Starting ecovillage in St. Louis MO area, anyone interested?

The reason I picked St. Louis is that's where my job and other connections are. I am planning to make this a transition village, maybe 5 to 10 homes, surrounded by diversity of local food production: permaculture, aquaculture, a greenhouse or two, etc. I have experience in real estate (brokers license) and some resources that can make this happen, but not without your help. Its all about community! I am looking at a few possible multi-acre sites outside of St. Louis, nothing is set in stone at this point.  I hope to find some folks who are interested to start discussing this project, and I am open to hearing your ideas.  
There is a lot more I could say but for now, please reply or message me if interested.
Thanks!

Hi Tim,

Thanks for opening up this topic and I'm curious to learn more. My husband and I are older millenials that are currently in a transitionary stage. We just moved back to FL from CA, to live with family, once the pandemic hit, but we're looking to relocate eventually, and be apart of some sort of cooperative land-owning situation. I've worked on other people's farms and gardened, whenever I've had access to space. I currently am working on establishing a food forest on my parents' property, with perennials, annuals, and outdoor mushroom cultivation, so I can bring farming as well as many food-preservation techniques with me. We've never lived in the St. Louis area, but I used to live in Chicago and worked on a farm in Detroit, so I have some experience with working in the colder climate. Do you have an idea of what kind of legal structure to use for land ownership? This is something I've been reading about but don't have any first-hand experience with.

Just to give a better idea of where I'm coming from: for me, a cooperative land-owning model would one of the only ways we can see ourselves being able to afford having access to land to farm, without being burdened by debt, and we're interested in being apart of a community that can pull resources together, as needed (ie. marketing for farming sales, tool sharing, bulk seed buying, skill sharing, labor sharing). I would like to eventually just farm as my job but I have a background in web design and development, and my husband is looking to teach (he just graduated from an fine art masters program and is looking to teach art or writing at a college or high school). I'm vegan but I would also consider eating animal products periodically in a self-sufficient context, and my husband is a meat eater. Although I would consider myself to be spiritual, neither of us are religious or interested in a community built around any sort of dogma, although we are tolerant of others who are religious, as long as there is a sense of mutual respect, and we're not the subjects of proselytizing. I do align myself with the principles of permaculture, and have tried to apply them to my day to day habits and living situations as much as possible, since I first became introduced to it.

Anyway, if others are interested, I am interested in being apart of the conversation to see what others' needs and priorities are as well.

Hey thanks for the questions!  Here are some answers, though some may be half-baked. Anyone else who has experience on these topics perusing this thread, please feel free to chime in with your wisdom.

Regarding land ownership, this is not written in stone, but here is what I'm thinking:

Individual dwellings are owned or rented, as folks can afford. Rent can be subsidized based on contributions to the community (e.g. growing food, fixing things, etc.).

Common land will be held in a trust. It will be available for everyone to use for growing, or support of growing.  If it is all getting used up (which would be awesome) then the community will make decisions to allocate its best usage.  The folks who invested to make the land purchase possible will have interest in the land as beneficiaries of the trust, this will  be determined based on amounts original founders/investors put toward the purchase. So those folks will still "own" some percentage of the common land, in some ultimate sense, but it will be available mostly freely for use by everyone in order to encourage lots of local food production.  This is based on the assumption that some folks who invested in buying the land are not full time farmers (that includes me).

There might be some argument that someone who is freely using the land should at least contribute some of the harvest to the community's food, while being able to sell the rest of it if they choose. This needs to be worked out in a way that everyone feels is acceptable.

Honestly, I'm seeing this from the point of view of someone who wants to put some money into the land, but I might not want to spend all of my effort farming it, because I have a pretty decent job that takes up my time. I'm still happy for someone else to farm it.  But some of the food production needs to be for the community in that case.  To be clear, I do plan to spend time working on the land, just not full time by any means.

This is what I mean by a transition village - some folks will still want to keep their professional jobs (perhaps like your husband), hence the proximity to a large city.  Other folks may want to spend most of their time farming. And a lot of folks might want to be in a situation where they can transition, without cutting their professional and personal ties by a move to the far off countryside.

Ok, if that sounds half-baked, maybe you'd like to help bake it the rest of the way.

To your thoughts on beliefs, I totally agree! The focus will be on the nuts and bolts practical good of the community, and folks are free to believe whatever they wish, but everyone must be respectful of others' beliefs.

BTW, I am also vegan. My proposal for a community standard would be that anyone wanting to eat meat would need to raise or obtain it locally. Personally, I hope to be part of a vegan food co-op, should this dream come to be a reality.

I would be happy to hear your thoughts.