Alexandra Malecki wrote:Hello Otis/Otessa!
I’m pursuing SKIP to secure land for the future of myself and my family. I dream of building an eco-village, living off-grid in an earthen home, and spending every day outside homesteading. The land that I’m seeking will:
1) Have a secured source of drinking water (not municipally treated water) for generations to come.
2) Have enough land to pasture animals and grow an edible landscape to sustain a small community and/or have neighboring land that I could invest in and steward.
3) Be located in a cold-climate that’s resilient to climate change and natural disasters.
I’m open to a wide range of possibilities; however, I’d prefer to move onto your land and get to work as soon as possible. I homeschool my two elementary-aged kids full-time and my husband has a virtual job so we’re very mobile.
I created a thread dedicated to my countdown to PEP2 and having since completed PEP2, it's now dedicated to whatever happens next.
Please purple message me, I look forward to connecting with you and seeing if we’re a good match!
Update (one year later):
It’s been a year since I posted the message above, and our commitment to this path has only grown stronger.
A few things have changed since then:
• I’m now PEP2 certified.
• My husband left his US-based corporate job, so we are no longer limited to the United States.
• We are in the process of selling our house in the city so we can fully dedicate ourselves to a path toward off-grid, rural living.
Over the past year we’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on what we are truly hoping to find through this journey.
Yes, we are looking for land where we can build a forever home for our family. But even more than land, we are hoping to find a relationship with someone who has spent years caring for a place and building a life rooted in it.
We understand that what we’re asking through SKIP is a big ask. Land often represents a lifetime of work, memories, and love, and we don’t take that lightly. What draws us to this path is the possibility of continuing the care of a place while learning from the people who have known it best.
We would love to find someone—or a couple—who might enjoy sharing their knowledge and experience with us over time. We’re especially interested in continuing to build skills related to natural building, food production, land restoration, masonry heaters, and traditional or primitive skills—the kinds of knowledge that help people live well with the land and maintain a property with fewer outside inputs. Our goal is to rely more on local resources, practical skills, and resilient systems, and less on fossil fuels and outside inputs wherever possible.
Because Harry and I were both raised in cities, we didn’t grow up with generational land-based knowledge being passed down. By documenting
my completion of PEP2 and
Harry documenting his time as a boot, we hope to demonstrate our willingness to learn, our ability to see projects through, and our disposition for working hard.
We’re raising our children with the hope that they grow up deeply connected to land, having acquired practical skills, and feeling safety and connection in community. It would mean a great deal to us to find people interested in multi-generational living who would enjoy knowing them and sharing some of that hard-earned wisdom with the next generation.
If it felt meaningful to you, we would also be honored to support you as you age—helping with the daily work of the land and making it possible for you to remain connected to the place you love.
Once we sell our house this spring, we plan to begin our journey at Wheaton Labs—learning and sharing what we know with others, visiting friends and family, exploring national parks, teaching a few rocket mass heater workshops, and hopefully making new connections along the way while living out of our van conversion.
We’re committed savers and have always opted to learn skills as opposed to contract work to others. The financial stability we’ve built should allow us to live simply and focus on stewardship rather than needing to extract income from the land.
We are also working toward the goal of building a small family business constructing masonry heaters. With our engineering backgrounds, we hope to help people heat their homes efficiently while reducing environmental impact. Our hope is to have a viable business by the time our children reach adulthood so that they have a means of supporting themselves.
For this reason, we’re especially interested in cold-climate land.
We believe something like this should grow slowly. Our hope would simply be to spend time getting to know one another—perhaps visiting, helping with projects, sharing meals, and seeing whether a real relationship develops before discussing any long-term arrangements.
If you’ve cared for a piece of land for many years and sometimes wonder what will happen to it in the future, we would be grateful for the chance to connect.
Even if it begins with nothing more than a phone conversation or a cup of tea at the kitchen table, we would consider that a wonderful start. We’d love to hear from you! My email is
alexamalecki@gmail.com.
8
