Best practices @ Dancing Squirrels
i occasionally joke that if you believe my anarchist maxim that you can do what ever you want, as long as you take responsibility for it. And you buy into the new age principal that we create our own reality, then you have a political obligation to be an optimist, because otherwise you are creating the wrong reality.
i am thinking about new community a lot these days, it is like waking up from a long sleep and feeling something alive in me wanting to come out. i am talking a lot with people about best practices, about examining the gems from various different communities and considering fusing them.
Personal shelters and robust commie clothes from East Wind, the consensus decision making and no labor tracking from Acorn, the robust sharing systems and transparency groups from Twin Oaks, off the grid like Dancing Rabbit, ecological transition covenant borrowed from the Living Energy Farm, the activism commitment from Little Flower, the radical hospitality mandate from Casa Robina, pro-kid like Fussen, and the dumpster ethic from the Keep in Death City.
best practices feedback loop
Feonix and Steve live in the collective house in Washington DC (aka Death City) with the uber Cool Aries former Twin Oaks visitor. This place is called the Keep. And they do serious dumpstering. And it makes me clear that part of what i want to be doing with this new community is dumpster/food rescue.
The way it might work is like this. Assuming this new community is in Louisa county, on a bi-weekly basis there would be town trip to Death City for few days. One specific purpose of the trip would be rescuing food and processing it. This returned bounty will supplement and diversify our food system. A handful of people would go up and help expand the effort of the crew which is already bringing in an impressive harvest of rescued food.
Steve is the poster child for a new religion around dumpster diving. He is charismatic, dedicated, fun inviting into the club of the dumpster rescue clan. He is willing to teach, willing to share the rescued treasure and he was excited about having more people work with him on this when i talked with him about it at 4 AM after cleaning fruits and vegetables for some hours.
The revolution will be rescued from the trash.
13 responses to “Best practices @ Dancing Squirrels”
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your passport to complaining 
Your new community sounds like heaven! Love it!
Hey Bliss wanna come, you and your carpenter partner and super cute baby would be most welcome, isn’t it time you came back to community?
I second this Bliss! Though I am also still in the process of convincing myself this could be feasible.
This sounds great. Let me know when there are openings.
Not entirely clear if the purpose of the DC town trip is purely food rescue, or also about visiting friends. While some dumpstering happens round the Louisa/Cville/Richmond parts, it seems like there’s still a lot more that could be done. I’d also love to see TrashWiki being updated again, it was such a great tool when I was in Europe.
Fairest Angie: Certainly more could be done locally, and i think there is a cultural thing about building dumpster culture in urban centers. I loed doing the TrashWiki updates when i was at Casa Robino, and i think they work best when there are lots of people in busy places – not sure the Farmer Food dumpster dive locally is something you want to be drawing public attention to.
Yeah, those were kinda two separate thoughts that flew together. I think that local (central virginia) dumpstering is important and currently being under-harvested, but I’d also love to see Steve and the DC crew sharing their info with TrashWiki.
What do you perceive to be the advantages and disadvantages of personal shelters?
Briefly, the advantages of personal shelters is that there are some very cool people who want to live in them (i am think o Joan from Acorn, now at Red Earth in Missouri). And many of the income sharing communities restrict them (for reasonable reasons). And i am hardly attached to this idea, there are ecological disadvantages.