Co-Op Village Foundation, Inc.

How Do We Live Together

As presented in The Next Evolution by: Jack Reed

Imagine looking out and seeing unspoiled nature with clean air and a stream running by with clean drinkable water. Imagine at the same time that you are in the middle of a Community where people are living and working together as one family. The residents here increase their abundance by sharing Community resources which allows everyone access to a full range of recreational, educational, and creative interests. A purpose of this Community is to support individuals in their growth so that they can make their dreams a reality. It is also the aim of its members to find peace and harmony within themselves, with others, and with nature, in hopes that this will assist in bringing peace to this earth.

This is the vision shared by the members of the Community Planet, which is bringing forth a planned cooperative Community. We are designing an environment that enables us to live in greater harmony and balance with ourselves, each other, and our environment. In this Community it is necessary that our life-style not only has abundance and success but is also nurturing and fun. In creating such a model Community, others will be able to see how we can all cooperate and enjoy a higher standard of living. Others can learn from sharing our experiments and experience through publications, seminars, workshops, and temporary residence in the Community. Eventually we envision that the replication of our Community or similar models will have a transforming effect on individual and world peace and the prosperity of all mankind.

Our first challenge is to create that initial successful model. To do so we believe that the key area to focus on is how we live together. We consider issues such as how to incorporate the latest technology and how to live in harmony with nature to be very important. However, our primary concern is how we interact and relate with one another and how we make decisions that include and involve everyone.

Without this we would be missing the essence of what a Community really can be - a loving and joyful support group for all its residents.

To capture the essence of what we want in our Community, we created this affirmation:

We are living in a Community, a home of peace and loving, dedicated to:

	· Demonstrating harmony with all life.
	· Nurturing and supporting each other.
	· Sharing our wealth as one family.
	· Listening to the truth within each other and responding with kindness, consideration, and loving honesty.

At first our plan was to describe the Community through focusing on areas like economics, agriculture, education, recreation, etc. Instead we chose to focus on more expansive questions involving how people live together:

	1) How do we bring forth inner wisdom?
	2) How do we vitalize ourselves?
	3) How do we coordinate what we live to do?
	4) How do we beautify our environment?
	5) How do we interact with our environment?
	6) How do we enrich ourselves?
	7) How do we nourish ourselves?
	8) How do we enjoy ourselves?
	9) How do we share our abundance?
	10) How do we communicate?
	11) How do we reach consensus?
	12) How do we expand our Community?

To see how much more expansive these “How do we...” focus areas are, notice how the areas of health involves so much more when we consider, “How do we vitalize ourselves?” Likewise with food production and preparation, when the question is

“How do we nourish ourselves?”, it makes us think about all the aspects that are important in nourishing ourselves rather than just putting good food in our bodies. We see how the twelve focus areas are all interrelated, and we think it is important that, as we move into a New Age of cooperation, that we begin to consider our lives as a whole rather than to compartmentalize them.

As we explored the twelve focus areas, we intentionally tried to avoid making hard and fast rules; we wanted the individual to have as much freedom as possible. At the same time we realized that everyone in the Community would have to have a commitment to the Community’s well-being and its mission for it to succeed.

There are three parts in describing each of the twelve focus areas. The first is a short overview. Next are “Essence statements”, which are the ideals we feel are the essences for that focus area. Last, we list the guidelines, which are the standards we will observe and the explanation of how our Community functions with respect to that focus area.

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Created 2007, Co-Op Village Foundation, Inc. | 1-850-623-8753 | HOME | FAQ |

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