Bellyacres - Artistic Ecovillage

Mission: To caretake the land, in the spirit of cooperation, while aspiring towards greater environmental sustainability.

From www.ic.org/directory/bellyacres-artistic-ecovillage/:

We purchased our 12 acre kipuka “island of trees” in 1987. There are 35 founding members (mostly jugglers and performing artists) from 8 different countries, who met at one of the 19 Hawaiian Juggling festivals. We loved the Big Island of Hawaii enough to decide to live or visit here regularly and organized ourselves to establish a permanent home and performing arts center.
We bought an abandoned jungle homestead that was overrun by vines and weed trees. Since 1987 we have worked thousands of hours on the land, and have turned a slice of raw jungle into a tropical paradise. Almost all of the work has been done voluntarily and with love.

Bellyacres has seven houses and 3 cabins for staff, faculty and interns. Typically we are about 20 adults and 6 kids plus 1 or 2 visiting work exchange folks. Our lives are integrated with several of our neighboring families.

Our organic homestead is focused on exploring location appropriate sustainable agriculture practices. Seasonal crops include, coconuts, breadfruit, mangoes, papayas, avocadoes, bananas, many citrus, soursop, jack fruit, lychee, rambutan, berries, passionfruit and guava. Our greenhouse has the potential to grow a variety of conventional temperate climate vegetables, though they are mostly inappropriate for our location. We get all of our electricity from solar panels. Our water is collected from roof catchment systems and stored in tanks.

For nearly 20 years we organized a traveling circus (HICCUP -Hawaii Island Community Circus) providing weekly performance arts classes throughout Hawaii in schools and in rural communities, plus presenting a range of community performances and circus training camps. Due to the success of these activities we raised funds to build our own community performance arts center. Our SPACE facility opened in November 2007 and has changed the focus of our work. We host a small charter school, an after school circus program and some adult performance arts classes.

Despite our jungle location, we have a well-equipped and cozy communal kitchen with electricity, telephone, free mainland calls, high speed internet, library, hot showers, refrigerators and flush toilets.

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.