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Protestants, who take a literal interpretation of the Bible, account for a majority of the religiously active
population (http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Tennessee.aspx). As Harvey notes, “we provide the
major social connection for many homesteading families that live in the area via our weekly pot-lucks
and our food coop.” In this way, the community serves as a centralized gathering spot to nourish
cooperative culture.

Like Harvey, all of my interviewees have worked in some way as community networkers. Laird values this
networking function not only as a way to spread cooperative culture, but as a way to support an
individual community’s survival. For Sandhill, involvement with other communities has provided “moral
support, technical advice, and a safety net for the ebbs and flows of membership.” For example, joining
the Federation of Egalitarian Communities was a big help in the early years, as it provided them with
people to help during their labor-intensive sorghum harvest. This involvement also gave them places for
inexpensive vacations at sister communities. And this provided them with a name in intentional
community circles, helping them with recruitment. Laird calls the decision of Dancing Rabbit community
to locate nearby in 1997 was like winning “the national sweepstakes.” In Laird’s words, “it allowed us to
retain the closeness only possible with small numbers, while enjoying the big community advantages of
hybrid vigor and a wealth of increased culture (and prospects for intimate relationships). By having
neighbors with very similar values we had the best of both worlds.”

Laird also notes the value of networking to individuals. For example, his involvement in the broader
community networks of the FIC and FEC, as well as his work as a group process consultant, nurtured him
by providing “a wider pool of peers” than he could expect to meet at a small, isolated intentional
community, and gave him the opportunity to engage in deeply meaningful social change work that has
become, in his words, “one of the central foci of my life over the past 36 years.” While Sandhill Farm
provided “sanity, renewal and grounding”, his work in community networking allowed him to satisfy his
“desire to make a difference in the world.”
The roles of my interviewees in the process of spreading cooperative culture cannot be underscored.
Many of them have worked not only as leaders in their own communities but around the country as
educators and trainers to promote peaceful group process and cooperative, egalitarian communities. In
doing so, they’ve trained other individuals and groups to become adept at doing this work themselves.
Laird, for example, estimates that he’s worked on group process with at least 100 groups, and has taken
about 80 students through his 2-year facilitation training. In this way, they’ve sowed seeds of cooperative
culture in an exponential way.

Conclusion

In conclusion, in my travels to scores of communities around the United States, I’ve seen how the work of
intentional community elders, networkers and writers such as Nancy, Valerie, Harvey, Marty, Jenny, Roger
and Laird, has spread a distinctive cooperative culture that focuses on the primacy of building
relationships over accomplishments. In a blog that Laird wrote in May of this year, he says “to be clear, I
don’t think intentional communities will eliminate conflict in the world – yet we do think that living
cooperatively can be a building block of world peace. It all hinges on how people (and the groups that
they create) respond to disagreement” (http://communityandconsensus.blogspot.com/, 5/6/2016).

Laird views intentional communities as the Research and Development centers of the greater society, as
they work to “figur[e] out the nuts and bolts of social sustainability” and create “successful cooperative
culture”. I think Laird’s following words sum up the general spirit of my interviews: “The world, I believe,
desperately needs what we’re learning about.” … “I’m hoping to see a shift to where successful
intentional communities see a greater responsibility to the wider culture to witness what they’ve been
learning, such that they become centers around which ever-widening circles of cooperative culture
radiate out.”

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