Intentional community

What distinguishes an intentional community

A residential community is “intentional” when:

• Members choose to live there for shared reasons — values, practice, lifestyle, [[mission-district-sf|mission]] — not just because the housing was available
• There are explicit agreements about how the community will be organized — governance, decision-making, finances, work, conflict resolution
• Common property or resources are held collectively to some degree — buildings, land, equipment, food production, child care
• Daily or regular shared life is part of the structure — meals, meetings, work, worship, recreation

Some communities are highly cohesive (a single dining hall, communal income, full daily life shared); others are loosely coupled (separate households, occasional shared work, common land trust). Both qualify.

Major forms

• Cohousing — see [[cohousing]]; private residences clustered around shared common spaces
• Ecovillage — see [[eco-village]]; ecologically-designed community with explicit sustainability [[mission-district-sf|mission]]
• Communes — high-cohesion communities with shared income and dwelling; range from religious to secular
• Catholic Worker houses — radical-Catholic hospitality communities; ~200 worldwide
• Hutterite colonies — Anabaptist agricultural communes; ~500 colonies in North America
• Kibbutzim — Israeli collective communities; secular and religious variants
• Ashrams and dharma communities — Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and other spiritual communities
• Land trusts and rural-cooperative communities — diverse rural variants, often with separate dwellings on common land
• Urban intentional communities — shared houses, multi-family dwellings, food-co-op apartment buildings
• Income-sharing communities — Twin Oaks (Virginia), East Wind (Missouri), Acorn (Virginia), Sandhill (Missouri); members share income from community businesses

Foundation for Intentional Community

The Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC) maintains a directory of intentional communities worldwide. As of 2024, [[directory|the directory]] lists 1,200+ communities in the U.S. and Canada alone, plus several thousand internationally. The FIC publishes the Communities magazine, runs annual conferences, and provides resources for forming and joining communities.

Why this matters

Intentional communities are the operational laboratory of communal living. The [[gift-economy|gift economy]], [[mutual-aid|mutual aid]], regenerative practice, alternative governance forms, alternative-economic experiments — all happen in living communities, with all the difficulty and learning that real-world implementation produces.

For 0mn1.one’s framing of abundance and worldwide healing, intentional communities are part of the answer to “where could it actually look like that, today?” They are imperfect, often difficult, frequently changing — and persistent. The form has been here for centuries; it will be here for centuries more.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Shares approach with: [[gift-economy]] · [[bioregion]]
• Supersets: [[cohousing]] · [[eco-village]]

Sources

• Foundation for Intentional Community (ic.org)
• Creating a Life Together, Diana Leafe Christian (New Society, 2003)
• Communities Directory, FIC (multiple editions)

Rooted in life.