When designing a community project, it is important to pay attention to the details of everyday life. In fact, small daily practises connected with food, work, personal hygiene and resource use, for example, are often psychic and materialistic expressions of the worldviews, intentions and visions of the group. They can be designed consciously to support and strengthen them – or work the other way around, informing and giving clarity to the intention a community stands for.
At times, the worldview expressed in a practice might not correspond exactly to that of an individual group member, or even of the group as a whole. A group may have agreed to a common vision and intention, but still consciously or unconsciously operates according to a worldview more in line with what they want to change rather than where they want to go.
This can create conflicts and personal struggles, but can also be an invitation to support each other and help the project realise its goals. Consciously designing elements of everyday life to express the intentions of the project can thus support group members to take the actions and maintain the attitudes and types of relationships that help make their common visions a reality.
In projects that aim to change or improve something in the world, there are often blind spots that might go unseen before we encounter practices that disturb or challenge us, or which make us relate to life in a different way. How would we change or re-design our everyday life and practices if we consider them as expressions of either intentions or unexamined assumptions about life? What would we add or take away to better express what we want to create in the world? How does this influence, enrich or challenge us as individuals and communities?
When individuals group together and form a community, some daily practices that were previously individual and ‘domestic’ are transformed and become shared as community practices. In this section, examples are chosen to illustrate how we can build coherence between the individual, the community, the intentions and the structure, through practices woven into everyday life.
Examples are meant to show the interconnectedness between the levels in the model.
In accordance with GAIA Education’s wheel of sustainability, four examples have been chosen, one for each respective dimension:
· Social – the case of shared dinners
· Ecological – the case of compost toilets
· Economic – the case of car sharing
· Culture – the case of moments of awareness
The magnitude of experiences from existing ecovillages on these topics will be found on the CLIPS ICT platform. This section simply explores how practice in our model is influenced and is influencing all layers of community, from the individual to intention and structure.
Practise shows the intentions and structures – or the lack of the same. What can support groups in getting their plans down to earth, to have their intentions materialize? How to find the right people for the tasks, how to organise the workflow or the distribution of work? The practice layer of CLIPS responds to the questions of practice – what can be seen and experienced. Methods have been gathered and adapted from the ecovillage network which can contribute to successful realisation of projects.
Some groups establish car-sharing schemes, thus using common cars more effectively: having on
average more passengers per ride, distributing ownership and maintenance costs, reducing the
number of cars on the road.
Before starting with their tasks team members meet in a circle and spenda few moments in silence, listening within, noticing how they are, connecting to the larger purpose of theirwork together, and focusing their intention and awareness on the present moment, the group they arewith and the tasks at hand.
Sharing an innovative toilet culture is a great opportunity for community building.
The group needs to find answers to many questions: Who will create the system?
Where to place it? How will the system be taken care of? How aesthetic and comfortable do people want it to be? How much can it cost? etc.
This is a chance to practice negotiation and decision-making.
A common feature in many groups (e.g. the ecovillage and cohousing movement, community gardens, transition groups) is the practice of dining together. This ranges from sharing every meal to having shared dinners occasionally, usually on a weekly or monthly basis. Systems of shared diningare often subject to experiments and changes as the ultimate form that meets the needs of different individuals is generally hard to reach.
Any group needs to set its boundaries in a transparent manner for members, both new and old, to be able to navigate more smoothly within the community.
What is needed from each member? What can be made possible? What is expected?
The Traffic Light exercise zones out these aspects to set clear boundaries.
A group needs practices for sharing.This is one that is widely used within the ecovillage movement and therefore a recommendation for each community group to experiment with – and find the form that match the group the best.
Feel free to contact us and share your own tools!