Findhorn Common Ground
Details
- Author: Findhorn Foundation Community
- Category: Constitutions
- Published: Late 1990s onward
- Source: New Findhorn Association
- Source URL: https://www.findhorn.cc/about/common-ground/
- Access: public
Description
The shared values, principles, and behavioral guidelines that bind the residents of the Findhorn ecovillage in Scotland, structured as Principles, Essence, and practical Guidelines.
Annotation
Findhorn Common Ground is one of the cleanest examples of a community constitution that combines a high-altitude statement of principle with a low-altitude code of conduct. The two halves are unusual to find in the same document. Useful for studying how communities balance values language with rules language.
Full text
The Findhorn Foundation was founded in 1962 on the Moray Firth in northeast Scotland. It is one of the oldest continuously operating intentional communities in Europe and a founding member of the Global Ecovillage Network. Membership in the New Findhorn Association is defined by intent to live by the values and standards set out in a document called Common Ground.
Common Ground has three parts.
The Principles are three:
1. Deep inner listening
2. Co-creation with nature
3. Love in action
The Essence is a longer set of statements. The community lives in clarity and integrity seeking truth; in openness with deep listening seeking communion; in gratitude and open-heartedness seeking love; in courage and willingness seeking their soul's path; in cooperation and shared vision seeking alignment with Spirit; in awareness and responsibility seeking peace; and in acceptance and surrender seeking freedom.
The Guidelines are practical. Members agree to: respect other people, their differences, views, origins, backgrounds and issues; respect all forms of life and the community's and others' property; use clear and honest communication with open listening; be willing to listen to constructive feedback and offer feedback in a caring way; make every effort to resolve disputes and use the community's grievance procedures as necessary; respect the law of the land and keep agreements made.
What is structurally interesting about Common Ground for the comparative researcher: the same document carries the high-vision language of deep inner listening and the low-altitude language of use the community's grievance procedures. Most communities split these into two separate documents (a vision and a code of conduct). Findhorn keeps them in one.
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## Living examples and entry points for community builders
If your community is trying to write shared values rather than rules, and wondering whether values alone can do the work that governance needs to do, Findhorn's sixty-year experiment is one of the most instructive cases in the record.
The Findhorn Foundation and the wider Findhorn Community in Moray, Scotland are not the same entity, and understanding the distinction is part of what the community's experience teaches. The Foundation is the formal institution, the charitable organization with staff and programs. The wider community includes hundreds of residents in the neighboring ecovillage cluster, from Cluny Hill to Universal Hall to Phoenix Community Stores, many of whom are not Foundation members and are not governed by it. New Findhorn Directions represents a more recent layer of community evolution, as residents have tried to create governance structures more responsive to the full community rather than the Foundation alone.
Damanhur in Italy is the obvious comparison, a spiritually founded community of similar vintage with a much more formal constitutional structure. Looking at Damanhur and Findhorn side by side gives you a concrete picture of the range of choices a spiritually grounded community can make about how explicit to be in governance.
Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India is another useful comparison: founded in a similar era, also organized around a spiritual vision, but with a Foundation Act passed by the Indian Parliament in 1988 that gives it a legal structure Findhorn has never had.
Where the door is:
- Findhorn runs residential experience weeks year-round and they are genuinely accessible to outsiders. Staying there for a week is one of the few ways to understand from the inside how a large community holds together under loose governance.
- The Findhorn Foundation's publications, including "The Findhorn Garden" and "The Kingdom Within," give you the values framework in the founders' own voices.
- The question worth bringing to Findhorn: what does "shared values" actually mean when a specific governance decision needs to be made? Who decides? Who has standing? What happens when two people with equal claim to the same values reach opposite conclusions?
One caution, and it is a significant one. Findhorn has operated for 60-plus years under governance that is genuinely difficult to describe clearly. What looks like spiritual consensus is held together by a small group of long-term residents who carry institutional memory that has never been fully written down. Communities that adopt the "shared values" governance model often discover, sometimes years in, that values identify what you care about but do not resolve disputes about what to do. Governance structures resolve disputes. Findhorn's longevity is real; so is the ongoing difficulty of its governance. New communities that find the values-first model appealing should study both.