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
