Family of 5 seeking community

Hey, I’m Brandon. My wife, 3 kids, and goldendoodle who’s been trained to be a homestead dog (good with birds, goats, donkeys, cats, etc) have been exploring community living for the last 4 years. It's led us all over the place - some internet searches landed us at Workaway where we watched a video of a community in Portugal and we fell in love. We met so many great people and various communities that were thriving.

We ended up going to a family’s land who recently moved to Portugal - we stayed in a little off grid pallet house with an outdoor kitchen, outdoor shower, and compost toilet. I hauled water from the pond for the shower, built stairs to connect terraces, planted a food forest, helped build an octagon home, and various odd jobs.

Portugal ended up being too far from family for my wife at the time so we ended up coming back and have since volunteered, work traded, and help establish various communities in Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee, north New Mexico, and central Texas.

We have learned so many skills and made many friends over the years and have seen what it takes to take raw land and build systems, have philosophical conversations on structures for thriving communities, had difficult conversations to resolve conflict, and just the day to day hard work that it really takes to build up the infrastructure and systems needed for a community.

Some of my skills are walking raw land and designing homesteading systems, operating heavy machinery to clear land (have carved out terraces on the mountains of the Appalachia, built roads, and dug out ponds for example) operate a chainsaw to fell trees and process them, build berms and swales and a food forest, some natural building experience, tending to animals, processing birds, foraging for mushrooms and herbs, I’m an electrician by trade, I’ve had multiple successful Personal Training/Holistic Coaching businesses where I focus on reversing pain through movement and improve health through nutrition and lifestyle.

My wife is passionate about natural births, she’s had natural births with all 3 kids - home births with just me and her for the last 2 kids. The kids take up most of her time so she isn’t out learning new skills as much but she does love learning about herbs to make medicine, making sourdough, fermenting different foods and drinks, making delicious foods, has some experience milking goats, and most importantly teaching our kids.

We have made many friends from all the communities we have explored but have yet to find the place we wish to call home. There’s many reasons for this as we have been to 9 communities now and would love to share with anyone curious about any of the experiences.

One aspect that holds us back from certain opportunities is our financial position. I have had a strong call to create local security and self sufficiency and have invested into many communities we once wanted to call home but later walked away from - some were bigger investments and some were smaller but ultimately - would be nice to have that money in the bank to invest but I also learned a lot of skills during those times so it’s hard to say one way or the other. Ideally, we find the right group of people who need someone who works hard to build out systems and create wealth on the land. A lesson I’ve learned over the years is that we also need a contract in place to protect each person involved to ensure equity is maintained. Living within an hour or so of a decent sized town increases my odds of being able to build a business but my wife and I are both working towards building an online business but would prefer to live on land where we can generate money from the land and quite frankly money isn’t near as important when we produce an abundance of food on the land.

Some places we love the most are the Pacific Northwest, the ozarks, and the Appalachia. Having spring water is important - and even more so, diversifying water systems to have water security is important.

Ive now spent a lot more time writing this out than expected haha - it’s hard to know what to write while trying to sum up so many experiences in the last 4 years but if you resonate with what I wrote and would like to talk more feel free to message me and we would love to hop on a phone or video call to develop a relationship and see what opportunities we can create!

In good health,
Brandon

It sounds like you all have a lot of community experience and skills, I hope you find a right community/homestead situation to settle in soon.

Riona Abhainn wrote:It sounds like you all have a lot of community experience and skills, I hope you find a right community/homestead situation to settle in soon.

Thank you! Learning every day and I’m sure we will find a great community!

Hi Brandon, I was hoping for a similar situation as you and we looked in Southern Oregon thoroughly for an opportunity, to work alongside others building up, most importantly, food sovereignty.  We didn't find an existing land project of the type, of the mix we were looking for, so we decided to go solo and bought a smaller acreage in Selma in order to get started.  The hope now is to find others that want to move nearby and collaborate.  The land in this county has the lowest property tax in the NW, and for the great deals on beautiful real estate here, it makes it a really good area for those starting out in homesteading.  It would be so nice if I knew other dedicated permaculturists in the hood.  If you like this area and want me to keep an eye out for property, or a rental situation please let me know.      

Ryan Quantum wrote:Hi Brandon, I was hoping for a similar situation as you and we looked in Southern Oregon thoroughly for an opportunity, to work alongside others building up, most importantly, food sovereignty.  We didn't find an existing land project of the type, of the mix we were looking for, so we decided to go solo and bought a smaller acreage in Selma in order to get started.  The hope now is to find others that want to move nearby and collaborate.  The land in this county has the lowest property tax in the NW, and for the great deals on beautiful real estate here, it makes it a really good area for those starting out in homesteading.  It would be so nice if I knew other dedicated permaculturists in the hood.  If you like this area and want me to keep an eye out for property, or a rental situation please let me know.      

Hey Ryan. I’m just getting back on Permies in a while and seeing this. I do love the west coast and spent most my adult life there. I’m im able to find the right community, the right resources from the land, and access to a decent economy within an hour, I’m open to moving to many places. I’ll do a search for that area and see what opportunities I can find.

Id like to possibly contact both of you! Looking for the forever farm for my family and I.

Bridget Evab wrote:Id like to possibly contact both of you! Looking for the forever farm for my family and I.

We would love to have a conversation with ya. Feel free to email me

Brandonbrown9113@gmail.com

Brandon,

I'm not sure how much our Christian community will resonate with you. We are not 100% permaculture focused, but we have a long history of working with the land. I'll share our land internship page, which is one way to experiment in our community and see if it's a good long-term fit: https://jubileepartners.org/volunteer/land-internship/

Our income is from the nonprofit side of things: helping immigrants and refugees get settled in the United States (and hopefully NOT get trapped into the materialistic consumeristic mindset of Western society). Fortunately this has dove-tailed well with working on the land (most refugees come from subsistence farming lifestyles so they know more than we do about finding/growing food).

I'll share some land work that I get to be involved in on a regular basis:
-tending 260 acres
-annually growing about 2 tons of sweet potatoes
-2 acres of blueberry bushes
-40 chestnut trees producing roughly 100 gallons a year
-muscadine grape arbors
-asian persimmons
-jujubees
-pawpaws
-figs
-harvesting wild chanterelles
-Shiitake mushroom logs
-Pet rabbits (sometimes for meat)
-hand milking jersey cows
-3 large ponds with fish
-Main Garden: tomatoes, peppers, green beans, okra, squash, corn, garlic, cucumbers, eggplant, kale, collards, etc...
-Neighbor's Field garden/pasture: a place for neighbors (mostly refugees/immigrants) to rent plots and grow whatever they'd like, or keep animals
-Processing chickens, deer, steer
-Communal meals for somewhere between 20 and 80 people lunches Monday through Friday, and dinner 2-3 times per week
-chainsawing for lumber and firewood
-Communal practices: noontime devotions, Sunday worship, morning prayer, business meetings
-Team structures to organize decision making such as leadership, maintenance/construction, land, hospitality, guests, food, cars, volunteer, etc.
-A lot of comings and goings, but always looking for folks that want to be here for the long-term. Our statement of faith is necessarily very brief:
"We affirm that Jesus is Lord. Our life together is a response to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We joyfully order our lives in the belief that he calls us to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves."

So yeah that's the best I can do to sum it up. Good luck on your search!
Matt

There is a sweet spot in the size of a community.  When it's too small it blows up.  When it's too big it's just unmanageable.  There are numerous religious communities, but only a handful of secular communities survived since the 1960's-70s --One success story is Twin Oaks.  You might look into it for its governance and size.  It has maintained 80-100 people and has lasted half a century.  For religious communities, the Hutterites have a member size of 65-140 people.  So that's a sweet spot in size of adults you could begin with.

Today is a wonderful time of opportunity because the youngins are questioning everything and seeking alternatives, not by choice, but because the traditional ways of having careers and families are comical and economically ridiculous.  You could find other like-minded families to build community of 100 adults and follow the Twin Oaks governance structure.  i'm not familiar with governance of the religious intentional communities but I would only focus on the ones that have been around for a long time.