Family Seeks Community
We are a family of three growing community in British Columbia, and dreaming big. We prefer a location less than an hour’s drive from Victoria or Vancouver. We dream of thriving alongside other families, interrelating with our natural and built habitat, and co-creating the world we all deserve. We are most interested in Vancouver Island or the Lower Mainland, and are open to other regions.
We recognize that it takes tremendous physical, personal, and interpersonal work to manifest anything worth doing. And we believe building community is definitely worth it. We are looking for allies and investors (of monetary, artistic, and spiritual kinds) to help create a place where we can live in accordance with our needs and express our values.
One of us has a professional background in teaching and academic coaching. The other is a poet and arts organizer with a background in politics. Along with a handful of others, we co-founded the Solidarity Circle to weave equity into the fabric of a community. We both have about a year of experience practicing sociocracy, nonviolent communication, and regenerative agriculture in intentional community spaces. We believe that a robust community can counteract some of the excesses of globalization: why buy tasteless imported berries from the supermarket when we can grow them at home more sweetly?
We reject suburbia and resent lawns. We resist car-centric lifestyles, and instead embrace walking and cycling as core modes of daily transport. This doesn’t mean that we will never own a car or, better, share one or more automobiles with others. We will probably need at least 1 parking spot.
We will need three bedrooms. We would happily share gardens, tool sheds, etc.; as well as some kind of shared living space(s). While we have our own reasonable needs for privacy (quiet when the baby naps!), shared resources are integral to the design. (Why do we go around and see 4 trampolines on the same block?? Can’t your kids just become friends?? OK, I’ll stop.) The more that we can agree to share, the more opportunities we have to go further with our own private needs. Buying groceries and cooking shared meals, for example, frees up everyone’s time.
We’re looking for like-minded families who could fit into an arrangement that feels more like an extended family than mere neighbours. This would allow for mutual childcare, even homeschooling. We prioritize finding families with children roughly the same age as our daughter, and would consider living with couples and singles. We wish to conjure an environment where our daughter can learn from people of different generations, genders, ethnicities, abilities, talents, and all the ways humans can be unique and beautiful.