Promoting Community Living and Cooperative Lifestyles Across North America
FIC Vision:
We envision a world where community is available, understood, appreciated and supported for all people who desire it and where the skills, structures and wisdom of community are recognized as basic building blocks of a just and sustainable culture.
FIC Mission:
1. Openly provide accurate and comprehensive information about living in intentional communities.
2. Promote dialogue, understanding, and cooperation between existing communities and related organizations.
3. Make the realities, options, and lessons of intentional communities readily accessible to the wider culture.
4. Provide moral, financial, and technical support to forming and established communities in need.
The Fellowship for Intentional Community nurtures connections and cooperation among communitarians and their friends. We provide publications, referrals, support services, and sharing opportunities for a wide range of intentional communities, cohousing groups, ecovillages, community networks, support organizations, and people seeking a home in community.
Intentional Communities have for many centuries been places where idealists have come together to create a better world. Although there are thousands of intentional communities in existence today, and many others in the formative stages, most people are unaware of them or the roots from which they spring. The Fellowship is increasing public awareness of existing and newly forming communities. We offer information and referrals for those who are actively seeking, or simply curious about, alternate lifestyles for themselves and their families.
Communities come in all shapes and sizes, and share many similar challenges — such as defining membership, succeeding financially, distributing resources, making decisions, raising children, dividing work equitably, and choosing a standard of living. Many wrestle with questions about right livelihood, spiritual expression, land use, and the role of service in our lives. At the same time, there is limited awareness of what others are doing to meet these challenges — and much to gain through sharing information and experiences with others exploring similar paths. The Fellowship documents the visions and experiences of life in community, and actively promotes dialogue and cooperation among communities.
Intentional communities are often aware of themselves as different from mainstream culture, and many choose to highlight these differences. Yet, virtually all communities share a common root value of cooperation. The Fellowship facilitates the extension of cooperation beyond membership boundaries and common values, understanding that differences can be a cause for celebration, and an occasion for enrichment and growth. The Fellowship is helping draw the circles of cooperation ever larger, and assisting with the personal stretching that this requires. In that spirit, FIC membership is open to everyone.
The 2010 Edition of the Communities Directory is available for sale.
More information on the Communities Directory:
Communities: Life in Cooperative Culture
Since 1972, Communities has been the primary resource for information, issues, and ideas about intentional communities in North America – from urban co-ops to cohousing groups to ecovillages to rural communes. Communities now also focuses on creating and enhancing community in the workplace, in nonprofit or activist organizations, and in neighborhoods, with enhanced coverage of international communities as well. We explore the joys and challenges of cooperation in its many dimensions.
To read a selection of recent articles in Communities, click here.
To subscribe to Communities, click here.
Intentional Communities Website
The Intentional Communities Website is the best place on the web to find information about ecovillages, cohousing, communes, co-ops and all forms of intentional community.
Our site includes an online Directory of over 2000 intentional communities worldwide with maps and a sophisticated search function for finding the community that suits you best. We also provide articles from Communities magazine, classified ads, a blog, a wiki, our free REACHBook for posting your ideas, a communities events calendar, and our intentional communities store.
Community Bookshelf
Community Bookshelf offers the most useful, up-to-date (and often hard to find) information on the many aspects of intentional community.
Community Bookshelf focuses on communication skills, decision making and meeting facilitation, all vital components of successful community. We also carry titles on subjects relating to different approaches to sustainable living, ecological design, natural building, social change, and creating more community in your life.
The FIC is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization; all donations are tax deductible.
