“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”

– Toni Cade Bambara

 

About 10% of intentional communities actually make it beyond just being a few people or families living together. Experience and statistics show that becoming a community isn’t easy.

According to Naima Ritter Figueres, co-author of the Community Facilitation Handbook, there are 5 main reasons why communities fail.

Mentality of Scarcity

Understandably, everyone wants their own needs met. Communities often meet needs through principles of sharing. Some individuals may feel that sharing is an impingement on their space, their time, and resources.

Lack of Commitment

In our modern society of endless options, people often lack commitment to places and to each other. When a problem arises, there is a tendency to just walk away. Like many modern relationships, people “bounce” when things get difficult, instead of trying to work through it. Communities face the same challenge.

All talk, no build

Sometimes, a group of people will become very excited about the idea of creating a community together but it will stay very much in the ideation phase. A lack of organization or planning capacity can leave a community in limbo.

Structural Tension

People come from different backgrounds and will have different tastes and preferences. These differences in opinion will certainly extend to how a living space looks, feels, and operates. The design of a community space may not fit the preferences of certain individuals, which can lead to tension among members of a community.

Lack of a spiritual glue

People can easily come together when the going is easy and fun. Community-building without a deeper root, however, can easily splinter during rough patches.

 

For the past 12 years, I have explored partner dance as a vehicle for developing community, conscious relating practices, generating shifts in consciousness, sharing and learning about other cultures through music and dance, and as an approach to maintaining optimal health, not just for the individual, but on a planetary level.

So when Momentom Collective co-founder, Gabrielle Bonneville, told me she wanted to do a residency in Costa Rica focusing on permaculture and regenerative living at the country’s largest permaculture farm, @PuntaMona, it was a no-brainer to bring Cocréa to the game.

In the program we collaboratively built, Cocréa serves as a community development tool that bridges the hands on permaculture practices and social theory through embodiment, and supports the generation of a culture based in amplifying synchronicity and allowing the emergence of synarchy.

This idea of synarchy came to me from the Gene Keys, and to quote:

“As a concept, synarchy is the opposite of anarchy. The prefix syn means to act in concert, and archy means to govern. Therefore the literal meaning concerns the concept of collective rulership.”

In other words, to realize its purpose as a practice of creating transformational movement containers that can help would-be communities stabilize into a sustainable state of prosperity and joy.

Punta Mona founder, Stephen Brooks, added this to the above list of reasons why communities fail:

“They can’t retain the youth.”

The solution as I see it, and my job as an artist who cares, is to do as filmmaker and activist, Toni Cade Bambara says, and

MAKE THE REVOLUTION IRRESISTIBLE.

This revolution needs to include regenerative agriculture if we’re going to dig ourselves out of the now well documented hole modern humans have dug ourselves into. We need new era solutions to the woes that come with urbanization and hegemony, colonialism and patriarchy, such as loss of cultural skills and languages, extinction of species and indigenous people and languages, and collapse of ecosystems and food chains.

However, it is – with few notable exceptions – far from irresistible for many of us to think about leaving the comforts of our modern life to get our hands dirty on a farm, or face the cultural implications of colonialism and what effectively addressing it means for our needlessly consumptive lifestyle.

Together, Momentom Collective, Cocréa and Punta Mona are providing a replicable program and space at the Green Residency to explore and learn tools that address each of these primary short-comings of budding communities. We must find ways to inspire enthusiasm to explore and innovate new living systems so humanity and all life can thrive in harmony.

Imagine a community based in:

Mentality of Abundance

In immersing ourselves in a functional and thriving food forest, we are living in an actualized dream of prosperity. Through learning to dance with each other, and relate with each other, we gain an embodied understanding of what it means to always have enough of EVERYTHING.

Valuing Devotion

By seeing how a PLACE of epic beauty is created and becoming a part of it for a month, we learn the value of sticking it through to completion. Devotion to a project and a living space with potential unending returns becomes the obvious and unavoidable choice.

Essential Speech and Hands on Practice

Through fully integrating building, organization, planning and management skills into our curriculum under the masterful guidance of Solution Era co-founder, Fred Wiper, we encourage and support initiative and execution of projects. By providing activities that support the WHOLE BEING throughout our month long program, participants consistently embody positive feedback from community and gain experience in going beyond ideation.

Structural Tensegrity

By learning to dance with one another, Green residents practice the valuable art of adaptation, improvisation and flow. Attunement to and communication of needs with compassion helps to relieve tension and promotes iteration upon ideas. Regular weekly dances allow for needed releases of energy from the body and stimulates mental and emotional regulation.

Staying Curious about the Bigger Picture

Devotedly integrating yoga and meditation as well as exploring our higher purpose through practical and profound practices such as the Gene Keys allows residents to stay curious and interested in the process rather than fixated on an outcome that could degrade their commitment when going gets rough. This rootedness in a higher purpose to our presence on Earth within residency hopefully inspires and translates out beyond the bounds of Punta Mona and the rest of life.

Generational Relevance – Changing with the Zeitgeist

Bringing forward and honoring wisdom from our elders who have come before, while also gracefully and graciously integrating new information, ways of being and practices that can support youth in evolving in nourishing and expansive capacities.

I hope you’ll choose to be curious and interested in being part of an irresistible and real Green revolution. Now that Momentom is taking a pause on running residencies, I invite you to come play, learn and grow with us a Cocréa retreat. If you are interested in having Cocréa bring a similar program to your community in collaboration with your values and regions interests and needs, please don’t hesitate to reach out through the contact form to schedule a call.