It’s just not possible. You can’t do that. It’s not going to work. And, you know, whether it’s, you know, our collaborative decision making process, and we were talking about this at a meeting not too long ago. I think it was a community meeting. It wasn’t a GEN’s workshop, but just the things that the skills that we’ve learned here in community, working with people, taking that out for those of us still work out into the world, taking that out into the world to try to integrate it into collaborative process in the workplace or the school place and be able to demonstrate that. And I think that’s one of the gifts. I think just sort of the collaboration and working together and demonstrating that that does work. That does work. And there’s, you know, the synergy of that. The product of that is so much greater than what any one person can do. I can’t imagine any one of us kind of doing what we did here. It’s just impossible.
Devon: Yeah, that was, I’m thinking back even to when Anna, my partner and I were considering Hundredfold perspective members, the sense of cooperative culture was an early, like, I’m noticing that and then now living here and living out the governance model that’s got consensus decision making at its heart. That cooperative culture is one of the things in terms of gifts that is, I think, a ready link to ecological, the view and living out ecological interdependence. These to me have a through line that when you’re in a community setting that really values and seeks to demonstrate cooperative culture, you have clearer pathways to feeling your relationship to land as interdependent. And from living here for a couple years now, there’s an aspect of the life cycle that I think is super important, a super important gift that ecovillages specifically can offer. And it’s actually the decomposition phase in the life cycle, because we’re on 80 acres of land and there’s like mixed ecosystems here, I can see decomposition, I can see it, I can feel it, I can smell it. For communities that may not have quite that tangible, tactile access to decomposition, things like just start composting, even if it’s the urban version, which I did with my partner, we’ll set things aside in the bucket and the compost service will come and pick it up. But if you’re still relating to a critical part of the life cycle and not forgetting about it, or underappreciating, it must happen. Decomposition must happen for rebirth to be possible. We get to do that, not just in the ecological sphere. In our community, we get to do it by holding ourselves to different social and cultural values that we have to be attentive to decomposing or how most of us are socialised according to hyper-individualism. You know, we got to work on getting ourselves out of that mindset, dropping that competitive edge most of us are trained to use with each other on both the human and non-human levels. And those are gifts too that again are not so hard to point to, but you can effectively register these things that communities offer to the wider world. We get to decompose some of our mental and emotional habits that are toxic and harmful to each other.
Eva: That is so beautifully said, just taking a moment. That is such a gift of community to have the social ability to decompose emotions and trauma. Go ahead, Bill, and then I’ll come in with another question.
Bill: One of the kind of “aha” moments for me, and I mentioned this, we’re talking, Devon and I were talking about this before, and it kind of came to me late in this process. I mean, by training, I’m an ecologist. So there’s a vocabulary there that is ingrained in the GEN process that I have never thought to apply to a community situation. So I have a vocabulary for community and I have a vocabulary for ecological principles. And here’s this person trying to cause me to try to put these things together into a common language. And it was challenging for me to like, no, you can’t use that. I mean, in my head, it was like, you can’t use that word that way. That doesn’t apply to that. That’s not what that means. But talking with Devon and working with this, it just suddenly just like, wait a minute. And it was decomposition that really struck me in terms of ideas. And it’s not just decomposition because in my mind, it’s kind of linear. It’s the recycling of the products of decomposition. So we think of ecological systems and apply that to a community in terms of the timeline again, things that had happened in the past. There are nutrients there in our early history that need to be broken down and not parted off site, but we need to kind of recycle these to build new things here. So to have that breakthrough for me was such a pleasure. It’s like, wow, thinking more circular in terms of community, as I think of ecosystems with limited nutrients. Yeah, decomposition is just a part of it. What’s more important is that that’s in place, but also that we can take the products of that and bring it back into the community.
Eva: Yeah, who’s to say if it’s the last stage or the first stage of the cycle.
Devon: Exactly. And what kind of decomposer you need for what, like, I think about the difference bacteria does compared to fungi and the way like nutrients are released and reabsorbed differently depending on what it is that you’re breaking down.
Bill: You might have seen this once or twice since you’ve been here, but we have a welcoming ceremony that we do for newer folks. And one small piece that we don’t focus on a whole lot is a mandala that I brought home from a trip to Sri Lanka a long time ago. And it becomes kind of a tablecloth where we do things on it. So just that circle of life. And here we are, this thing that we’ve used, it kind of goes again, it’s like things that we didn’t realize how important they were back in the day. And suddenly, wow, now we’re talking decomposition in the circle of life and around and around we go. In terms of community, it’s just like that’s, in my mind, even a more important artifact of our history.
Devon: And in placing in that ceremony, this gets at one of our longer standing cultural traditions when we have people actually move into community after that point, they have a welcoming ceremony. The mandala textile art is, for me, I remember the first time. I feel like it is within the Buddhist tradition that when a mandala is made, it’s like immediately erased, like it gets created in sand. Yeah, typically a sand medium to make a mandala. And then it’s like, that was shocking to me that you would make something so exquisite, and then immediately clear it away. Yes, to demonstrate. All right, it’s done, it’s been composed. Now, it’ll be decomposed and remade some other ways. And I hadn’t actually thought as much about having the mandala as a central symbol in that welcoming ceremony.
Bill: It just popped in my head just now. I
Eva: It’s welcomed into our story.
Devon: Story is leading the story.
Eva: Aside from this welcome ceremony with the mandala, do you have other ceremonies or practices that help compost the social regeneration, or the social quote unquote waste produced in the community process?
Devon: Yeah, some of these are kind of newer experiments that we’re trying since this most recent recomposition of the community, socially speaking. We’re trying different meal gathering activities that are a little bit more low key, just kind of indoor picnic style in the winter months, especially where a community member just offers their space or their home. And it’s just sort of bring your own light dinner and gather around. That’s starting to set, it’s been about a year of a experiment with that as a way to address, I think, several things happening at once. You know, the isolation piece from COVID-19 had a long tail to it, and communal meals dropped out during that time. So rebuilding shared meal scene is starting to happen. Well, when we have someone in the community die or someone connected to community die, there’s been some sort of tree planting as a longstanding cultural tradition that’s still being observed. That I think ties together, you know, we have a death and we will invite life from the death.
Bill: In that regard, you and Anna brought something new to us.
Devon: Yeah, when my partner and I were living in Arizona, one of the very first major cultural events we experienced was Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. And Jen gets at this sometimes, but it has a spiritual significance to me. And that’s a way of relating to death that we have had some Day of the Dead gatherings, I guess, two of them. Time will tell if that becomes a cultural tradition. But it has been so far in our community reflection and experience a Day of the Dead ways for us to, I want to break this word a little bit, but like, re-member that we all have ancestors and ancestral knowledge that we carry with us. Again, it’s invisible, but it’s with us. And it re-influenced each other on this level. And that’s been one of the major things that have come up, like I’ve learned and could relate to community members differently because of what was shared during those Day of the Dead events.
Bill: The turnouts have been small, but they’ve been incredibly powerful. And this kind of goes back to that timeline and thinking about, for me, that’s a time for me to think about those people who God has here who are community members who have passed, dear friends, but also family members. And it does give you insight into other community members and the things that influenced them and made them who they are. And it’s so outside, I think, our culture to do that kind of thing. So I really, really appreciate you bringing that and sharing that with us.
Devon: Yeah, it’s one of those things. It’s a helpful moment in the seasonal cycle, too. Not to lose sight that we each are becoming ancestors. And your legacy is built every day, not just towards some distinct end-of-life timeline, but we’re doing that now. And so having time regularly set aside for that is, again, I think an important practice. For me, it tracks on the spiritual level, but it has significant cultural impact, too.
Eva: When we’re talking about resilience and a way of coping with change, coming to peace with death and having a transformed relationship with this, especially for those of us in the Western world, I think is a very important part of the process. Thank you so much for sharing. That was very juicy compost conversation. You had also shared at the beginning, before we started recording, that you wanted to share a bit about your economic model and how you have been able to create resilience economically. And I just wanted to open the floor for that, if you have a way you would like to start. Otherwise, I’ll come up with a question.
Devon: Yeah.
Bill: I was going to say, thinking about social, thinking about ecological and economic, the first two, we’ve done really well in creating a foundation for social. I mean, there’s always more work to be done, always work to be done to fine-tune that. And also talking about the ecological things that we’ve done in terms of what we’ve built, but also what we look after here. I would say the economic side has been challenging in many different ways. And it’s almost more personal than so many things, especially, again, talking about our culture and how we deal with money and talk about money. I’m going to talk to you about my money. And so, even though we do not have a shared economy here, that’s one of the aspects of co-housing. It’s usually a pretty early question when we’re talking to people interested. No, we don’t share money. I’ll loan you some money. But otherwise, it’s not part of who we are. That’s been challenging. We’ve kind of been up and down, and we need to do more work with that going forward. Because when we first started Hundredfold, and again, not really setting out to be an ecovillage and understanding that the economic part of it is a key part of that definition back in the day. Our original goal and expectations here didn’t really have a large economic component to it, other than personal economics, which is going to cost me a little bit. But we ended up buying a property that had an operating business. So, this property, we were looking for a fairly substantial piece of property. There’s a lot of gardeners here and thinking about creating a CSA and growing here and feeding ourselves. So, that was a very key part, and it still is. But there was an operating Christmas tree on this property, and we’re just kind of like, oh my gosh. So, not only do we want to create the first co-housing community in Pennsylvania, let’s also run a business, and we barely know each other. So, again, this kind of goes back to not knowing what we can’t do. So, right early on, the only way we found, with the help and advice of others, that we really kind of worked, because we had an operating business here that helped offset the cost of being here for us. And we ran that business collectively for 15 years. So, that economic component was ingrained in this, and for reasons we don’t have enough time today, that business kind of went to the wayside. So, we’re back to not having that business operating anymore. So, that was really the stumbling block when we were trying to revisit vision prior to the GEN project, because we could easily talk about community, the social side. We could talk about the ecological side and feel pretty good about it. But we kept getting stuck on the economic part of it, because, I think, just the personal aspects of it. And this project, in the past year and a half, talking more about that and trying to wrap our heads around, for the newer people, really, the economic model of us, not just beyond the dues and what we pay and what we own, what’s the budget look like? There’s that bigger picture. And Devon’s really done an excellent job in kind of expanding, at least in, again, my head, challenging me. When I think of economics, I just sort of thought of the boundary of this place, almost like the physical boundary. Not thinking about how each one of us is an element of a larger economy outside, and what’s happening out there, economically, is going to impact us. So, GEN project, in general, just kind of throwing that much larger view of things. But I think we have work to do.
Devon: Yes, and I think some of what is a more unique GEN-supported toolkit, tool set, around economic resiliency is not limiting an understanding of economics to finances. Like, just before this resilience project began, I, along with another community member, did a couple sessions on time banking. How time is a kind of currency we could start exploring. My partner and I are massive advocates of bartering. If you want some kind of something from us, like, Anna and I both cut hair, we do pop-up barber shop periodically throughout the year. If you want your hair cut, don’t pay me. I will not take your money. Instead, if you could fix the toilet, that would be excellent. We get kind of stuck, and sometimes the best way into unsticking a group with a question is actually to change which door you’re entering through. If we’re not going to get so far entering through the front door of finances, let’s take other side doors and see what kind of playroom and imagination space we have there. And I imagine those things are going to resume again once we wrap this project return to this visioning work, which will kick off our strategic planning season. But there’s other things, too, that I really wish to feel kind of back to decomposition, like the business that Bill mentioned that was operational at the point the community formed and the community ran collectively for 15 years. The last business season, I think, was 2015 for that tree farm, but it’s kind of been in a limbo state since then. Will it be reactivated? Won’t it be? And just recently, while we’ve been going through this research project, the decision was made to officially sunset it, to decompose it actively. And I think that will, as time goes on, actually clear up some energetic space and return nutrients that are needed to get clear on what the next community income earning activity could be. Those are some points about economics, just like not limiting that word to mean only money. And I feel like I really just want to give a shout out to some of our community ancestors, too, who took massive economic risks themselves to make this project possible. To 20, 25 years down the road, make points of access to the community different than they were for the original group that formed the community. Those are sacrifices that I still feel are palpable. And I think change, because we have a monthly dues model for how our operational budget is realized, that can shift. That dues number might be different if we had a different set of people at the very early stage that made different choices.
Bill: Being one of those people, I just thank you. But it’s also kind of interesting just that it’s not you, but to think about the timeline again, and not just the emotion and the time, which is actually more important to me than the money. Time is limited. I can’t make more time. I’d really like to make more time. So it’s been a hell of a ride. High highs, low lows, but I would not have experienced it. The economic stuff, for me personally, but it’s interesting how people in the community, they won’t react to the time invested. They won’t react to maybe the emotion. They weren’t there. But when they hear a number, a dollar amount, they’re like, oh my gosh. It’s just interesting that term, or it’s a feeling that they have because of their relationship with money. Over the years, people have built, don’t you think some of these people should cough up some money and give you that money back? Could you? No. It’d be great, yeah. But again, it’s just the relationship that people have with things. So that conversation about economics, it really isn’t so much what had happened. I mean, we are here, but how do we meld that to ensure that we’re still here in the future? Because one of the things, I mean, looking back at our history, it’s easy to kind of decompose stuff. But just thinking, and one of the reasons some of these businesses that we have, we started out as a collective early on. But then we kind of started partitioning various legal and economic aspects of the community that were subsets of people. Had different responsibilities legally and financially, which was not, in my mind, a good way to, I mean, at the time it made sense. So we’re kind of repositioning ourselves by decomposing some of these existing entities to try to get ourselves back to where we’re all one collective group. Whatever that may mean in terms of being here emotionally, physically, economically, and trying to allow everybody to do that. And I think that’s critically important for me personally, that shared element of community.
Eva: Composting this notion of competition that stands in the way of community and this relationship with money. Two big takeaways I’ve just had. Thank you very much for sharing. Believe it or not, our time is coming to a close together. Before we leave, I wanted to ask if there’s anything you wish I would have asked or anything you would still really like to share in terms of your personal and collective coping with change a hundredfold farm.
Devon: I feel, for me, because I’m the lead representative for this research project, I have been wildly, dramatically impacted by having the community of practice calls to join. They inform how I show up in this community. They also humble me and provide spaces to bear witness to the really disparate impacts of climate change around the world. They keep me sensitive, like those calls keep me sensitive and alert, and also provide some fortitude. That sense of like, because we’re in a rural region in southeastern Pennsylvania, I find it’s easy to feel like we’re a little bit alone sometimes in the community movement. So having the calls to go to every couple weeks, just simply being on the calls has been an important through line for me to stay in a perspective that is not so myopic, which is just, I think, by our sheer geographical placement, perhaps a feature than maybe for some other communities that have more nested communities nearby. A question that I’ve also been considering that was offered in the template of questions, but is really about connection with the land and our extra human companions and creatures. That is an area that I find I’m really skill building in because of this project. Our ears are often tuned to the frameworks where we are caretakers or stewards or keepers, and for me that increasingly is not allowing the register of reciprocity to be achieved. It’s like that human imposed view of, yes, dear piece of land, this is what you need because I am your caretaker, and rather developing a skill set where we had one activity in this research project that was like a being with the land activity, where we were to individually or in small groups, find spots to linger in around the land. And then when we gathered, it was actually around a community meal to share what we heard in that activity. It was striking how different people’s listening practices were. That’s an area that this project has really opened up to me that the listening skills need to shift in order to act as though you are interdependent with land, not over-dictating what it needs. It will tell you what it needs if you can drop in.
Bill: I don’t have so much of a question. I just really wanted to say thank you, and GEN in general, just allowing us to participate in this. Here’s this global project. In my wildest dreams, I’d never imagined this little cohousing community in South Central rural PA would be involved in this. And I hope there’s something, again, we’re all educators to the most part, that there was something that comes from this that’s beneficial to this. And it wasn’t just us just kind of pulling things in, but also just a huge, huge thank you to this one right here. When this project started, Devon had a partner in the community to help and that did not work out. And then another person stepped up and that did not work out. And Devon has carried this and has just done amazing work with this. And I really appreciated that it challenged the community in many ways. So often we think we’ve got these things figured out. We know what we’re talking about. I recycle stuff. But there’s just so much more here that some of our members were kind of gobsmacked by things that came up. And it needed to be, and we needed to be. So this is a hugely valuable thing for us. So this project and Devon has been a gift to us. So I just wanted to say that, say thank you for that opportunity.
Eva: Ending in gratitude is beautiful. Thank you both so much for being here with me today.
Devon: You’re welcome. Thank you for this chance to speak with you.
GEN Staff
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