For many years some friends and I have the idea (actually it is more than that, it’s a dream) to create a unique community, where we can live in a sustainable way and on the same time develop a giving and sharing culture. Now at least some of us feel ready to start this project and that’s the reason why I’m writing in my blog about it.
As I’ve already learned, when you start a project, no matter what kind of, the most important factor is the people. So it is important to find first the right people who we’ll like to start with us. Everyone is welcome to join us. There is only one rule – you have to be 100% honest to yourself with your heart and mind that you want to do this. If not, you’d better not join. If there is a moment when you are not anymore sure that this is the right thing for you, than you’d better quite. Ok, so we are looking for people to join us.
After that it is important to have at least some idea what you want to do. I’ll list here shortly what are some of my ideas who it can look like. Everyone is welcome to bring his/her own ideas as well and them we merge them together and choose the most practical and realistic one, which we can achieve first. We are not going to forget all the other ideas and we are not going to forget our dreams, because we know that at some point we’ll have the capacity to achieve them.
Here are my ideas:
1. Agriculture, Farming and Food: Aim is that we achieve 100% self-sufficiency. There are three posts of this: Grow, Collect and Share. Aim it that we don’t need the third one at some point. We will grow our own vegetables, fruits and crops. I know the basics, but I’ll need help in this. From the nature we can collect a lot of different products, for example: bear’s garlic, all kinds of herbs (for medicine as well), all kind of nuts, diverse grasses and so on. I’m quite a specialist in this area and have a strong will to learn even more. At first we won’t be able to have animals, but maybe we’ll need some later. I hope that we won’t need animals.
2. Community or who we are? The best thing will be if we come from different countries and cultures, if we are different ages and if we are a good mixture of men, women and kids. I first expect that there will be no families with kids but mostly young people and retirees.
3. Cultural Activities. We what to start different cultural activities especially arts, music and traditional handicrafts.
4. Production. It will be good if we can produce some technical stuff as well, check for example this blog post about open source ecology.
5. Diverse Services. We still have to define what we can do well and which services we can provide. For example looking at kids and teaching them diverse things about our community. Or teaching languages, handicrafts, about IT or about different herbs you can use and many more.
6. Business Creation. We will be a very mix and innovative community and from our different ideas we will start businesses or will give ideas to other people who can start businesses. There are many different possibilities, but we will act from the beginning as a platform for open exchange and sharing, as a kind of business lab.
7. Creation of New Ways of Life. This point will be a direct consequence of the project.
8. Tourism. Everyone will be welcome at every time to visit us and experience our community. We will inform about all our activities and backgrounds. We will organize some regular trips to different destinations in the world, so there will be a possibility for everyone to join as well.
9. Workshops, Seminars, Exchange. It is highly possible that we will have the infrastructure we need for such events.
10. Regular Jobs. At first I suppose that most of us will have their regular jobs at part time. When we start different businesses and have a strong financial basis this will change. Or it is at least highly possible that some of us decide not do their regular jobs anymore.
11. Communications, Infrastructure and Technologies. We are not going to have cars, so we will be dependant from public transport. As there will be some young people in the community as well, we need to establish it near a big city, so we can easily go to the city, have fun, exchange with other people, go to work and so on. We will need the modern technologies as internet and at least some of the modern infrastructure. At first we are going to use the modern technology as a base, but the idea is to use only a small part of it at the end in order to create as much as possible an sustainable way of life in the nature.
As you can see from all of this, we need a place. And we need some land. This place can be everywhere in the world. At the moment it is most probably that it will be somewhere in Baden, Germany. We can’t invest in buying a place. We can rent or we can obtain one through sharing. The best vision I have is that some old people are going to share their places and live together with us.
The next steps in the future are to learn more about such communities around the world. Everything is open and we are open for everything.
