Open Circle
- Fellowship for Intentional Community
Mission: Our community life is based on personal affinity, which means that persons and relationships come first and everything else follows from that. We want to live creatively, and in ways that are fulfilling for all our members.
From www.ic.org/directory/open-circle/:
Our community is based on personal affinity, which means that persons and relationships come first and everything else follows from that. We are experimental and we embrace change. We have been working at this (under various names) for more than 40 years. We find that the community spirit is powerful and alive and needs to be nurtured every day with caring attention to each other, our feelings, and our needs. We meet several times a week for this purpose and to coordinate our action. We have seven members, and most of us have years of prior community experience.
Located in central VA, we are within an hour & a half of Twin Oaks, Acorn, Living Energy Farm, Cambia, Mimosa, and Compersia. We have close connections with members of Twin Oaks, Ganas, and Compersia communities and we exchange energies for mutual benefit.
We are lucky to live in a true beauty spot at the base of Old Rag Mountain near Etlan VA. Our 97 acres of mostly forested land borders on Shenandoah National Park. We have created (and continue to create) a great physical environment for community living, including a farmhouse, three cabins, and two gardens. We also have a three-story mixed-use building in the nearby town of Culpeper, Virginia, and two of our members live there.
We are a close-knit group and pay a lot of attention to our relationships and our personal growth. We circle together for meals most days, do gardening and projects together, and hold meetings several times a week; this serves us well in staying connected and coordinating our efforts. We wish to grow our community in ways that are sustainable emotionally, financially, and environmentally. We want to live creatively, and in ways that are fulfilling for all our members.
We feel that sharing is essential to group living. We make group decisions and go up or down together accordingly. We expect every member to make appropriate contributions of time and money so that we all stay in balance.
Over the next several months, we want to take the time to fully integrate our new and returning members. We need to reorganize and do some thinking together about new directions. And we want to settle in to who we are now as a community. For this reason, we want to postpone visitor periods and other steps on the track to membership for new people until the end of 2017 or early 2018.
- Address
- Physical Address
- Etlan, Virginia
- United States