A Growing Playce To Practice Collaborative Community
- Fellowship for Intentional Community
Mission: Our mission is to encourage, guide, and give field experience to efforts in collaboration that helps to create social, environmental, and financial sustainability (often via alternative economies), with continual efforts to be inclusive and diversified. We live intentionally to care for each other and the environment and over the years to acquire housing in close proximity to one another with common spaces for community activities. We are committed to learn how to be a community that identifies itself as a "natural support" for a sustainable number of marginalized individuals who live in the community (and more outside the physical community) by engaging them in programs of social agriculture (or care farming), creative self-expression through the arts, micro-enterprises in the arts, urban farming and marketing, and the hospitality aspects of operating a retreat center that provides residencies to artists and activists who come to develop their work in collaboration with a person who has a psychiatric label or is disenfranchised from society though such label. The artists' only obligation for this no cost residency is to include a mentally disturbed resident in need of community recognition and engagement in some phases of the development of their art or performance. We hope to support one another as residents seeking permanent community in comfortable safe housing areas that include some of society's most vulnerable.
From www.ic.org/directory/a-growing-playce-for-practice-in-human-community/:
Presently we have many features of an established intentional community and are working toward sustainability around growing food, raising chickens and bees, and supporting both residents and non-residents with emotional challenges to express themselves and heal through the arts. We also have a therapeutic miniature horse, and engage people in social agriculture or "care farming," in which a mini-farm is used to create and maintain community with disenfranchised individuals. We hold meetings and a "creative movement group" in New Orleans with occasional extended retreat weekends in Bay Saint Louis designed to help us develop consensus skills, practice collaboration, identify our common values, objectives and covenants, and to establish our bylaws. We are presently four Bay Saint Louis residents and four non-residential members in New Orleans. Some of us wish to own our own homes, while others wish to remain renters; there is a plethora of housing stock either contiguous to the Bay Saint Louis properties, located in "Old Town," or within short walking distance of it. We would like to acquire adjacent properties in the neighborhood. Two residents live in a self-contained house with a studio apartment in the rear for another resident, who is also the farm manager. The house next door is reserved for "retreats" in which artists come either in groups or individually to do their own creative work and to share it with a person with mental challenges to engage that person's in self expression. In the future, we hope for shared office space, personnel and a performance venue where micro businesses, social entrepreneurships, or cooperative businesses will emerge.People who live in the community must be open to inclusion of people from all races and backgrounds, and over time, they must be willing to include and offer natural support to a few individuals who have special life challenges or have been marginalized. Presently a cooperative is forming within this community among people who are using the arts and a Buddhist model for "being present" with people who are experiencing what is called "psychosis" in the medical system. The aim of the cooperative is to offer an a more compassionate form of healing or a place of sanctuary from the brutality associated with undergoing conventional "treatment." At this time, this group is called "The BeWith Community," and it is also the model used by artists in residence working with those who have psychological maladies.
Objectives: We need people who can buy or rent residences so we can create a nearly contiguous pattern of properties that will make community life viable in a small urban setting. But anyone is welcome to apply who wishes to participate in building a community where a variety of micro-businesses or social entrepreneurships will emerge in urban farming, renovation and building with salvaged materials, social agriculture, holistic mental health, and the operation of a well-needed retreat center for urban artists (New Orleans artists will have first consideration), designed to host workshops in performing arts, healing retreats, InterPlay events (www.interPlay.org), and other convergences in the arts for social change.
Social agriculture” (care famring) is one such entrepreneurship that will quickly grow to a business in the larger community, but a pre-vocational training program in the gardens is already in use on the community grounds to engage adults and children from the outside community in caring for plants and animals while they acquire a sense of belonging, purpose, and interdependence of all life on earth. Right now there are only four of us in the social garden space, which is used also for gatherings--for “play” or social purposes that build community. Social agriculture is inclusive, creative, and playful. It offers alternative activities for healing mind and body. We grow food. We grow community. We grow well.
Come home to A Playce that creates its sustainability through interdependence, artistic expression, and commitment to belonging and purpose for everybody.
- Address
- Physical Address
- Bay Saint Louis (58 miles from New Orleans) Bay Saint Louis, MS, Mississippi
- United States