Page 14 - C.A.L.L. #35 - Fall 2012

KALEIDOSCOPE
Communal Aspirations

One bit of evidence for the desire for community can be seen in the classified
advertising section, called “Reach,” in Communities magazine. In every issue there are
ads seeking members for established communities, but also quite a few ads for new
communities, typically ones that have not yet been actually launched, but concrete
visions of community, at least, in the minds of would-be founders and members. In
the Fall 2010 issue of the magazine, for example, people were invited to help start an
ecovillage and retreat center in Kansas, a desert community in Arizona, a cohousing
community in California, an urban cooperative in Hawai’i, and a shared household in
New Jersey.
Another bit of evidence for community-mindedness is the traffic on the Fellowship
for Intentional Community website. As of October 2010, that site attracted about
66,500 hits per month, or about 2,200 a day, with 6.5 page views per visit, and the

numbers for 2010 were up 11 percent over 2009. While not everyone visiting the site
is in the market for community, surely the numbers reflect to some degree interest
in intentional communities – if not living in one, at least wishing.
Video sales also indicate increased interest in community. The FIC reports that it
sold over 1000 total copies of the two volumes of Geoph Kozeny’s video “Visions of
Utopia” last year, and that included more sales of volume 1 than had been reached in
any of the seven years it has been available.
Communities also attract attention from the broader public. There is a steady
stream of media coverage of communities, as in the case of the photo feature on
East Wind community in National Geographic in 2005. And there is a steady stream

of visitors to communities – not just sightseers, but in any cases persons looking for
a place to live in community.

The Hard Numbers
For all of the interest there seems to be in intentional communities, however, the
number of persons actually living in intentional communities is tiny – a very small
fraction of 1 percent of the population. Counting the number of active
communitarians is a daunting task, to say the least, but the numbers are not large.
I decided I would count up the population of the hundreds of American communities
in the 2007 edition of the Communities Directory (the new 2010 directory was not
yet out when I did my counting, but I don’t think the results there would be very
different) and in round numbers that would come to something like 10,000 adults
living in communities of five or more members each in the United States. But there

are so many problems with the numbers that getting within even a couple of orders
of magnitude is dubious. For example, the Adidam community lists its population as
1060. But that apparently includes many locations, the majority of them outside the
United States. On the other hand, the Bruderhof communities don’t provide any
numbers at all, and that group of communities, with a membership thought to be in
the low thousands, has enough members that its numbers alone would have quite an
impact on any total figure. And the most important skewing factor of all is that huge
numbers of communities choose not to be listed in the directory.

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