Dry Gulch Ecovillage Dry Gulch Ecovillage teaches social and ecological responsibility via the School of Intentioneering.

The Dry Gulch Ecovillage began in 2014 with the intent to grow a small urban community, now with three apartments in one building.

The type of intentional community here is different from what I, the founder, Allen Butcher, envisioned. Having lived 12 years in the communal Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC) I thought to create an urban FEC community. The closest we came to that was from 2014 to ’16 when this was home to the “Not In Kansas Any More” (NIKAM) community, which was a Rainbow Family community. The ecovillage identity began in 2017 with energy upgrades including a new high-efficiency boiler, and front lawn conversion to gardens, with a passive-solar heated mini greenhouse. Solar power installation is planned.

The form of community that has evolved at the DGEcovillage did not have a name even though the model has always existed, so I coined the term “class-harmony community” to refer to groups in which one or a few people own the land as the owner-class and everyone else is renter-class. This is opposed to Marxist communist class-conflict.

The largest class-harmony community is Ganas on Staten Island, NY. About 20% of the listings in the Communities Directory say the land is owned by one person or a small group. Renters get a discount from the market rate. While class-harmony is not equity-sharing, rent discounts are a form of sharing the benefit and privilege of land ownership in a market economy.

The Dry Gulch Ecovillage is home to an educational initiative called the School of Intentioneering (SoI), presenting the intentional communities movement of gifting and sharing cultures via print and eventually video media, planning to combine these for an online class. Currently I have about 2,000 pages of self-published material about community on the Internet, including an alternative history of Western Civilization focusing on gifting and sharing societies. Blessed Be!