Report of the workshop: Intentional Community Living
Lecture given by a few housemembers from Mandrill community Maastricht.
-Short video mandrill cultural/political centre.
The centre is squatted, non-profit based on volunteers.
They live in a community and describe the alternative way of living.
- Community is with 9 people.
- everything is shared, also sleeping space, food and clothes.
- it is not easy to live like this, it take’s effort.
- political, capitalist, gender values are different from the ”normal” society.
- Willing to work on yourself and taking care of each other.
- started 3 years ago.
Why
- empowering, you can do more with a committed group of people
- you can never do this alone
- easy to share : (organic) food, car, fridge. You need less stuff because you share.
- activism element
- fun, good for social skills
- platform, work on yourself
- care, people want to support each other.
- one model that worked for Mandrill community
Challenges
- sharing everything
- avoid irritations, talk about everything, listen to each other
- individual within a group instead of individual next to a group
- finding personal boundaries, neglecting yourself can happen, no privacy.
- the way you’ve bin raised, personal change is intense.
- priority ourselves over the things we organize for the outside
- balance between the individual and community
- trust, supporting community, you don’t have to do everything yourself. Everybody does their part for the community.
Tools
- communication, be flexible, how to say thing to each other if you have a irritation.
- meetings weekly : *we talk until everybody is okay with the decision
*how we are doing personally, check in/check out ( start meeting with personal things, nobody is allowed to talk if you say ”check in” until you say ”check out”.)
*you know what is going on with somebody
*cardsystem, they make different cards for different tasks like cleaning ore administration ect. Also emotional tasks like the hartkeeper card, this person does special/nice thing for the house to keep the atmosphere good. With this cards you can litany pas on the card (task) to somebody else . Card overview , know witch tasks are done, need to be done, who does it.
- Holy Moly: make cleaning more fun : after dinner one song, if the song is finished the cleaning needs to be done. And have cleaningdays, make this more fun for example to wear red lipstick while cleaning.
- Retreats : getting to know each other, a weekend away with the whole group.
- Dating- date (non-sensual)with group members, to get to know them good, go to movie together ect.
- finances- persons name on the door, how much they spend. Head of finance checks after a month if everything is even.
- if new people come in, the new people are people who already helped out, so that they and we know what there up to. And people that just fit, no formal things, it is about communication.
- invisible hat if people don’t feel social/bad, so you know to just ignore that person.