Sociocracy For Communities (SoFA + FIC, 2016 onward)
Details
- Category: Courses
- Access: public
Description
A 10-hour pre-recorded course on sociocracy governance, taught by Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez of Sociocracy For All (SoFA) and hosted by the Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC). Five classes covering linked circles, consent decision-making, feedback design, meetings, and implementation strategies. Built for residential and forming communities. $79-$129 USD sliding scale.
Full text
## 1. What the course is
Sociocracy For Communities is a 10-hour pre-recorded course hosted by the Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC) and taught by Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez of Sociocracy For All (SoFA). The course teaches residential and forming communities how to adopt sociocracy as their governance framework: linked circles, consent decision-making, role selection by consent, feedback design, and the integration of relational practice with procedural rigour.
The course exists because most facilitators and consultants teaching sociocracy come from a corporate or organisational-development background, and the questions a cohousing community or ecovillage faces are different from the questions a 200-person tech startup faces. A cohousing board meeting that runs sociocracy has to integrate finance, child-rearing, conflict, food, and twenty-year membership relationships in the same room. The course is structured around that integration.
The canonical short description, from FIC's own page, is: "Discover a way to make fast, clear, and inclusive group decisions in your community." The course is built for residents and applicants of intentional communities, cohousing groups, ecovillages, residential cooperatives, and forming residential projects. Its target audience is not professionals seeking certification, but community members who need to govern themselves and want a sustainable procedural layer.
The course fits a particular kind of group. One where the current decision-making practice has become a problem (consensus that drags for years, an autocratic founder ageing out, a constitutional crisis, or a generational handover). One where at least three to five members are willing to commit ten hours of learning time. One whose members are comfortable enough with English-language video instruction (the SfC course is currently English-only) to absorb the content. The course works less well as a one-person enterprise: sociocracy is a team practice, and the course is designed to be taken by a cohort from the same community together.
Sociocracy For Communities is part of a wider Sociocracy For All ecology of trainings, of which it is the entry point. SoFA also runs the Sociocracy Academy (a multi-level practitioner-to-trainer-to-consultant pathway), specialized intensives (for facilitators, for trainers, for organizations), and free webinars. The SfC course is the most accessible entry point because it is pre-recorded, self-paced, intentionally affordable, and tailored to the residential-community context that is the primary audience for this Living Library.
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<text x="350" y="24" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="13" fill="#857e72" font-style="italic">Sociocracy For Communities. 10 hours, 5 classes, pre-recorded. $79 to $129 USD.</text>
<text x="350" y="56" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="12" fill="#5d4f3a" font-weight="600">THE 5-CLASS CURRICULUM</text>
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<text x="84" y="129" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="10" fill="#5d4f3a" font-weight="600">& Structure</text>
<text x="84" y="156" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Linked circles</text>
<text x="84" y="168" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">and roles.</text>
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<text x="84" y="228" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">meetings.</text>
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<text x="217" y="129" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="10" fill="#5d4f3a" font-weight="600">Making</text>
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<text x="217" y="186" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Three steps</text>
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<text x="217" y="216" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Selections by</text>
<text x="217" y="228" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">consent.</text>
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<text x="350" y="129" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="10" fill="#5d4f3a" font-weight="600">Design</text>
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<text x="350" y="174" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Proposal</text>
<text x="350" y="186" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">generation.</text>
<text x="350" y="216" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">How feedback</text>
<text x="350" y="228" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">becomes change.</text>
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<text x="483" y="167" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">techniques.</text>
<text x="483" y="186" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Planning</text>
<text x="483" y="198" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">agendas.</text>
<text x="483" y="216" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Deeper listening,</text>
<text x="483" y="228" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">consent process.</text>
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<text x="616" y="180" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">existing and</text>
<text x="616" y="192" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">forming groups.</text>
<text x="616" y="216" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Legal</text>
<text x="616" y="228" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">implications.</text>
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<text x="350" y="300" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="12" fill="#5d4f3a" font-weight="600">What comes after the course</text>
<text x="350" y="316" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="10" fill="#857e72" font-style="italic">The SoFA Academy practitioner pipeline (separate, longer-form pathway)</text>
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<text x="142" y="354" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="11" fill="#c97e4f" font-weight="600">Level 1</text>
<text x="142" y="372" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="11" fill="#5d4f3a" font-weight="600">PRACTITIONER & FACILITATOR</text>
<text x="142" y="392" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">2-hour weekly Zoom classes,</text>
<text x="142" y="404" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">badges + certification</text>
<text x="247" y="378" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="20" fill="#c97e4f">→</text>
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<text x="349" y="354" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="11" fill="#c97e4f" font-weight="600">Level 2</text>
<text x="349" y="372" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="11" fill="#5d4f3a" font-weight="600">TRAINER OF TRAINERS</text>
<text x="349" y="392" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">For people leading sociocracy</text>
<text x="349" y="404" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">implementations in or out</text>
<text x="454" y="378" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="20" fill="#c97e4f">→</text>
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<text x="556" y="354" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="11" fill="#c97e4f" font-weight="600">Level 3</text>
<text x="556" y="372" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="11" fill="#5d4f3a" font-weight="600">TRAINER + CONSULTANT</text>
<text x="556" y="392" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">Advanced certification</text>
<text x="556" y="404" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#857e72">for facilitators</text>
<text x="350" y="440" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="10" fill="#857e72" font-style="italic">Instructors: Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez. Cherry Hill Cohousing, Amherst, MA. SoFA founded 2016.</text>
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<figcaption style="text-align:center; font-style:italic; color:#857e72; font-size:13px; margin-top:8px;">The 5-class Sociocracy For Communities curriculum on FIC (top), with the optional SoFA Academy progression (bottom). Most communities take only the FIC course; practitioners who want certification continue through the Academy levels.</figcaption>
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## 2. Who runs it
Sociocracy For Communities is produced by **Sociocracy For All (SoFA)**, a nonprofit international service organization that has become the largest English-language sociocracy network. The course is co-hosted and distributed by the **Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC)**, a 501(c)(3) US nonprofit that has stewarded the intentional-community movement since 1995.
**Sociocracy For All (SoFA), founded 2016.** Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez co-founded SoFA in 2016 in Amherst, Massachusetts. The organization began as a small training initiative inside their cohousing community and has grown into an international network with practitioners across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific. SoFA is a member-supported nonprofit that publishes books, runs trainings, maintains a global community of practice, and offers consulting to organizations implementing sociocracy.
**Ted Rau.** Co-founder of SoFA. Linguist by training (PhD), with academic background in syntax and semantics. Resident of Cherry Hill Cohousing in Amherst, Massachusetts, since 2012. Co-author of *Many Voices One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy* (2018), the most-cited sociocracy-for-community handbook, plus *From Here to There: The Sociocracy Implementation Companion*, *Who Decides Who Decides* (2021), and *Collective Power* (2023). Ted has taught sociocracy workshops across the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Italy. He is transgender and has been open about how that experience has shaped his thinking about gender dynamics in groups. He has five children.
**Jerry Koch-Gonzalez.** Co-founder of SoFA. Long-time community organizer, trainer, and consultant. Certified in both Dynamic Governance/Sociocracy and Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Founding and current resident of Cherry Hill Cohousing. Former board member of the Institute for Community Economics, United for a Fair Economy, and Class Action, and former trainer with Movement for a New Society, the National Coalition Building Institute, DiversityWorks, Cambridge Youth Peace & Justice Corps, Lesley College Center for Peaceable Schools, Boston College Center for Social Justice, the Association for Resident Controlled Housing, and Spirit in Action. The breadth of his prior teaching practice is part of what makes the SfC course work: he has spent thirty years adapting structured-process methods to community contexts.
**Cherry Hill Cohousing.** A 21-year-old (as of 2026) cohousing community in Amherst, Massachusetts, where both Rau and Koch-Gonzalez live and where they have run sociocracy as the community's governance for at least the last six years. The community is named in the course materials and in many of their published case studies. Many of the practical examples in the SfC course come from Cherry Hill's lived experience.
**The Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC), the hosting partner.** Founded 1995, based at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri. FIC publishes the *Communities Directory*, hosts the *Communities* magazine, runs the *Inside Community* podcast, maintains the Communities Bookstore, and runs Communiversity, an online learning platform with several pre-recorded courses on residential community life. Sociocracy For Communities is one of FIC's flagship courses and has been a consistent enrollment leader since its launch in 2021.
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## 3. Logistics
The course operates in a specific structural form that makes it unusually accessible compared to most facilitation trainings.
**Format.** Pre-recorded, asynchronous, online. Approximately 10 hours of video content, divided into 5 class sessions. Downloadable class audio, transcripts, slides, and supplementary resources.
**Access window.** 90 days from purchase. Participants can revisit any class during that window. After 90 days, the recordings are no longer accessible (though buyers can re-purchase or take the live re-run, when offered).
**Price.** Sliding scale, $79 to $129 USD per person, with the levels named explicitly:
- $79 for BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled, and low-income participants
- $99 covers FIC's costs
- $129 covers FIC's costs plus supports the wider intentional community movement
- Plus optional scholarship-fund contributions ($25 standard, $50 generous)
The sliding-scale model is part of the course's accessibility design, not a marketing afterthought. FIC publishes the cost breakdown openly.
**Where it lives.** ic.org/sociocracy-for-communities is the canonical URL. The course is purchased through FIC's Communiversity store and accessed through FIC's learning platform.
**Group purchase.** Communities can purchase multiple seats for cohort viewing. The course is most often taken this way: a community sends three to five members through the course together, and they bring the practice back to the wider membership. Some FIC discounts apply for group purchases of 5+ seats.
**Time commitment.** Roughly 10 hours of video, plus 5 to 10 hours of practice and discussion if taken as a community cohort. Most communities complete the course over four to eight weeks rather than in a single intensive week.
**Prerequisites.** None. The course is designed for participants who have heard of sociocracy but have not practised it. Some prior exposure to Nonviolent Communication, consensus decision-making, or other participatory facilitation methods helps but is not required.
**Companion materials.** SoFA's *Many Voices One Song* (Rau and Koch-Gonzalez, 2018) is the canonical handbook companion. Most participants buy it alongside the course. *From Here to There* (Rau and Koch-Gonzalez, 2024) is the implementation companion published more recently. The SoFA website also offers free downloadable templates (agendas, role descriptions, governance backlog formats) that participants typically use as they implement.
**Language.** English only as of 2026. The course has been translated informally into Spanish and Portuguese for SoFA's broader Latin American and Brazilian community of practice, but the FIC-hosted version remains English-only.
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## 4. Curriculum
The course is structured as five classes, each roughly two hours of video content, with downloadable supporting materials. The syllabus below is as published by FIC.
### Class 1: How to combine the best of small group decision-making with a sense of the whole
The structural foundations. Participants learn the basic principles of sociocracy (consent, circles, double-linking, drivers), how to design a community's circle structure with work circles and a general circle, how circle roles are filled, and how whole-community meetings interact with the smaller circles. Most communities arrive at the course assuming sociocracy is a meeting method; Class 1 reframes it as a structural pattern for distributed authority. The reframing is the load-bearing move.
### Class 2: Group decision-making: Hearing everyone and moving forward
The consent-process detail. Participants learn the three steps to reaching consent (proposal, clarifying questions, consent round with objection integration), what counts as a valid objection (and what does not), how to integrate the wisdom of someone who does not consent into the revised proposal, and how to use the consent process for role selections (electing facilitators, treasurers, conflict-resolution circles). The class is heavy on practice rounds and worked examples from cohousing and ecovillage contexts.
### Class 3: Feedback Design
The deeper move. Participants learn how to design feedback loops (the consent process is itself a feedback loop, but groups need additional ones), how to use selections as a tool for ongoing development, and how to generate proposals that are workable rather than ideal. The class addresses the gap most communities discover after their first year of sociocracy: the framework works but the feedback layer underneath it needs explicit design.
### Class 4: Meetings: Techniques for small and big meetings
The operational skills. Participants learn how to plan agendas, how to optimise meetings for deeper listening rather than rapid throughput, how to facilitate consent rounds without rushing them or letting them stall, and how the dynamics differ between a 4-person work-circle meeting and a 40-person community meeting. The class includes specific recommendations on meeting length, frequency, facilitation rotation, and the relationship between meeting structure and group culture.
### Class 5: Stories and practical tips on how to put the most useful tools in place together
The integration class. Step-by-step strategies for both forming communities (groups still working through founding documents) and existing communities (groups with established practices that need to shift). The class also covers legal implications of sociocracy: how circle authority interacts with bylaws, board governance, and the specific legal structures common in cohousing and ecovillage contexts (LLCs, cooperatives, non-profit boards, condominium associations). Most participants name Class 5 as the one that bridges from theory to their own situation.
**The five-class arc.** The course moves from structural foundations (Class 1) through the canonical sociocracy procedures (Classes 2-3), to the implementation craft (Class 4-5). The pedagogical theory underneath is that sociocracy fails most often not from misunderstanding the principles but from poor adaptation to local context. Class 5 is the answer.
**What the course does not cover.** Conflict mediation, deep relational practice, large-group emotional integration, the specific psycho-spiritual dimensions of long-term residential community life. The SfC course is procedural by design. The relational layer (Forum, Circle, NVC, Restorative Justice) is treated as a separate practice that pairs with sociocracy; participants are pointed toward those resources without the course teaching them directly.
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## 5. Who it is for
The course's audience is named explicitly in FIC's positioning: residents and applicants of intentional communities, cohousing groups, ecovillages, residential cooperatives, and forming residential projects.
In practice, three audiences take the course.
**Forming communities.** Groups working on their founding documents, who want to lock in a procedural layer before they start admitting members in larger numbers. Forming communities typically take the course as a small founding-team cohort (4 to 8 people), use the worked examples to draft their initial circle structure, and bring the practice into their first community-wide meetings.
**Existing communities in a year-three or year-ten reckoning.** Communities that have been running for several years on consensus, on benevolent founder authority, or on an informal mix, and have hit a moment where the existing way is producing more harm than benefit. Most adoption happens here. The course gives the community a shared vocabulary to negotiate the structural transition, plus the operational detail to implement once they have decided to adopt.
**Practitioners.** Community-development consultants, ecovillage trainers, and individual organizers who work across multiple communities. The course serves as their orientation to the SoFA practitioner pipeline; many of them go on to take the Sociocracy Academy Level 1 (Practitioner and Facilitator certification) afterward to deepen their own practice.
**Who the course works less well for.** Activist movements, mutual-aid networks, distributed online organizing collectives. The SfC course assumes a residential or close-contact group with shared geography. Movement organizing has different design constraints (high turnover, dispersed membership, varying commitment levels) and SoFA addresses it through different curricula (Sociocracy Academy, Sociocracy for Movements webinar series, custom intensives).
**Who the course works less well for, part two.** Communities looking for a deep relational or spiritual transformation through sociocracy alone. The course is explicit that sociocracy is a procedural layer. Communities that take it expecting it to resolve interpersonal conflict, surface unspoken material, or replace Forum/Circle/NVC tend to leave disappointed. The procedural layer is necessary; it is not sufficient.
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## 6. How to prepare and apply
Six steps. Verb-first.
**1. Read Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez's *Many Voices One Song* first.** The 2018 handbook is the canonical sociocracy-for-community reference. ~200 pages, available from SoFA, FIC, and most major booksellers. Reading it before the course (or as homework during the course) means the video content lands as practice rather than as theory. Two members of your community reading the book and discussing it for a month before the course starts is a strong preparation move.
**2. Send a small cohort, not one person.** Sociocracy is a team practice. The course is most useful when taken by three to five members of the same community together, watching the videos and then discussing them in a structured way. One person watching the course alone can absorb the framework but cannot bring the practice back to the community without colleagues who share the vocabulary. Plan the cohort before purchasing.
**3. Purchase through FIC's website (ic.org/sociocracy-for-communities).** $79 to $129 USD per person on the sliding scale; choose honestly based on your community's situation. Purchases can be made individually or as a small group; FIC accepts multiple seats per order. Discounts apply for groups of 5+. The course is also occasionally offered as a live re-run with Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez teaching in real time, with breakout-room discussion; the live format costs more but adds the interactive dimension.
**4. Block 8 to 12 weeks for completion.** The 90-day access window from purchase is generous; treat it as a soft deadline. Watch one class per week with your cohort, leave a week between classes for practice and discussion, and finish with one week of integration before the access window closes. Cohorts that try to finish in two weeks tend to retain less; cohorts that drag past 12 weeks tend to lose momentum.
**5. Practice between classes.** Each class introduces tools that work best when practised in a real meeting before the next class. Try one consent round in your next community meeting after Class 2. Draft a circle structure after Class 1. Run a meeting using the Class 4 agenda template after Class 4. The practice is what turns the course content into community capacity.
**6. Plan the year-one rollout before the course ends.** By the time you finish Class 5, your cohort should have a written plan for the first six months of sociocracy in your community: which circles will be formed, who will be in them, when the first whole-community meeting under the new framework will happen, who will facilitate the first meetings, and what relational practice (Forum, Circle, NVC, or other) will run alongside the procedural layer. The plan does not have to be perfect; it has to exist before momentum disperses.
**One caution.** Sociocracy For Communities is procedural by design and works only when paired with a relational practice. Communities that complete the course and roll out the framework without a working relational layer often discover by year two that consent decision-making has thinned into formalism. Decide before the course which relational practice your community will use (or which one you will commit to building) and make that decision visible as part of the rollout plan.
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## 7. Living examples and entry points for community builders
Where Sociocracy For Communities is alive in 2026, and how to engage with the broader SoFA practitioner community beyond your own cohort.
### Living examples
**Cherry Hill Cohousing** (Amherst, Massachusetts). The community where Rau and Koch-Gonzalez live, and where they have run sociocracy as the community's governance for at least six years. Many of the practical examples in the SfC course come directly from Cherry Hill. Worth reading their published case material if you can find it through SoFA.
**SoFA member communities.** Sociocracy For All maintains a member directory of cohousing communities, ecovillages, and residential cooperatives that practice sociocracy and have publicly named the framework. As of 2026, the directory lists communities across North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific, though the largest concentration is in the United States cohousing sector.
**The wider US cohousing sector.** A significant fraction of the ~170 established US cohousing communities have either trained their membership through SfC or adapted sociocracy on their own. The Cohousing Association of the United States (Coho/US) is one institutional channel through which the SfC framework has spread.
**Vidàlia (Catalonia, Spain).** The clearest archive example of an S3-grounded community in the ToGather Library's Sociocracy 3.0 entry. Vidàlia operates through Sociocracy 3.0 rather than the classical Endenburg variant taught in SfC, but the underlying patterns are shared. The two frameworks overlap substantially at the consent-decision-making layer.
**Inside Community Podcast** (FIC, ongoing). Hosts episodes with Ted Rau, Diana Leafe Christian, and other sociocracy and governance practitioners. The Ted Rau episode ("Creating Inclusivity with Sociocracy") is a useful audio preview of the SfC course's framing.
### Adjacent applications and pathways
**SoFA Academy.** For practitioners who want to go deeper than the SfC course offers. The Academy has three levels: Level 1 (Practitioner and Facilitator certification, weekly two-hour Zoom classes, badge-based progression covering vision/mission/aim/domain, circle structures, role descriptions, meeting formats, rolling out policy, minute-keeping, and emotional emergency tools), Level 2 (Trainer of Trainers, for those who want to lead sociocracy implementations professionally), and Level 3 (Advanced certification for facilitators moving toward trainer and consultant credentials).
**Sociocracy 3.0 Practitioner Course.** The parallel pathway from the S3 community (James Priest, Bernhard Bockelbrink, Liliana David's modular pattern library). S3 and SoFA's classical sociocracy share an intellectual ancestor (Endenburg) but diverge sharply: S3 is a Creative Commons pattern library; SoFA teaches the full classical system. The two are sometimes pitched as competitors, more often as complementary. The Living Library's Sociocracy 3.0 entry covers the S3 path; this entry covers the classical-SoFA path.
**Tamera Community Course, Findhorn Ecovillage Training, and GEN Education programs.** Other residential-community-oriented trainings that complement SfC. These programs cover the broader spectrum of community life (relational practice, ecology, conflict, financial models) of which sociocracy is only one piece. Cohorts that take SfC alongside one of these broader trainings often retain more.
**Custom SoFA consulting engagements.** For communities that need more than a self-paced course can provide. SoFA offers paid consulting engagements (typically six to twelve months) in which a SoFA-certified trainer accompanies the community through the implementation process. The cost is substantial but the success rate is documented as higher than self-implemented adoption.
### Five entry points for the broader community
1. **Buy and read *Many Voices One Song***. Available from SoFA (sociocracyforall.org/many-voices-one-song), FIC, or major booksellers. Two community members reading it together is the minimum-viable preparation.
2. **Attend a free SoFA webinar.** SoFA runs regular free webinars on specific sociocracy topics (consent decision-making, meeting facilitation, role selection). The webinars are recorded and many are available on the SoFA YouTube channel. Pick one or two before purchasing the SfC course.
3. **Visit a sociocracy-running community.** Many SoFA-affiliated communities welcome visitors who want to see sociocracy in operation. Cherry Hill Cohousing is the obvious example; other named-and-public sociocracy communities exist across the United States and Europe. Two days of visiting reveals patterns no course can describe.
4. **Take the FIC's "Becoming a Communitarian" course alongside SfC.** The two courses are designed to complement each other; one teaches the structural framework and the other teaches the personal and relational disposition that makes community living workable. Available through FIC's Communiversity.
5. **Join Sociocracy For All as a member.** Membership is on a sliding scale and gives access to the SoFA community of practice, occasional members-only events, and discounts on Academy courses. The membership network is the most active English-language sociocracy community of practice in 2026.
**One caution.** Sociocracy For Communities is a strong entry point but not the final form. Communities that adopt sociocracy and stop deepening their practice tend to drift back toward either consensus paralysis or informal authority by year three or four. Plan for ongoing learning: a refresher webinar each year, occasional consultation with a SoFA-certified facilitator, and willingness to revise circle structures as the community changes. Sociocracy is a living practice. The course is the door, not the room.
---
## 8. Limits
The course is widely recommended but has accumulated several practitioner-level critiques worth naming directly.
**The English-language and US-residential bias.** The SfC course is in English and uses primarily US cohousing examples. Cohousing as a sector is heavily concentrated in the United States, Northern Europe, and parts of the Asia-Pacific. Communities elsewhere (Latin America, Africa, much of Asia, Israel-Palestine kibbutz networks) have to translate the framework into their own contexts, often without local sociocracy-trained support. SoFA has working groups in several non-English-speaking regions but the SfC course itself has not been formally translated.
**The pre-recorded format.** The pre-recorded structure makes the course accessible and affordable, but it removes the live coaching and breakout-room practice that the live SoFA Academy provides. Communities that learn well from video can absorb the SfC framework; communities that need embodied practice with feedback often discover they need additional support after the course. SoFA addresses this through the live re-run option (offered intermittently) and through the longer Academy pathway.
**The procedural emphasis.** The course is procedural by design, and is explicit that the relational layer must come from elsewhere (Forum, Circle, NVC, Restorative Justice). Communities that take the course without already having or building a relational practice tend to discover the gap by year two. The course does not hide this, but communities sometimes hear "sociocracy is enough" because the procedural framework is so well-articulated. It is not enough.
**The framework's adaptation to non-residential contexts.** SfC is targeted at residential communities. Activist groups, distributed organizing networks, mutual aid collectives, and other non-residential groups have to adapt the framework substantially. SoFA addresses this through other curricula, but the SfC course itself does not translate cleanly into those contexts. Communities should pick the right course for their context.
**The cost of ongoing implementation.** $79 to $129 for the course is affordable. The hidden cost is the time, the practice, and (often) the paid consulting support that successful implementation requires. Communities that budget only for the course and not for the rollout often discover that the framework demands more sustained investment than the course price suggests. Plan for at least one year of dedicated implementation work, including some external coaching, in addition to the course fee.
**The year-three reckoning.** A pattern observed across communities that adopt sociocracy: enthusiasm in year one, productivity in year two, drift toward thin proceduralism in year three. The drift is not specific to the SfC course; it appears across every sociocracy adoption regardless of training source. The remedy is sustained relational-layer investment, periodic refreshers, and willingness to revise the procedural layer as the community changes. The course does not prevent the drift; it provides the framework that has to be re-examined when the drift becomes visible.
**Format-as-routine.** Communities that adopt sociocracy as their go-to framework for every decision eventually report that the form goes stale. Consent rounds become formalistic, circle meetings become procedural, the substance gets lost. The same remedy applies as for any long-running practice: rotate facilitators, vary meeting formats, mix in other methods (Forum, Open Space, Circle), and sometimes take a deliberate break from formal sociocracy for a season.
The course's design has held up since 2021. The limits are real and named by the course producers themselves; the SoFA team is open about what the course can and cannot do.
---
## 9. More resources
### Canonical course and books
- [Sociocracy For Communities (FIC course page)](https://www.ic.org/sociocracy-for-communities/). The canonical course page with current pricing, syllabus, instructors, and testimonials.
- [Sociocracy For All (SoFA)](https://www.sociocracyforall.org/). The producer's home, with the Academy pathway, member directory, free webinars, and book sales.
- Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, *Many Voices One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy* (Sociocracy For All Press, 2018). The canonical handbook companion. Most participants buy it alongside the course.
- Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, *From Here to There: The Sociocracy Implementation Companion* (Sociocracy For All Press, 2024). The implementation companion published more recently.
- Ted Rau, *Who Decides Who Decides* (2021) and *Collective Power* (2023). Additional books in the same series.
### The SoFA Academy pathway
- [SoFA Academy](https://www.sociocracyforall.org/academy/). Multi-level practitioner-to-trainer-to-consultant pathway. Level 1 is the natural progression for SfC graduates who want certification.
- SoFA Sociocracy For Movements webinar series. For non-residential applications.
- Custom SoFA consulting engagements. For communities that want professional accompaniment through implementation.
### Hosting institution
- [Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC)](https://www.ic.org/). The course's hosting partner. FIC's Communiversity hosts several complementary courses including *Becoming a Communitarian* and *Understanding Diversity in Community*.
- [Inside Community Podcast](https://www.ic.org/podcast/). FIC's podcast, with multiple episodes on sociocracy and governance.
- [Communities Directory](https://www.ic.org/directory/). FIC's directory of intentional communities, including filters for governance models.
### Companion Library entries
- [Sociocracy 3.0](/library/sociocracy-3-0). The Creative Commons pattern-library variant that diverges from SoFA's classical-sociocracy approach. Read alongside this course for the comparison.
- [Doocracy](/library/doocracy). The informal counterpart. Many communities that adopt sociocracy still run doocratic patterns for daily operational work.
- [The Tyranny of Structurelessness](/library/tyranny-of-structurelessness). Jo Freeman's structural critique of leaderless organizing. The SfC course can be read as a contemporary operationalization of Freeman's seven principles.
- [Liberating Structures](/library/liberating-structures). The 33-method facilitation toolkit that pairs naturally with sociocracy at the meeting layer.
- [Tamera Forum](/library/tamera-forum). One of the canonical relational practices that pairs with sociocracy as the procedural layer.
- [Circle / The Way of Council](/library/circle-way-of-council). Another relational practice that pairs with sociocracy.
### Theoretical lineage
- Gerard Endenburg, *Sociocracy: The Organization of Decision-Making* (Eburon, 1998). The classical Sociocracy 1.0 reference. The framework underneath the SoFA approach.
- John Buck and Sharon Villines, *We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy* (Sociocracy.info Press, 2017). Earlier English-language sociocracy book that influenced both the SoFA and S3 traditions.
- *Reinventing Organizations* by Frédéric Laloux (Nelson Parker, 2014). The developmental framework whose Teal stage is consistent with sociocracy at the organizational level.
- *The Tyranny of Structurelessness* by Jo Freeman (1972). The structural critique sociocracy is responding to.
### From the ToGather archive
The course is not directly named in any published archive interview. The closest archive grounding runs through:
- **Vidàlia** (Catalonia). The clearest archive example of an S3-grounded residential community (described in the Sociocracy 3.0 Library entry). Vidàlia uses S3 rather than classical sociocracy, but the underlying patterns are shared.
- **Tamera** (Portugal). Adopted sociocracy alongside Forum after the 2021 Miki Kashtan consolidation, as described in the Sociocracy 3.0 and Tamera Forum entries. Tamera uses a hybrid approach rather than purely classical SoFA, but the SfC course's framework is in their working vocabulary.
- **Findhorn Ecovillage** (Scotland). Exploring sociocracy as a layer alongside attunement and consensus following the 2024 institutional restructuring. The SfC course is one of the resources Findhorn's exploration team has used.
When future archive interviews surface communities that have specifically taken the SfC course, this section will be revised to link to them directly. As of 2026-05-11, the archive grounding for this entry runs through adjacent S3-running communities rather than through SfC alumni specifically.