By Tom & Carol Braford
Are you tired of working at an unfulfilling job while dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur so you could afford a home in an environmentally responsible, supportive community, wondering how you could possibly come up with the time and money anytime soon?
What if solo entrepreneurship was the problem, not the solution, as Robert Putman put it in 2000 in his seminal book, “Bowling Alone”? The reality is that human beings are not designed to be solo anything. In fact, another highly relevant book, “Peak Performance”, that included a section by evolutionary anthropologist, Robin Dunbar of Dunbar Number fame, identifies not just one but four distinct levels of social support that we all need to be all that we can be, and by extension have our businesses and communities be all they can be.
He starts with 3 to 5 confidants, people each of us can tell anything to. He says that the reality now, however, is that half of us have no one, so is it any wonder that people in alarming numbers are dealing with mental illness? Next is our “hunting party” of 12 to 15. This is the scale of teams that yields the most effective results. Beyond work, Dunbar discovered that we are at our best if we are part of a stable residential community of approximately 35 households, with no more than 50 adults, the Cohousing movement scale for most successful communities, that in turn is part of a larger contiguous community of 150 to 200 people, where we interact with our neighbors at least once annually and preferably way more often.
At Arizmendi Ecovillage, we are going for the upper end of the optimized scale of 200, so that community has 4 contiguous cohousing neighborhoods, including one senior cohousing, and on-site cooperatively owned businesses. We are looking for people who would like to be part of one or more of our worker owned, breakthrough 5Rs technology divisions that will build out our current and future Islands of Coherence Communities of Practice and hopefully purchase homes, live there and be employed long-term maintaining the systems, while building out other communities.
We even have a rookery of three dozen great white egrets and numerous small blue herons that nest just north of us every spring and summer!
Contact: braford@sbcglobal.net
www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com