Curriculum Vitae for NewTown

 

My exploration of intentional communities began in 1971 when I decided that what I had been taught about how the world works would not work for me.

I got my first “real” job as a Delivery Salesperson for a local office supply company where I learned the meaning of customer service as well as the details of the office supply industry. During my eight years at Commercial Office Supply, I finished my BA degree in Sociology at California State University, Los Angeles.

 

I became acquainted with Transactional Analysis and the works of Eric Berne and Claude Steiner, and gained my initial understanding of my life scripts relating to how I transacted with the world. I became involved with Family Synergy, an organization dedicated to networking around intentional community and related topics. The first group I joined was exploring the idea of living together. I eventually moved into the Allott Street House where I got my first hands-on look at intentional communities from the inside.

During this time, I began exploring the possibility of working and earning a living with friends. I put a notice in the Family Synergy newsletter stating my interest in working with other members of the group and  got a response from a member who owned a small distributor of electro-mechanical parts. I left Commercial Office Supply and went to work for my friend Harley at Distributor Specialists where I worked until leaving Los Angeles in 1984.

I moved to San Francisco in 1984 with my wife and devoted myself to learning about relationships, children, and the many dynamic relationships present in every family, thus deepening my understanding and awareness of the challenges facing intentional communities.

I worked at the law firm of Sedgwick, Detert, Moran and Arnold in January of 1987, where I remained until September, 1993. This experience enhanced my real-world business experience . both making me more valuable to any intentional community and seeding the concept of a new type of intentional community. While working in the law offices, I became active in the Expanded Family Network, a Bay Area group similar to Family Synergy. My understanding of, and interest in, intentional community broadened and deepened. I also met several people who I remain friends with to this day.

My Aunt Audrey passed on in 1993, giving me a large enough inheritance to forgo traditional work for several years. That same year, I saw a presentation about a community in Germany called ZEGG and was deeply inspired by the visions of groups of people living harmoniously, working through their issues, and building a beautiful community out of a former Stasi training camp.I became very involved in attempting to start a similar community in the United States and began arranging a series of ZEGG workshops with the idea of jump-starting this new community. The workshop in Eugene, Oregon in December, 1994 generated great enthusiasm and I moved to Eugene in January of 1995 to begin creating what become known as LoveGarden Circle. We learned a lot together, had some wonderful events, and some incredible conversations. We stayed in Eugene for seven months before moving to Portland to join another intentional household called the Habitat House.

The ZEGG US tour continued for a year and a half and some of the Americans created the first American Winter Came in February, 1996 in Oracle, Arizona. This resulted in a new networking community called The Network for a New Culture, which continues to produce an annual summer camp that attracts over 150 people from all over the globe. Some of the original ZEGG people remain involved.

During the first Winter Camp, I met two of the key people at the Ganas Community in Staten Island, NY. During our interactions, I realized that I still had more to learn about intentional communities. Ganas was founded in 1978 and had a population of 80- a very stable community and the logical next step. I lived there for three months and continue to enjoy warm working relationships with the people there.

September of 1997 saw me in Tucson, AZ starting another community with about 30 other people. This effort drove home the challenges of creating a viable intentional community. I tried again in 1999, when a group purchased a 2.27 acre site just southwest of Tucson. We began rehabilitating and reclaiming this former horse ranch and introducing permaculture techniques to the land. Flowering Desert Permaculture Site was born. Our understanding of intentional community had progressed to the point where we realized that highly developed inter-personal communication skills was necessary. We embarked on the study of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as soon as we moved onto the land. One of our traveling members had studied under Marshall Rosenberg, then came back and taught the rest of us the basics. We then met a person who is a certified NVC trainer and began to do study and practice groups with her. We continued this practice and study until Flowering Desert ended and the property was sold in 2000. During this time, I also worked for two years as a contractor doing contract management, planning and purchasing for Bombardier Aerospace and Allied Signal Aerospace in Tucson; where I honed business skills large corporate environments.

After the end of Flowering Desert I began to seriously evaluate my intentional community experience. I noticed that there were hundreds of attempts to find the right group of like-minded people and that 90% of these attempts ended without a community being formed or a community that foundered and eventually failed. I began to suspect that there was something seriously wrong with this approach to community building. One day during a conversation with a fellow community builder I had an epiphany. She had worked diligently with a group of people to put together a co-housing community in Tucson. Finally after seven years, she moved into her newly constructed home. I asked her if it was community. Her reply was, “not yet, but if people stick around for 10 –20 years it will be.” BINGO!!!  In that flash of a moment, I integrated what I had learned in the ZEGG workshops and at Ganas. What I got was this. Create infrastructure, context and excitement; then people with gravitate towards the activities and people that resonate with them.

Thus, the entire concept of NewTown is about creating fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of community and to nurture growth of community. Towards this end, I continue to study co-housing, aspiring ecovillages and new urbanism. My practice of Nonviolent Communication continues to deepen.

Why Now

·         Successes of co-housing and aspiring ecovillage developments

·         Development of “new urbanism”

·         The need to re-claim and develop “greyfields”; dying malls and neighborhoods

·         Need to re-claim and rehabilitate human capital

Manifesting the vision of NewTown requires clear-headed experience and understanding of the dynamics of developing an intentional community as well as skills in collaboration and nurturing. My life experience leads me to this point of co-creating and developing NewTown.