Woodbury

Mission: My vision is to bring together a small number of daring, independent, and nice families and individuals to help create a home where we can share resources, farm, brew beer, drink beer or wine, cultivate mushrooms, create art, and be an oasis from the city for those of us who work there. As we evolve and grow, we may even be able to use our land to provide some or even all of our income, making us truly self-sustaining.

From www.ic.org/directory/woodbury/:

The goal of Woodbury (no, I’m not married to the name…) is to combine the resources of its members into either a land trust or other legal entity that will allow us to leverage our funds to purchase enough acreage to allow us to be nearly self-sustaining or even potentially generate enough income to offset the cost of owning.

There is no master philosophy, dogma, or oppressive covenants, please. You may smoke, I don’t; that’s fine. I don’t want to be anyone’s mother. Maybe your family is into home schooling. I’m in my 40’s so I won’t be attending … unless there’s cookies. What may set this community apart is that we aim to have amenities close enough for everyone to enjoy and get a sense of connectedness with others while having enough space to allow for solitude and privacy.

The biggest hurdle to creating this community is that the only way it will become real (spoiler alert: or any cohousing/intentional community) is for all families and individuals to be solvent enough to qualify for the mortgage. Although we may end up purchasing a very large piece of farmland that could allow for us to enable share-cropping, exchange of services, barter, etc., we cannot accept anyone at this stage who isn’t able to invest financially in their share of the community.

Some of the proposed ideas for Woodbury include:
A Modest Common House—a place where we can meet, socialize and share meals and memories. Many properties already have homes built on them already that we could use for the common house without building new.

Residence—In order to maximize the flexibility, sustainability, and affordability of our new residences, the current plan is to build customized container homes. Our homes can be stand-alone or attached to other neighbors as desired.

Retreat/Vacation Home—Those who want a place in the country to visit and relax on the weekends may enjoy living in Woodbury part time. One option if we choose, is to have retreats where people can camp, do morning meditations to awaken their spirits.

Sustainability—Our building practices, water usage, food production, and energy production will be designed to be self-sustaining. Our home will use less energy through smart design, generate all the energy we do need from renewable solar electric, possibly hydropower, and/or recaptured methane.
(no) Zombies!—This isn’t a doomsday bunker cul de sac, but we want to be a resilient as well as sustainable community. Residents can stock emergency supplies, food and water. They can also be a source of help for each other when needed.

Food—Our goal is to acquire enough land capable to feed everyone in the community, perhaps more. We will primarily focus on permaculture and create both tillable crops as well as a food forest. There will be an outdoor community garden during the growing season and greenhouse during the winter.
Income generating if feasible—With the amount of land we may potentially have, the possibility of offsetting the cost of our homes should be considered. We may want to build a community center to host seminars and ongoing workshops. In the end, the possibility of income will depend on the talent and availability of community members.
Frugal when possible—A key goal is make Woodbury affordable, not requiring two full-time jobs per household just to get by. To control costs, we are pooling finances to buy a large property to reduce the build cost per acre, employ modular building techniques with container homes lowering the cost while making the ability to add on to the home far cheaper than conventional buildings.
We are organizing now to find the rest of you that want to join us in this adventure.

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.