Green Acres Permaculture Village

Mission: GREEN ACRES PERMACULTURE VILLAGE is a small, retrofit, intergenerational intentional community in a core suburban college town neighborhood that integrates self-knowledge and expression with a shared culture among humans and the living Earth to encourage abundance on every level.

From www.ic.org/directory/green-acres-permaculture-village-current/:

GREEN ACRES PERMACULTURE VILLAGE is a retrofit intergenerational intentional community carved from within an existing suburban neighborhood in college town. The evolving Village, currently featuring three adjacent homes and permacultured grounds, with pathways and commons areas (two greenhouses, a workshop space, chicken house, shed, patio) offers itself as a template for transformation of suburban life.

Village rhythms feature both work and play. Offering workshops, work days, weekly Community Dinners, and Seasonal Celebrations, we both integrate internally and promote outreach to the larger community. To this end, we offer tours, plus sponsor and encourage WWOOFers, including Indiana University Interns and Sustainability Classes, to demonstrate and promote values that lie below money as far as possible. To this end we keep rents low, work together on projects, encourage each other’s self-expression and entrepreneurial skills, honor our communion with the living Earth, and aim to live and work in place inside a sharing economy that values both individual expression and community cooperation.

Established in 2009 by founder Ann Kreilkamp who dedicated her own yard for a Green Acres Neighborhood Garden, both our sense of community and our capacity for growing food have evolved organically over time. In 2014 Rebecca Ellsworth, an organic gardener for 40 years, joined us, and from then on, the cultivation and preservation of food and value-added products for both Village use and sales, including a small CSA, have taken hold.

In 2017 we were invited to establish a permaculture garden behind the house of a neighbor in exchange for part of the produce, and plan to offer this service to others in the Green Acres neighborhood.

Early in 2018 we created a ten-member Village Board that is now researching legal structures to determine which type will best meet our needs as we go forward. We expect to add houses and grounds to the Village over time.

Green Acres Permaculture Village is networked with the Green Acres Neighborhood Association, Dandelion Village, Bloomington Co-operative Living, Bloomington Council of Neighborhood Associations, the Association for Regenerative Culture, NuMundo, and the Federation of Intentional Communities.

A service of the Data Commons Co-op. The project has been supported by Equal Exchange, the Cooperative Charitable Trust, the USDA, and many others - thank you! Tech volunteers over the years include: Benjamin Bradley with support from GAIA Host. Ben Mauer with support from Quilted. Paul Fitzpatrick. Ronin Tech Collective, Brattleboro Tech Collective, Sligo Computer Services. Jason Lemieux. Default map tiles courtesy of MapQuest. Default map data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA.