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• Fellowship for Intentional Community

We are currently a community of six member households and three households interested in membership, living close to the land on 135 acres of mixed woodland and pasture. We range in age from infant to 60s, with 15 adults and 14 children. We strive to live spirit-focused lives that are simple, sustainable, and joyful, benefiting from and enjoying our close connections with each other and the land. We don't all need to identify explicitly as Quaker. We welcome diversity of all sorts.

We are in the gorgeous Hudson Valley of upstate New York (2.5 hours from NYC/Boston, 10 minutes from our local Quaker Meeting), in the foothills of the Berkshires.

We are thriving in a range of green homes that use technologies including plastered strawbale walls, slip-and-chip walls, stick-building, timber-framing, passive solar design, solar hot-water systems, and wood heat; many of us built our own. Many of us farm small plots organically, raise chickens and livestock, and eat increasingly more from what we grow. We join together in our big farmhouse for weekly potlucks, occasional community dinners hosted by one or more households, community workdays, committee meetings, spontaneous game nights and tea times, presentations on topics of interest, and monthly community business meetings. We use Quaker processes including consensus decision-making that seeks God's will, discernment, and the clearness process, and we value equality, simplicity, and diversity of experience and viewpoints.

We are currently seeking new members! Starting late summer 2014 there will be a 1,500-sq ft house available for sale to a new member household. The house is initially available for rent in order to allow time for discernment about membership. (See pictures of red house in photo gallery below.) We also have one house building site available, with the possibility of two more in the future if there is need. Our membership process starts with a mutual getting-t0-know-each-other time, during which the potential member or member family gets involved with the community in various ways and gets to know us (and vice-versa). This often takes up to a year. The goal is to come to a sense of clearness, for the applicant as well as the community members, about whether the fit is a good one. More about our membership process can be found on our web site (http://qivc.org/faq-qivc#Participation).

We believe conscious culture creation in community can be a means to advance our intentions:

1. To live in worship, increasing our mindfulness, spiritual focus, and God-centeredness by intertwining our daily lives with others who share these intentions


2. To create a village setting that values and engages participation by people of all ages, expands our experience of family, and supports our expression in the world


3. To create wealth that embodies integrity and Truth by carefully examining our engagement in the current economic order and stepping away from its destructive elements


4. To live in unity & harmony with the earth by considering the near and far environmental impact of our actions while striving for thrivability


5. To include a good measure of joy, fun, creativity, and service in our lives

We believe that our communities' success in achieving these five intentions will be aided by memberships diverse in race, age, ethnicity, sexual preference, and economic situations, and therefore it is our aim to gather communities whose members are diverse in these ways as well as others.

Address

Physical Address

235 Bradley's Crossing Road

East Chatham, New York 12060

United States

Organization Type

• Intentional community

Tags

• Cohousing (individual homes within group property)