Tanglemoss Homesteading Community

Mission: Build a community in the woods together. Become increasingly independent.

From www.ic.org/directory/tanglemoss-homesteading-community/:

Nestled in the woods outside of Olympia, Washington, a group of friends are creating a space to become increasingly self-sufficient as an independent community. We are Tanglemoss Collective and we're hoping to get more people involved in our super rad project.

Objectives (elaboration below)
1. Collectively buy land
2. Live communally
3. Become increasingly self-sufficient
4. Share skills

Here are some ways you can support us and our project:

- Share this info and share our crowdfunding page via social media. Print this out as an info sheet or zine and post it at your local library/info shop/food co-op.
- Come live with us! We are five adult humans and a handful of non-human animals. We want to share this dream with a whole community of folks. If you’re interested in joining us, we’d love to hear from you.
- Contribute financially. If you’re not interested or able to join us right now, but want to support the cause, contributions to our Indiegogo or PayPal are greatly appreciated.
- Advice! Know anything about real estate, soil, promoting, recruiting, off-grid living, legal stuff for collectivizing, potentially becoming a non-profit or any other advice you think would be helpful? Contact us, we'd love to talk.
- Buy eggs! If you\\'re local, you can help support us by buying organic, free- range eggs from us.

More on our objectives...

1st Objective:
Collectively buy land.
This property must meet the needs of the current participants, have long-term sustainability (water, farming acres, etc.) for our goals of becoming increasingly self-sufficient, allow plenty of living space for future community members to build dwellings, and potentially allow space for visitors, educational work trade, skill-share camp-outs, and who knows what.

We currently have secured financing and are looking at properties. As most properties are not set up to accommodate pet goats or more than a “single family,” we anticipate initial financial burdens that greatly exceed the monthly mortgage. We are trying to make a space for a larger community using the means of just a handful of current members, so to help alleviate some of the financial burden on the founding members, we are also pursuing crowdfunding.

2nd Objective:
Live communally.
Living communally reduces our need for manufacturing, transportation of goods and dependence on capitalism, and replaces that with the mutual aid provided by friends who trust and support each other. The community we are creating will be non-hierarchical. All decisions will be made by consensus.

3rd Objective:
Become increasingly self-sufficient.
Over time we want to make the property able to sustain its inhabitants without the need of outside resources. We will have electricity, plumbing, and all those luxuries, but we want to work towards not needing them, or being able to go without them indefinitely if we wanted or needed to. The climate in our area is projected to have heavier rain in the winter and drier summers, so we will build rain catching systems to help reduce the draw from our water well in the summer. We will, of course, grow our own produce, forest farm in our wooded areas, then over time start taking on more projects and mastering new skills. Some examples include growing our own wheat for flour, herbs for medicine, making oils and vinegars, building a stove out of bricks made from our soil, and spinning fibers.

4th Objective:
Share skills.
Humans are basically something of a terrible plague on the earth. Humans who lived here before us lived (and in some places continue to live) harmoniously with nature. We're hoping, with some expected trial and error, that it is still possible for us to live sustainably, without the need to import goods and resources. That's where we're hoping to get at some point. With this property, we aim to foster each others' efforts to decivilize and relearn skills for living which do not contribute to the destruction of the earth.

Thanks for reading!
We hope that you'll get involved or help us get the word out to folks who might want to get involved by donating and sharing!

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.