Kyle: another way to help others is to buy a block of land, subdivide it and if you are a certified designer, teach
permaculture classes-- subdivide so that each buyer has their own zone 1, but zones 2-5 would be community opwned or worked. My husband thought about doing this and selling land with homes already built on 3/4 of the land, (each owner would own 1 acre and their home outright but the areas of the food forests and larger crops and animal grazing and hoop houses, and all dams and
aquaculture would be owned by all in the community.
I thought perhaps buying enough and designing homes (earth bag which is even less expensive than strawbale and also uses
cob and lime plaster), preparing the zone 1 garden plots then obtaining and beginning to grow tree seedlings and legumes would mean that those who do not wish to learn so specifically could benefit from predesigned areas. We would offer courses for the home owners and for every 4 owners we would offer 1 home and acreage to a permaculture graduate to act as community steward for their portion of the community. In this way, there would be a knowledgeable person within the community that the others could rely on and who could also help them with animals, planting, and teach the many aspects of
sustainability .
Those who were too old or did not wish to engage in volunteering to take care of animals or the like could pay a monthly fee so that they still could enjoy the fruits of the animals or labor but not have to indulge. The monies from the fees would go to pay a stipend to the steward who also would be given the opportunity to live in the home provided on a contract basis (say, every 3 years the other 4 owners would decide if they needed to vote on a new steward or not)
Community activities would include building, animal husbandry, canning, and drying food,
gardening, etc.
The idea was to use the money from ordinary folks buying homes to buy more land and repeat-- we wanted to eventually have communities of about 20 homes, with 16 bought homes and 4 stewards we wanted them to be as near each other as possible and especially wanted to encourage owners to become educated in permaculture.
By buying and predesigning the land and building the homes and setting up the zones and beginning the planting process, we would take some of the anxiety and confusion out of the sustaining process because as people chose their own home and the site that it was on, they would be given a crash course in what was expected and could go into a process without having to do everything for themselves. We would provide the legumes and seedlings, teach
seed storage, seek out cultivars for planting and provide the basics. Those who bought the homes (we were going to use container homes for some with most having lake or
pond views) would be buying not only their house and garden, but also access to the herds,
milk, cheese, butter, etc, chickens, etc. We were thinking of having semi communities for vegans, vegetarians, ominivores, etc but each would be a group of 5 to themselves though they may share aspects such as access to the ponds and food forests OR we also thought of developing zones 2 for each owner as well.
How does this sound? Our goal was to have at least 25% of our properties to go to people who cannot afford homes per se but who worked hard to learn about permaculture and committed themselves to the community and their place in it--as stewards, they would ultimately take on a large amount of the task for ensuring butchering,
composting and crop planting and succession were done correctly --in return following a 10 year stint, we planned to
gift them their house and zones.
The bulk of the land would belong to the community and as such would not be able to be sold--also we would specify that any who wanted to
sell could not do so for 3 years minimum. We planned to combine able bodied youth with older people so that there was a mix --each with their own worth and able in some way to contribute--in this way, even elderly who wanted to live sustainably and self sufficiently could do so with the contribution of others.