Category Archives: Intentional Communities

Sara DeVries

Libraries are sometimes called the living rooms of their communities. People of all colors, creeds and economic backgrounds feel comfortable gathering in organic ways inside their libraries. This week I witnessed quite a few examples proving that our community library is indeed like my own living room.

In my living room at home, I read books and magazines, sometimes on the fly and sometimes while settled into a nice comfy chair. I might read a print book or an eBook. I catch up with friends and family on my cellphone using WIFI. I might even pull out my laptop and get a little farther in a work project or graphic design. These are all tasks that library users engage in on a regular basis inside the library.

In my living room, my family has intentional conversation about topics that matter. We ask tough questions and look up answers online and in books. Libraries provide individuals with answers to their questions, but they also help communities examine tough issues. For example, this February and March, library users will be reading and discussing a book that examines citizenship, crime, justice and more through a series of speakers and other events.

We have fun in my living room. We play with board games and the kids play educational games on computers and devices. The library has board games available for internal use, educational games installed on special computers dedicated for kids and kid-friendly devices called Launchpads available for checkout.

We spend time with old friends and get to know new ones in my living room. This week we met up with friends at the library intentionally once, and another time informally when we happened to be here at the same time as other friends. We also made new friends as my daughter played with a child from a different cultural group at a LEGO building program. Both families stayed long after the event ended to allow our girls to continue playing with each other.

We feel comfortable in our living rooms and feel like we can be ourselves. I almost feel like I have two living rooms, one at home and one in the library. If you havent been to the library in a while, I challenge you to come and just hang out sometime. Now that were open downtown on Sunday afternoons, there are even more opportunities to come. I think youll be surprised how much it might feel like home to you, too.

Sara DeVries is Community Relations Manager for Herrick District Library.

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Herrick Library: Libraries: The Living Room of our Communities - HollandSentinel.com

For the last eight years, Nicolas and Rachel Sarah have been slowly weaning themselves off fossil fuels. They dont own a refrigerator or a car; their year-old baby and four-year-old toddler play by candlelight rather than electricity at night. They identify as Christian anarchists, and have given an official name to their search for an alternative to consumption-heavy American life: the Downstream Project, with the motto to do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

As it turns out, exiting the system is a challenging, time-consuming, and surprisingly technical process. Here in the Shenandoahs and central Virginia, a handful of tiny communities are experimenting with what it means to reject the norms of contemporary life and exist in a radically different way. They seem to share Americans pervasive sense of political alienation, which arguably reached an apotheosis with the election of Donald Trump: a sense of division from their peers, a distrust of government. The challenges of modern politicsdealing with issues like climate change, poverty, mass migration, and war on a global scaleare so vast and abstract that its difficult not to find them overwhelming. But instead of continuing in passive despair, as many Americans seem to do, the people in these communities decided to overhaul their lives.

These communities show just how hard it is to live without fossil fuels, a government safety net, or a system of capitalist exchange. They struggle with many of the same issues that plague the rest of America, including health problems, financial worries, and racism. At the center of their political lives is a question that every American faces, but for them, its amplified: whether to save the world or let it burn.

Their answers are different, but they share one thing. Theyve seen what modern American life looks like. And they want out.

* * *

Communities like this have a lot of names, including homesteads, intentional communities, or income-sharing communities, which is really a way of saying commune. Louisa County, Virginia, is home to five such communities: Twin Oaks, founded in 1967, and its later spin-offs, Acorn and Sapling, along with two fairly new communities, the Living Energy Farm and Cambia. Taken together with the Downstream Project, which is located an hour or two away in Harrisonburg, these newer communities offer three rough models for what it means to create an alternative lifestyle in response to immense global challenges: to struggle at the edges of society, to remake it, or to build a haven for retreat.

A Radical Idea: Four City-Dwellers Share All Their Money

Unlike the rural communities of Louisa, Nicolas and Rachel Sarah explicitly wanted to build the Downstream Project in an urban context. (Nicolas and Rachel Sarah each have slightly different last names, in keeping with the Latin American tradition of Nicolass family. Their first names are used here for clarity.) Rather than rejecting mainstream culture entirely and living in the woods, theyre struggling to live as ethically as possible in the city, with a particular focus on environmental sustainability and energy use. But their approachengaging and educating, rather than retreatingmakes them particularly vulnerable to the challenges and risks of urban life.

The two 29-year-olds dream of buying land within a bike-able distance of the city so they can supply their homestead with fresh food, but have found the real estate prohibitively expensive. Harrisonburg has only a modest bus system, so its difficult to get around. Theyve had trouble recruiting people to join full-time; their project has mostly been attractive to transient, 20-something interns, several of whom have lived with them. What weve discovered in a big way is that you cant do this by yourself, even in a city, said Rachel Sarah. And you cant homestead by yourself if you have a family even more.

Perhaps worst of all, Nicolas recently injured his arm, which flavored our whole year, Rachel Sarah said. He had been planning to develop ways to make their own food and medicine. Instead, they had to pay for those things, along with medical bills; because theyre uninsured, theyve had to get financial assistance from hospitals and medical centers. In recent months, theyve made small but meaningful concessions, like using a crockpot to make dinners.

As theyve built their project, they have also found themselves caught between two worlds. Among people who are wanting to live the same lifestylebeing fossil-fuel freethere is a lot of push against Christianity, Rachel Sarah said. Its almost like anything is okay except Christianity, because thats oppressive.

When theres a Democrat in power, social-justice-minded people go to sleep, because they feel validated by what they hear on NPR.

The opposite is true at church: While some in their Mennonite congregation are open to what theyre doing, she said, theyve found little willingness among their fellow Christians to lift up climate change or the environment as theological issues. To them, though, the case for creating environmentally conscious communities is evident in the Bible. The story of the Jews was that they are emancipated, tribal slaves [who] went out and tried to start their own society, Nicolas said. Anarchism is in the story: Simple, small-scale organization of societies, not huge, hierarchical systems.

Theyre hopeful that Trumps election will spur more people to think critically about their lives. Times like this really awaken people, said Rachel Sarah. Since [the election], weve started to feel really hopeful. Trumps election left Nicolas feeling sick to his stomach, he said, but he sees an upside. When theres a Democrat in power, social-justice-minded people go to sleep, because they feel validated by what they hear on NPR, he said. The couple says theyre feeling more awake now, too. Trumps election is like a crescendo for the Christian anarchist call, Nicolas said. If we are citizens of another kingdom, and the empire is getting pretty ridiculous, it inspires us to take our convictions more seriously.

* * *

The folks at the Living Energy Farm are not as confident that their fellow Americans are ready to take their failures seriously. Among the people I hang out with, theres a fair amount of alienation from both the political right and the political left, said Alexis Zeigler, who co-founded the community with his wife, Debbie Piesen. We are not trying to change who is in office. You cant dictate a democratic society from the top. You really have to build it from the bottom up.

The Living Energy Farm runs on a different philosophy of alienation: If they can prototype alternatives to modern life, they believe, they can eventually remake the world. The community is located half a mile up a dirt road in Louisa County, which gave 60 percent of its vote to Trump in November; Charlottesville and Richmond are each 40 minutes to an hour away by car. Two couples and four kids live there permanently, along with a 20-something electrician, Eddie, who has been there about seven months, and a regular cycle of interns and travelers. Theyre farther off the grid than the Downstream Project: They function entirely without fossil fuels, and their home and seed-growing business are powered by a suite of firewood, motors, solar collectors, and other devices explicitly designed to be inexpensive and simple to implement.

We refer to it as neo-Amish, or Amish without the patriarchy.

In the summer, they cook with a small solar dish and a rocket stove behind the kitchen; theyre building a bigger dish, taller than a grown man, nearby. They hooked up an exercise bike to a washing machine and rigged a pair of old tractors to run on wood gas rather than gasoline, although they arent quite functional. They built their own food-drying room off the kitchen, where they process vegetables grown on their 127 acres, and they graft fruit-tree branches onto wild stems. We refer to it as neo-Amish, or Amish without the patriarchy, Zeigler said.

Theyre not religious; their goal is evangelization of a different kind. My intent is to get Living Energy Farm on its feet and try to convince people to live this way, Zeigler said. Recently, theyve been experimenting on their interns cellphones to develop battery-based chargers, which he hopes could be used in India or Africa.

The way we choose to live has far more impact in terms of our environment than any particular technology, he said. If Americans bother to talk about the environment at all, its usually in terms of a technological perspective. He thinks mainstream environmentalism is too focused on incremental reform and modest lifestyle choices, like driving Priuses. For us, the question is: How do I live comfortably with what renewable energy can do? If you ask it that way, you cant drive to D.C. and work in a cubicle, he said. But the environmental groups want to tell you that you can, because then youll send them donations.

The Living Energy Farm residents seem less invested in critiquing government than capitalism. We dont buy gasoline, and we dont pay anybody bills for energy, Zeigler said. Its not coincidental that this frees us from corporate dependence. For his part, Zeigler doesnt think government is inherently bad, and doesnt identify as an anarchist. (The problem with anarchism is not that the theory, in its ideal sense, is broken. Its that a lot of nitwits use that word, he said.)

The idea underlying the Living Energy Farm is that people can change the structure of society by changing the way they live. Without sprawling cities and single-family homes, powered by expensive electricity and gas-guzzling cars, there will be no need for high-level solutions like the Paris Climate Agreement. Their view is at least partly premised on apocalypseindustrialism is going to collapse, Zeigler said, matter-of-factlyand their work is meant to address that eventuality. Can we build a mass movement tomorrow? No, and Im not even worried about it, Zeigler said. But can we do that before we turn the planet into Easter Island?

It feels safer to be in a place where we have control over our water.

But even within such idealistic communities, not everyone sees the goal as engagement. Deanna Seay, one of the other Living Energy Farm residents, moved there last June with her two kids and husband, Misha Nikitine. He was interested in the politics, but she was mostly looking for an affordable way to live. I envisioned being remote, being able to keep to ourselves, not being involved in whatever strife is going on in cities, she said. She was glad to leave behind Boston and demonstrations like the ones that took place after Trumps election; shes also glad they now drink from a well, she said, because it feels safer to be in a place where we have control over our water. Hers is not a search for ideals, but for something tolerablesomething better than what was available elsewhere.

At Cambia, another, unrelated community in Louisa County, some of the members seem to have a similar impulse. A California-based couple, Ella Sutherland and Gil Benmoshe, started the community with their son Avni about a year and a half ago. Two othersAnthony Beck, who go by the names Telos, and another man called Gilgameshlive with them in their small house and nearby cabin; theyre building a barn out back, and theyve laid plots along a path through the woods where theyre hoping to construct more dwellings. Altogether, theyre looking for 10 or 12 people to join them. Cambians share their income, and their goal is to create an alternative to mainstream or capitalist society, they said. They fund their community in part through a small woodworking shop, where they make wooden spoons. They have a car, and get about a third of their food from grocery-store dumpsterstheyre freegans, Sutherland said, meaning they only eat meat and dairy if its going to be thrown away.

While the Cambians are dismayed by the election, it has mostly strengthened their conviction that they shouldnt be involved in politics. Im embarrassed to say that I felt like I had to vote, Benmoshe said. I dont believe in democracy, so I should have abstained. But I felt like it was really critical. Well, that didnt do any good. Even though they believe many people are unhappy within the current political and economic systems, they dont feel particularly called to engage in politics because of Trump. There are a lot of people who feel isolated, who feel violated by capitalism in various different ways, Sutherland said. We should be creating an alternative, and thats needed now more than it was needed before.

I dont want to be an activist anymore. It requires me to rub against the things that I hate too much.

Instead, most of their energy is directed at building their homeliterally. They follow practices called natural building, using materials like cob (a combination of clay, sand, and straw) to line their walls, and wood-based energy sources for heat. Their backyard is full of spare parts and fixtures, including a random sink and lots of wood; their free time is often spent on construction projects.

To some extent, theyre trying to spread their knowledge and their project. Theyre writing a wiki, nicknamed commune in a box, outlining legal and tax details for income-sharing communitiesCambia, it turns out, is both a commune and an LLC. They want people to be able to start new communities, tailored to their own needs; Cambia is not the model, they said, but a model.

That model, though, largely doesnt involve politics. I really should be working on a campaign to change the political structure of this world. Instead, Im working in natural building, Benmoshe said. I dont want to be an activist anymore. It requires me to rub against the things that I hate too much, and I get sad and frustrated. Cambia was not built to usher in a revolution. It was built as a refuge.

* * *

Intentional communities are, in their own way, historical projects. The original cities of refuge, found in the Bible, were havens for people who had committed heinous crimes. In early modern Europe, religious separatists transformed this idea, establishing towns where they could await the imminent coming of Christ, writes the Williams College art historian Michael J. Lewis in his book, City of Refuge. Great thinkers have long told of socialist paradises and philosophers have pondered distant, lost societies. In all of these communities, historic and present-day, utopian dreamers face the same question: Are they willing to engage at all in politics as they are, or do they wish to build the world anew?

Ironically, the deeply secular Cambia comes closest to those older models of religious separatism that Lewis chronicles in City of Refuge. The historic groups that most eagerly sought to escape the world were obsessed with building geometrically pleasing, architecturally non-hierarchical townsphysical manifestations of their deeply held values. There, in their isolated hamlets, they could experiment freely with social orders and norms, safely separate from the world.

Theres no escaping into your own little enclave.

Perhaps its unfair to look to penalize utopias for failing to offer salvation. After all, people who live in these kinds of communities tend to be more politically active than the average American, said Karen Litfin, a professor of political science at the University of Washington who has written about eco-villages around the world.

And perhaps these communities are not as immune from worldly flaws as they might like. For example: Many of them struggle to be accessible to people other than middle-class white folks. Sky Blue, a Twin Oaks resident who also serves as the executive director of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, said there are a lot of racial [problems] and racism that are embedded in intentional communities. Even despite good intentions, Liberal white people who have a desire for diversity dont necessarily understand what it means to be inclusive, he said. Theyre going to create culture in [their] intentional community that is going to be comfortable for them, which isnt necessarily comfortable for people of color, or people with disabilities, or people who are gay or trans. Ethan Tupelo, a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who lived at Twin Oaks before he began studying intentional communities academically, said residents talked about this issue a lot when he was there. Its a bunch of white people sitting around wondering where all the people of color are, he said. Its nice that youre thinking about that, but its also frustrating.

Tupelo sees a structural explanation for the inaccessibility of intentional communities: It takes a lot of cash to get off the grid. Even when starting a new community, you need the capital to do it in the first place if you want it to be a legally recognized thing, as opposed to squats, he said. As Nicolas and Rachel Sarahs experience at the Downstream Project shows, becoming untangled from capitalism also means becoming much more vulnerable. Its tough to imagine a comprehensive way of replacing health insurance, not to mention programs like welfare, in a world without government.

And then there is the tension between engagement and escape. In parts of the environmental movement, of which many intentional communities would consider themselves participants, the impulse toward escape can be powerful, and dark. In a 2012 essay for Orion magazinea piece Nicolas specifically recommendedthe writer Paul Kingsnorth argued that one of the things green-minded people should do at this moment in history is build havens. Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside? he wrote.

Were just these little workers building this giant cathedral.

Litfin said she doesnt think its possible for humanity to go back to medieval times, no matter how tempting that may be for some. In the Dark Ages, they didnt have the internet. They didnt have global travel. They didnt have climate change to any great extent, she said. What we have now is an embryonic global civilization thats totally ecologically, socially, and economically unsustainable. Theres no escaping into your own little enclave.

Some people use the term lifestyle politics to describe these communitiesthe belief that if you live your values, then you will be able to make effective change, or at least express your political perspective, Litfin said. I think thats a good place to start, but if thats where you end, you actually dont have much impact at all. In their own way, each of these communities is trying to change the world, albeit in small ways. Not everyone who seeks utopia is like Zeigler at the Living Energy Project, though. People dont necessarily want to remake the world.

The one thing everybody knows about utopia is that it means no place, Lewis writes. Whats less well-known, he says, is that the Greek word for utopia sounds the same as eutopia, a word with a different meaning: good place. For all their struggles, this seems to capture the aspirations of Virginias modern-day utopias. Were just these little workers building this giant cathedral, said Nicolas. Each of us is just chipping away at a little block. We dont even have the big-picture cathedral. But were doing a little block.

In the face of increasingly alienating politics and massive global break-down, perhaps this is enough: building a good place, better than most, where people can try to live.

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How Anarchists and Intentional Communities Are Reacting to ...

CHAMBERSBURG, Pa. Pennsylvania State Police Lt. Gary Carter remembers investigating Franklin County's first heroin overdose death in 1998.

The Chambersburg native saw the drug quietly take hold among a small group of residents in the early 2000s. The users and suppliers remained in the shadows for years until the narcotic powder became a less expensive high for people addicted to prescription painkillers.

"Now, it's really all over the place," said Carter, barrack commander for the state police in Franklin County.

Investigators say the increased availability and decreased stigma of heroin use may contribute to new users being less inhibited about trying it. Police are carrying medication to reverse opioid overdose effects and they are providing information to addicts about recovery support programs.

"The whole attitude of policing has changed," Chambersburg Police Chief Ron Camacho said.

Waynesboro Police Chief James Sourbier hears critics say police aren't doing enough about drug abuse in the region. He argues many people have a grave misunderstanding of the depth and breadth of the crisis.

"You cannot arrest yourself out of a situation like this," he said, saying police, doctors, social services, churches, politicians and schools all have roles to play.

Waynesboro police responded to 19 drug overdoses in 2014. Of those, five were classified as intentional and self-inflicted, four were accidental, seven were inadvertent, one was mixed toxicity, one was unknown, and one was inconclusive. Four of the overdoses were fatal.

The department responded to 36 overdoses in 2015. Twelve were intentional, three were accidental and 21 were inadvertent; of those overdoses, 17 involved opioids like heroin. Five people died.

2016 brought the department 47 overdoses, with 11 considered intentional, one accidental, 26 inadvertent, four mixed toxicity, two unknown and three inconclusive. Thirteen people died.

"I don't think we've seen the worst of it yet," Sourbier said.

Waynesboro's police chief believes drug traffickers from the Baltimore area are stopping for periods of time in southern Franklin County to take advantage of inexpensive apartments, social services and walkability of communities. He said some of those dealers continue north to New York.

Carter agreed that Baltimore through Hagerstown is a major thoroughfare for heroin. Still, he sees other supply routes connected to Harrisburg and Philadelphia via the Pennsylvania Turnpike, U.S. 30 and Interstate 81.

"We're easy access," Carter said.

Franklin County District Attorney Matt Fogal, who established a multidisciplinary overdose task force, perceives fewer big dealers setting up shop in Franklin County. He is prosecuting users who are selling off extra inventory they obtained on short runs to metropolitan areas.

"It's less a business enterprise than someone who uses and buys a lot," he said.

Fogal is in the process of seating an investigative grand jury that will spend the next 18 months focused on heroin dealers and trafficking rings. The grand jury can issue subpoenas and compel testimony from reluctant witnesses, with that testimony granted confidentiality.

Pennsylvania law protects from prosecution, in many cases, the person who calls 911 about a friend experiencing an overdose. It also provides immunity to the person who overdosed. There are exceptions, including for overdoses that occur in businesses among the public.

Camacho said his eyes were opened to the reaches of addiction when the son of a coworker died a few years ago. Two decades ago, he never imagined he would be administering naloxone to someone suffering an overdose in hopes he could get that person connected with a treatment program.

He now emphasizes outside-the-box thinking and training to address opioid addiction.

"This is hitting everybody," he said.

"We realize there is no one thing that'll fix or cure this. It really does require a massive team effort," Sourbier said, saying he tries to provide resources to parents and grandparents concerned about their addicted family members.

Fogal spent years skeptical of the effectiveness of addiction treatment initiatives until he saw them producing positive results. Now, he's ensuring recovery and treatment specialists are at the table in the overdose task force.

"I don't accept failure," he said. "That said, I'm a realist and I know the challenges we face."

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Heroin hits home: Highways provide "easy access" for drug trafficking in Franklin County - Herald-Mail Media

The ski bum is extinct, resort worker Ian Johnson declared. This sentiment was echoed by many ski resort workers featured in my Catalyst article from two weeks ago entitled, Resort Reality: Ski Employees Face Financial Nightmares. In the past, a ski bum could work two days a week and ski five, while nowadays, most resort employees work five and ski two. The classic ski bum lifestyle is disappearing and the growth of mountain towns throughout the West is to blame. Johnson finds the exponential growth and the increasingly elitist nature of mountain towns unsettling.

An upcoming Colorado College-sponsored Sense of Place trip, Not Your Average Ski Trip, aims to educate the CC student body about the current reality. Last year, the trip took place over the weekend and was well attended by faculty, staff, and students. This year, a group will head up to Copper Mountain for a Block Break. Last year, for comparisons sake, trip attendees navigated the local transportation system. Public transportation often takes longer than driving straight into the sprawling parking lots that have become common features of most resorts. Johnson asserted that it is important for people to understand that there are sustainable options worthy of attention. The weekend included an opportunity to meet with the Green Team at Copper Mountain, a group that focuses on issues related to water. While water disputes are much more contentious in the summer months, securing water rights for snowmaking is a top priority for most ski resorts in the winter.

The 2016 trip had the opportunity to hear from Anthropology Professor Sarah Hautzinger, who provided a wealth of knowledge to attendees, mostly regarding real estate. Property prices in communities affected by expansion continue to skyrocket. As a result, skiing has become even more exclusive. When asked when things began to change, Ian Johnson said, Since the 1990s, the overall cost of skiing has gone up exponentially, creating an elitism I wish didnt exist.

This year, in Hautzingers place, the Office of Field Study brought in William Philpott, author of Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country. Those who choose to attend the Sense of Place trip will have the opportunity to speak with both Philpott and members of the Green Team at Copper Mountain in order to expand their knowledge of environmental issues surrounding Colorados favorite winter sport. The Sense of Place Trips are an amazing opportunity for students looking to learn more about Southern Colorado. Although the upcoming ski trip already has a long waitlist, the Sustainability Office organizes a trip each block. Creating an intentional space to reflect upon the impacts of our recreational activity is imperative. The Sense of Place Trips offer an opportunity for students and faculty alike to develop a conscious way to participate in outdoor sports.

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The Death of the Ski Bum and Intentional Tourism - The Catalyst

By University Communications

BOONE, N.C.Appalachian State Universitys student-led Alternative Service Experience (ASE) program has been ranked 10th in the nation for the number of alternative break programs it offered in 2015-16. The rankings were compiled by Break Away, a national nonprofit organization that supports the development of quality alternative break programs.

The ASE program is a service opportunity offered through the universitys Appalachian and the Community Together (ACT) office, a volunteer clearinghouse on campus. The ASE program allows students to use their fall, winter or spring break to serve alongside communities through various domestic and international service programs. Service hours donated by Appalachian students in ASE programs during 2015-16 were calculated at more than 13,500.

Our students have deep commitment for serving the community through volunteer work and service-learning, Chancellor Sheri N. Everts said. Their work has been recognized by the Presidents Higher Education Honor Roll and the Carnegie Foundation for the Engagement of Teaching. Since 2004, Appalachian has contributed more than $22.3 million in value to the High Country community through our Appalachian and the Community Together (ACT) program alone.

Out of 178 ranked institutions, the top 10 recognized by Break Away for most programs are, beginning with No. 1: University of Missouri, The Ohio State University, University of Connecticut, Central Michigan University, James Madison University, Vanderbilt University, University of Maryland-College Park, University of Georgia, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Appalachian.

Alternative Service Experiences serve as a catalyst for many students to enact positive social change in their own local communities, using the information learned on their ASE for application in a practical and relevant-to-them setting, Heather Jo Mashburn, assistant director of ACT, said. These transformational experiences encourage thoughtful dialogue and intentional service alongside communities, all skills that serve to strengthen the learning that takes place during college.

Appalachian organized seven international and 27 domestic ASE programs in 2015-16. Domestic ASE programs generally take place within 500 miles of Boone and stretch along most of the East Coast. International travel in 2015-16 included service programs to Ecuador, Nicaragua, Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Dominican Republic and Peru.

Specific locations are not revealed until students have signed up, Mashburn said. Our programs are social issue-focused rather than destination based, she explained. This is a learning experience, not simply an opportunity to travel.

Ten or more of the 2015-16 programs focused on environmental issues. Other focus areas included people with diverse abilities, animal welfare, education, food insecurity, health, affordable housing, immigration and refugee resettlement, LGBTQ and gender equity, race and racism and youth development.

ASE programs are created and led by students, and participants are chosen by a lottery system. Scholarships are available for domestic and international programs occurring over spring break. Scholarships vary based on demonstrated financial need and cost of the program; more than $8,000 has been awarded for ASEs occurring this spring break. Course credit is tied to all international ASE programs, as is the student leader training that is required.

In support of Appalachians sustainability initiatives and in close partnership with the Office of Sustainability, the ASE programs are carbon neutral. Leaders calculate each programs carbon emissions generated throughout the experience, and the cost of the offset is included in that programs budget.

Mashburn said in an effort to improve the efficacy of the international programs, ASE incorporated an intentional language immersion experience. This was made possible through a collaboration with the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and its graduate students preparing to teach Spanish at the college level, the Office of International Education and Development, and a grant received from the universitys Quality Enhancement Plan.

The lottery for the spring 2017 domestic program was held Jan. 30. Almost 200 lottery packets were distributed with only 136 spots for students available. In total over spring break 2017, 198 members of the Appalachian Community will serve domestically, and 90 members of the Appalachian Community will serve internationally. Each ASE is led by two peer leaders, who are undergraduate students, and one faculty/staff member serving as a learning partner.

Appalachians Alternative Service Experience Program immerses students in a service experience in local, domestic and international communities. Its programs are created and led by trained student peer leaders and involve direct service alongside a community, purposeful reflection and relationship building with fellow students. All focus on a particular social or environmental issue with intentional education and reflection incorporated in each program. Learn more at https://ase.appstate.edu

Appalachian State University, in North Carolinas Blue Ridge Mountains, prepares students to lead purposeful lives as global citizens who understand and engage their responsibilities in creating a sustainable future for all. The transformational Appalachian experience promotes a spirit of inclusion that brings people together in inspiring ways to acquire and create knowledge, to grow holistically, to act with passion and determination, and embrace diversity and difference. As one of 17 campuses in the University of North Carolina system, Appalachian enrolls about 18,000 students, has a low student-to-faculty ratio and offers more than 150 undergraduate and graduate majors.

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Appalachian's Alternative Service Experience among nation's top 10 ... - Appalachian State University

A Business Plan for Healthy Communities Hospitals & Health Networks Over the life of the program, Dignity has invested more than $180 million in loans and equity an intentional strategy to complement its community-benefit grants and other commitments. In 2015, ProMedica, based in Toledo, Ohio, began a pilot project ...

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A Business Plan for Healthy Communities - Hospitals & Health Networks

Fort Worth Star Telegram (blog)

Pastor: We must build bridges between police and local black communities Fort Worth Star Telegram (blog) Police officers and other leaders are raised from the community. This means that we must be more intentional and relationally intelligent in connecting the divide that is happening in our communities right now. We value our police officers and the ...

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Pastor: We must build bridges between police and local black communities - Fort Worth Star Telegram (blog)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There is an active and robust debate within community radio about what the First Amendment allows in relation to use of the public airwaves. One common argument is that freedom of speech means you can say or play whatever you want on the air. This is both legally and ethically wrong. Moreover, such a narrow interpretation misrepresents the very purpose of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment was designed to secure the separation of church and state, and protect the right of the citizenry to dissent. It was not intended to be a foil for propagating intolerance and hate in the name of expression.

I learned this from my father, U.S. Federal District Judge John Kane, who has served on the bench for nearly 40 years and is an expert in constitutional law. In the 1990s he traveled to Albania to help its leaders draft a constitution as their country emerged from the brutal dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Under Hoxha, minor acts like listening to the Beatles or watching TV from a neighboring country could condemn an individual or whole family to internal exile or prison.

Today my father is mortified by what he views as the disintegration of our constitutional rights and responsibilities in the U.S. Still, he remains committed to his work upholding our civil liberties. Right now this includes ensuring a fair trial for two Muslim men who are being held on terrorism charges. He is in the trenches of upholding the dream of a healthy democratic society.

His work inspires me to stay in public media. I grew up on it. My mother helped found a community station in my hometown. I was interviewing students and mixing music shows by the time I was 16. Public media helped me connect the dots by providing a window to the world from my backyard in rural Colorado. It exposed me to artists, ideas, and information that were not available on the commercial spectrum or in my classroom.

The connection I see between the work my father does and my work in public media is democracys requirement that we all value ourselves as citizens. Public media cultivates that effort by functioning as a nexus that addresses each listener as a citizen first, and not solely as a consumer. That core service of public media is rooted in a deeper understanding of the First Amendment.

During my 10 years as a rural station manager, I walked a very thin line between leading a media organization and being a member of the community. I wrestled with potential and actual conflicts of interest, and mended fences when people made comments on our air that offended listeners. Radio can be a natural convener for community-level dialogue, but as broadcasters we have to be intentional about representing a diversity of voices without unleashing a level of discord that actually undermines civil discussion.

As a manager I responded to angry DJs who accused me of infringing on their free speech rights when I fulfilled my obligation to enforce FCC regulations. Sometimes this meant simply having hard conversations with people about rules; at other times it meant removing them from the air.

Regulations and operational standards governing public radio stations are spelled out in Title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations, parts 70 through 79. They are extensive and binding. If a station violates them, the FCC can revoke its license. When DJs are on the air, they hold that license in their hands in a very tangible way. If they endanger it with their actions or words, a resource that belongs to the whole community is endangered.

When DJs choose to volunteer (or not) for a community radio organization, they must comply with this framework. The role of staff members, including station managers, is to provide effective training that helps volunteers learn to harness the incredible power of the microphone. But staff must also take steps to prevent DJs and other volunteers from putting the stations license at risk.

Any regulatory framework should be periodically evaluated and revised, and FCC rules are no exception. For example, Section 73.3999(a) of the CFR prohibits broadcasters from transmitting obscene material, but the definition of obscenity is vague, open to interpretation and often unenforceable. I think this regulation should be revised as do many of my colleagues but such change cannot come from individual DJs disregarding the existing code. It has to come from an organized advocacy effort.

Theres also an ethical dimension to consider in understanding how the First Amendment applies to community radio. Staff and volunteers are stewards of a shared resource; we must be committed to a mission of serving the public interest. What we say on the air affects the communities we serve. Standards for how we talk on the air or debate controversial topics are necessary. They enable us to maintain the trust of our listeners while creating a pathway for effective collaboration within and beyond individual communities.

Kane

Today listeners have a plethora of media choices other than radio. Data suggest that they are increasingly turning to these other options. If I had a magic wand, I would pivot stations to focus more on elevating artistry, craft and commitment to excellence above the notion that whatever you broadcast represents an inalienable right to express yourself. It is not enough to just criticize our legal and ethical framework; we have to engage a community of practice that fosters accountability and constructive debate. Cultivating this among community stations is the National Federation of Community Broadcasters primary role. I am honored to lead that effort.

StoryCorps creator Dave Isay says, Listening is an act of love. Our listeners are giving us that gift whenever they tune into public media. Lets take it to heart, and take pride and personal responsibility for what we offer.

Sally Kane started volunteering at her hometown community radio station, KVNF in Paonia, Colo., as a teenager. She returned 20 years later as a DJ and board member, and later led the station as general manager and executive director. In 2014 she joined the NFCB as executive director, bringing her experience as a trained facilitator and nonprofit management consultant.

This commentary continues our series published in collaboration with the Editorial Integrity Project to explore the challenges to public media journalism in a deeply polarized civil society. The project, funded by CPB, is an initiative of the Station Resource Group and the Affinity Group Coalition to develop shared principles that strengthen the trust and integrity that communities expect of local public media organizations.

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To truly serve the public, community stations must apply standards for what's said on-air - Current

Over the past 20 years, I have asked Christians and atheists, poets and physicists, authors and activists to speak on air about something that ultimately defies each and every one of our words. This radio adventure began in the mid-1990s, when I emerged from divinity school to find a media and political landscape in which the conversation about faith had been handed to a few strident, polarizing voices. I longed to create a conversational space that could honor the intellectual as well as the spiritual content of this aspect of human existence.

The history of theology is one long compulsion to not, as St. Augustine said, remain altogether silent. The history of theology, and humanity, is also brimming, of course, with words about faiths unreasonableness and limitations. One of my favorite definitions of faith emerged from an interview with a Jesuit priestthe Vatican astronomer George Coyne, who quoted the author Anne Lamott: The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. I have thrown this line into more than a few erudite discussions, and it delightfully shakes things up.

That is all by way of declaring that I can offer only incomplete and humble observations to the question of what I have learned about faith, in my life of radio conversation and the life I have led alongside it. Faith is evolutionary in every culture and in any life. The same enduring, fundamental belief will hold a transfigured substance in the beginning, the middle and the end of any lifetime. So here are three things I perceive about the state of faiths evolution in our world and in American culture right now.

The new nonreligious may be the greatest hope for the revitalization of religion.

The phrase spiritual but not religious, now common social parlance, is just the tip of an iceberg that has already moved on. We are among the first people in human history who do not broadly inherit religious identity as a given, a matter of kin and tribe, like hair color and hometown. And this is not leading to the decline of spiritual life but to its transformation. One might even use the loaded word reformation. This is reformation in a distinctly 21st-century form. Its impulses would make more sense to Bonhoeffer, with his intimation of religionless Christianity, than to Luther, with those theses he could pin to a door.

Masses of airtime and print space have been given over to the phenomenon of the nonesthe awkwardly named, fastest-growing segment of spiritual identification comprising something like 15 percent of the American population as a whole and a full third of people under 30. I do not find it surprising that young people born in the 1980s and 90s have distanced themselves from the notion of religious declaration, coming of age as they did in that era, in which strident religious voices became toxic forces in American culture.

More to the point: The growing universe of the nones is one of the most spiritually vibrant and provocative spaces in modern life. It is not a world in which spiritual life is absent. It is a world that resists religious excesses and shallows. Large swaths of this universe are wild with ethical passion and delving, openly theological curiosity, and they are expressing this in unexpected places and unexpected ways. There are churches and synagogues full of nones. They are also filling up undergraduate classes on the New Testament and St. Augustine.

Nathan Schneider, a frequent America contributor, eloquently described to me during his interview on my show the paradox of his own spiritually eclectic upbringing and the depth of searching he and his peers engage when they encounter the traditions. He converted to Catholicism as a teen, attracted to the contemplative tradition of the medieval church and the radical social witness of people like Dorothy Day. But at Mass, he met many lifelong Catholics who appeared unaware of the riches of their own tradition and kept going with a kind of inertia. Meanwhile, among the unchurched, he found people who were grappling with the big questions. They didnt feel like they could really commit themselves to these institutions, but they were curious, and they were looking for something.

I see seekers in this realm pointing Christianity back to its own untamable, countercultural, service-oriented heart. I have spoken with a young man who started a digital enterprise that joins strangers for conversation and community around life traumas, from the economic to the familial; young Californians with a passion for social justice working to gain a theological grounding and spiritual resilience for their work and others; African-American meditators helping community initiatives cast a wider and more diverse net of neighbors. The line between sacred and secular does not quite make sense to any of them, even though none of them are religious in any traditional form. But they are animated by Martin Luther King Jr.s vision of creating the beloved community. They are giving themselves over to this, with great intention and humility, as a calling that is spiritual and not merely social and political.

There is a new conversation and interplay between religion and science in human life, and it has wondering (not debating) at its heart.

In the century now past, certain kinds of religiosity turned themselves into boxes into which too little wondering could enter or escape. So did certain kinds of nonbelief. But this I believe: Any conviction worth its salt has chosen to cohabit with a piece of mystery, and that mystery is at the essence of the vitality and growth of the thing.

Einstein saw a capacity for wonder, a reverence for mystery, at the heart of the best of science and religion and the arts. And as this century opened, physicists, cosmologists and astronomers were no longer pushing mystery out but welcoming it back in. Physics came to the edge of what it thought to be final frontiers and discovered, among other premise-toppling things, that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down but speeding up. It turns out that the vast majority of the cosmos is brim full of forces we had never before imagined and cannot yet fathomthe intriguingly named dark matter, as well as dark energy.

Meanwhile, quantum physics, whose tenets Einstein compared to voodoo, has given us cellphones and personal computers, technologies of the everyday by which we populate online versions of outer space. In turn, these immersive, science-driven experiences are renewing ancient human intuitions that linear, immediate reality is not all there is. There is reality and there is virtual reality, space and cyberspace. Use whatever analogy you will. Our online lives take us down the rabbit hole, like Alice. We wake up in the morning and walk through the back of the closet into Narnia. The further we delve into artificial intelligence and the mapping of our own brains, the more fabulous our own consciousness appears.

I am strangely comforted when I hear from cosmologists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word, perplexing. In this sense, spiritual life is a reasonable, reality-based pursuit. It can have mystical entry points and destinations, to be sure. But it is in the end about befriending reality, the common human experience of mystery included. It acknowledges the full drama of the human condition. It attends to beauty and pleasure; it attends to grief and pain and the enigma of our capacity to resist the very things we long for and need.

Science is even a new kind of companion in illuminating this, the mystery of ourselves. Biologists and neuroscientists and social psychologists are taking the great virtues into the laboratoryforgiveness, compassion, love, even awe. They are describing, in ways theology could never do alone, how such things work; in the process, they are making the practice of virtues and indeed the elements of righteousness more humanly possible. The science-religion debate of clashing certainties was never true to the spirit or the history of science or of faith. But this new conversation and interplay born of a shared wonder is revolutionary and redemptive for us all.

The connection points I hear to monasticism and contemplation, nearly everywhere in the emerging spiritual landscape, are beyond intriguing.

The desert fathers and mothers, the visionaries like St. Benedict and St. Francis and Julian of Norwich and St. Ignatius Loyolathey all found their voice at a distance from a church they experienced to have grown externally domesticated and inwardly cold, out of touch with its own spiritual core. I see their ecumenical, humanist, transnational analogs among the nones. There is a growing ecumenical constellation of communities called the new monasticism with deep roots in evangelical Christianitya loose network around the United States in which single people and couples and families explore new forms of intentional community and service to the world around. And there are technologists hacking the Rule of St. Benedict to build open, networked communities beyond the grip of the internet giants.

Meanwhile, even as many Western monastic communities in their traditional forms are growing smaller, their spaces for prayer and retreat are bursting at the seams with modern people retreating for rest and silence and centering and prayer, which they take back with them into families and workplaces and communities and schools. As the noisy world seems to be pulling us apart, many people in and beyond the boundaries of tradition are experiencing their need for contemplative practices that were for centuries pursued by professional religious classes and too often missing from the lives of ordinary believers.

In so many ways, I see the new dynamics of spiritual life in our time as gifts to the wisdom of the ages, even as they unsettle the foundations of faith as we have known it. This is a dialectic by which faith, in order to survive, has the chance to live more profoundly into its own deepest sense than it ever could before. I have no idea what religion will look like a century from now, but this evolution of faith will change us all.

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Krista Tippett February 01, 2017 - America Magazine

London - Picture the scene: its a glorious sunny morning, you stroll out onto the balcony of your self-contained, all mod-cons flat, to have a coffee in the sunshine. Your best friend, whos moved in next door, is out on her balcony so you have a bit of a catch up.

The two of you wave to some friends who are walking across the communal landscaped gardens below, on their way to a morning yoga class.

Popping downstairs to the concierge to pick up your post, you bump into another good friend who suggests you join her at the on-site private members club that evening and, as youre heading back to your flat, you encounter yet another friend who tells you shes off to the shops and asks if she pick up anything for you.

It might sound like utopia something many of us have fantasised about over a drink with friends but in a few parts of the UK its becoming a reality. Groups of 50-something empty nesters or singletons looking to downsize arent just hoping theyll get on with the neighbours, theyre moving in en masse, creating what have been dubbed "intentional communities".

Think of it as a university hall of residence only for grown-ups. You have your own space, but theres a community of people you already know living on the doorstep, and often a whole load of shopping and entertaining facilities besides.

Sian Sutherland, 55, is an entrepreneur who co-founded Mio Skincare and Mama Mio, a skincare company. She and her husband have bought a property within the redeveloped Television Centre, the BBCs former HQ in White City, West London, and she has convinced her brother, Nick, and three other friends and their families to buy flats in the scheme. When complete, the development, which opens in December, will include 950 homes, cafes, restaurants, a cinema, hotel and even a branch of swanky members club, Soho House.

"Were nowhere near retiring, but we do see this as the last home we will buy in London," she says. "It gives us the opportunity to be living in a vibrant area, where we can enjoy everything that the city has to offer, but within a real community of people you know and love. I love the buzz of living in a city but the anonymity can sometimes be very isolating. Now, Ive got the opportunity to create a close community of interesting, fun, creative people.

"I love the idea of being so close to friends, you can pop in for a G&T during the week."

For her and her friends, the community aspect is very important. She has been in discussions with the developers about a coffee shop run by and for the residents that her brother, Nick, will open as a bar in the evenings.

"I think weve become used to curating our social communities online, seeking out like-minded groups of friends on Facebook and other social media, and I dont see any reason that shouldnt translate to real life. Loneliness is a huge problem in society these days and I think thats partly because we dont have enough real human interaction. So, for me, living near to the people you want to interact with makes perfect sense."

While Sian and her friends are buying into existing developments, thats just one approach.

Across the country, older people are devising new ways to create their own communities, whether as has happened in a suburb of Cardiff by notifying their friends when properties close to their own come up for sale, or starting from scratch and commissioning architects to build dedicated housing and gathering other like-minded people along the way, an approach that is known as "cohousing".

Melanie Nock, 53, works for a charity and lives in a three-bedroom house within Laughton Lodge, Lewes, East Sussex, a converted hospital building set in 22 acres of land with a village hall complete with kitchen for communal meals once a week.

Melanie says: "Cohousing keeps me young. I have made friends Ill have for ever and love the fact that I can socialise with them at the drop of a hat. If I want a companion to walk the dog with or join me for a swim, I just have to knock next door no forward planning, no mobile phones required. This means I never get lonely, or bored if my husband is busy.

"I am still only in my 50s, you never know how things are going to turn out, so it is important to build a strong support network now for the future. I know that if I ever have to face a crisis later on in life for example, if anything happened to me or my husband there would always be someone to help here.

"You cant look to your neighbours to be your carers as you get older, but they will be there to give you a lift to town, take you to the doctor, buy you a pint of milk or simply for a much-needed chat."

Indeed, communal living is being hailed as a solution to the alienation and isolation many experience today, and its for this reason its become such an appealing prospect for so many people looking to grow old surrounded by the people they know and love.

"In Holland, in the 1990s they saw senior cohousing as a way of keeping older people happier, healthier and more independent for longer," explains Maria Brenton, UKCNs Ambassador for Senior Cohousing. "They introduced policies that would assist that and there are now between 200 and 300 senior cohousing communities over there.'

Daily Mail

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Want a happy old age? Get your friends to be your neighbours - Independent Online