Intentional Community Discussion Group is a regular meeting of people interested in creating intentional community in the Maritimes. Our first session was Oct 28th 2025 and I hope to continue meeting every other week.

Definition of Intentional Community

My own general definition of community is having people to share the workload of basic life tasks, and people being able to rely on each other in difficult times. This is not necessarily a residential or intentional community.

According to Creating a Life Together, the definition of intentional community is

A residential or land-based community is a group of people who have chosen to live with or near enough to each other to carry out their shared lifestyle or common purpose together.

Not just about living together, but the reasons for doing so.

A group of people who have chosen to live together with a common purpose, working cooperatively to create a lifestyle that reflects their shared core values.

Long-Term Aspiration for this Discussion Group

• learn community-building skills together
  • group decision-making
  • legal structures
  • conflict resolution, etc.
• eventually make connections to form sub-groups and start creating communities
• OR find the communities we jive with and be better community members (not everyone wants to be a founder)

Short-Term Aspirations

• Start by discussing topics from Creating a Life Together
• I’ll host/organize the first several until we have a solid group going, and then I hope we will organize collectively.

From there we could read more books together, work on our own visions, support each other to create community.

Reflections

Our first meeting was yesterday evening. It was a small group, but we had some interesting conversation.

We started with introductions, and then I read a few points from Creating a Life Together that will make the topics for future discussions.

For our introductory go-around, I posed the question, what does community mean to you? And it was apparent that community means different things to different people.

Everyone had a different vision for community, and that is what I hoped for the group. Community isn’t one-size-fits-all.

Different interests among the group included urban co-housing, co-operative business models to fund community, and non-localized community networks.

Creating a Life Together

This book was written by the editor of Communities magazine, who has interviewed dozens of community founders, and this is a compilation of what she has learned about how to make a successful community.

In the first chapter, she says that probably 90% of communities never make it off the ground, mostly due to what she calls “structural conflict.” Here are the main proactive things that aspiring groups can do to avoid structural conflict.

1. Identify your community vision and create vision documents.
2. Choose a fair, participatory decision-making process.
3. Make clear agreements — in writing!(Including appropriate legal entities for owning land together)
4. Learn good communication and group process skills. Make clear communication and resolving conflicts a priority.
5. In choosing founders and new group members, select for emotional maturity.
6. Learn the head skills and heart skills you need to know.

This is the goal of the discussion group – to explore these topics, learn about these skills, and create visions for our own ideal communities.

If you’re interested in creating intentional communities in the Maritimes, join the discussion group. I post the Events on Facebook.