The Tools Exist. We Rarely Use Them.

Details

• Author: Sharon Avraham
• Category: Articles
• Published: 2026
• Source: ToGather on Substack
• Source URL: https://jointogatherproject.substack.com/p/the-tools-exist-we-rarely-use-them
• Access: public

Description

The same three things break intentional communities, and the toolkits that address them have sat on a shelf for forty years. On why proven governance and conflict tools go unused.

Annotation

Sharon's blunt observation after years of fieldwork: communities keep breaking on the same three things, and the tools to handle all three already exist. They have existed for decades. Sociocracy, Forum, restorative practice, structured decision methods, none of this is new, and most groups never pick it up.

The essay names the gap between the shelf and the room. A community rarely lacks a method. What it lacks is the time, humility, and willingness to be a beginner together that adopting one demands, and those are harder to find than the methods themselves. The closing turn is toward what Sharon has been building so the tools are easier to reach.

Full text

## What this essay argues

On the recurring failure points in community life and the well-documented tools that already address them, sitting unused. This essay maps directly onto much of the Living Library.

> **From the field.** Several of the tools Sharon points to are documented as their own Library entries. The links below lead to them.

## The essay

*On the same three things that break intentional communities, and the toolkits that have been on a shelf for forty years.*

A few weeks back I wrote about what holds communities together. The [Forum](/library/tamera-forum) at Tamera, the Dharma Chakra at Ananda Kalyani, the membrane at Feytopia, the consent agreements at Samar. The practices people use to keep something alive once they have it. This piece is the inverse.

What I keep finding when communities fall apart is harder to write. The tools to prevent the collapse were there. Most of them written down forty or fifty years ago. The people I have been sitting with in kitchen after kitchen had not heard of them.

That part has stayed with me through years of fieldwork. The problem is that the answer is already in a book or a constitution somewhere, and the people who need it are figuring it out from scratch.

## The same three things break

The two people who have spent the most time documenting why intentional communities fail are Diana Leafe Christian in the United States and Ilan Meyer in Israel-Palestine. They have never met. What they have found lines up in ways that are hard to explain unless what they describe is real.

Christian was the editor of Communities magazine for years before she wrote Creating a Life Together in 2003. The headline number from her rounds of interviews with intentional-community founders is one I cannot shake. Roughly 1 in 10 communities ultimately makes it. The Forster and Wilhelmus survival data from 2005 puts 80% of the failures inside the first two years. Christian's diagnosis of why is specific. She names "structural conflict." By that she means the absence of a clear decision-making structure before the first hard moment arrives.

Ilan has accompanied more than 80 kibbutzim through change processes, 43 of them through a full reorganization from collective to renewed kibbutz. When I asked him what makes a community thrive, he answered in a single breath.

> "In the end it comes back to three conditions. Growth. Dialogue of agreements. Leadership with trust. If all three exist the community can thrive. If one is missing cracks begin."
>
> — *Ilan Meyer*

Growth means roughly 25 new families every five years for a community of three to four hundred people. Without that, the kindergartens empty, the working-age population ages, the place can no longer carry itself. Ilan is precise about the number because he has watched it play out repeatedly.

Dialogue of agreements is what he calls an art. The capacity to put everything on the table, start with shared values before going to competing interests, then move toward compromise. Most communities lose this capacity the first time a real disagreement appears, and once it goes, decisions stop closing. Then trust starts to leak.

Leadership with trust is the condition he comes back to most. Legitimacy that comes from people believing the leader is not gaming them. Authority can be assigned. Legitimacy has to be given. In communities that lasted, he keeps finding one or two people who held the center without claiming it. In communities that broke, he keeps finding the absence.

> "When there is no trust there is no management. When there is no management nothing moves."

Christian, working a continent and a generation away from Ilan, lands on the same picture from a different angle. She studies sociocracy now because the consensus-with-unanimity model most American communities inherited from the Quakers tends to collapse under sustained disagreement. One person says no, a year of work stops, trust erodes, leadership erodes, growth stops. That is the same loop Ilan describes from inside the kibbutz world. The three failure modes feed each other.

Ilan told me about Kibbutz Samar in the Negev. Samar was unusual from the start. A group of people came out of the older kibbutzim in the 1970s and built a place that ran on personal responsibility instead of bureaucracy. Mutual responsibility without mechanisms. They shared everything, but they did not put a system in place to teach new arrivals how to share.

> "Samar is like a ship with two decks. Above, parties. Below, those who row."
>
> — *A Samar member, as told to Ilan Meyer*

At the start, everyone understood you had to row. Later, people arrived who only came for the party. The system did not stop it in time. Members who had built the place could not help their own children, while members who came in with outside money lived a tier above. The shared pool emptied. Trust collapsed. By the time Ilan was invited in, Samar was at a deep breaking point.

What you are reading is a diagnosis. Two people, working in different traditions on different continents, came to the same conclusion about what breaks a community. They named it in nearly the same words.

What has been on my mind since: the tools that address each of these failure modes already exist. Most of them have been written down for forty years or more. In the communities I have visited, it is rare to find any of them in active use.

## Six things on the shelf

I want to walk you through six. Six tools that map onto the failure modes Ilan and Christian describe, drawn from a library I have spent the last year building.

[Sociocracy 3.0](/library/sociocracy-3-0) is a modular consent-based decision system. It is what Christian recommends in place of traditional consensus, because it solves the single-veto collapse that kills the older model. The shift is small. Instead of asking the room "does anyone object," you ask "is this good enough for now, safe enough to try." A proposal passes when no one has a substantive objection grounded in the group's stated aims. If you have ever sat in a four-hour meeting that ended with one person blocking the room, this is the first place I would point you.

Tamera Forum. If you read what I wrote a few weeks back you saw Forum at work in the field. The full framework, with its origins in the early 1970s and the structure of circle, center, and mirrors, sits in the library. Tamera has held a community in southern Portugal through more than forty years of partner conflict and leadership succession by sitting in the circle every week.

[Liberating Structures](/library/liberating-structures) is a toolkit of 33 microstructures developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. Each one is a small protocol you can drop into a meeting you are already running. 1-2-4-All. Troika Consulting. 25-10 Crowd Sourcing. The names sound like jargon until you try one. The point is structural. In a regular meeting the loudest person sets the floor. These microstructures change the floor without anyone having to call the loudest person out. Communities I have visited that started using them said the same thing back to me afterwards. Meetings shortened. Decisions started closing.

[Ostrom](/library/ostrom-eight-design-principles)'s Eight Design Principles came out of the work that won Elinor Ostrom the Nobel in economics in 2009. She studied commons that had survived for centuries. Irrigation systems in the Philippines. Village commons in Japan. Alpine pastures in Switzerland. Fisheries on five continents. The eight features she found in all of them are concrete. Clear boundaries about who is in. Rules adapted to the local context. Decisions that the people affected can change. Monitoring. Graduated sanctions. Cheap conflict resolution. The right to make their own rules. Nesting inside larger networks. The principles touch all three of Ilan's conditions. If you want one document that comes close to an empirical answer to what works, this is it.

[Mondragon](/library/mondragon-ten-principles)'s Ten Basic Principles. Mondragon is a Basque federation of worker cooperatives that started in 1956 and today employs around 70,000 worker-owners. Their principles include open admission, democratic organization, sovereignty of labor, and the one most relevant for residential community: the instrumental and subordinate character of capital. In Mondragon, capital serves labor. If the Samar dynamic Ilan described is starting to play out in your own place, with members holding outside assets while founders cannot help their own children, Mondragon's principles are where I would look first.

[Mietshäuser Syndikat](/library/mietshauser-syndikat) is a German collective housing network of around 200 projects. All of them collectively owned. None of them can ever be sold. Each project is its own LLC, and the Syndikat itself owns a minority share in every project, just large enough to veto any sale forever. The structure addresses the inheritance and asset-accumulation problem at the center of Samar's collapse. The model has been running for thirty years.

That is six. There are more. The point of walking through them is to make a simple claim. In my opinion the bottleneck for most communities is access and attention. The toolkits already exist, in some cases for fifty years. The harder work is translating something abstract into something a specific community can actually use this Thursday.

## What I have been building

For years I have been doing field interviews across intentional communities in Israel-Palestine, Portugal, India, the Netherlands. The pattern I kept hearing was strange. Communities had often, without knowing it, reinvented Ostrom's principles, or stumbled into something close to Mondragon's subordination-of-capital rule. Some had built versions of Council practice without having ever heard of Council. They did the work themselves because the work they needed was in writing somewhere they had no time to look for.

The Living Library is where I park what already works.

It currently holds 43 entries. Frameworks for dialogue and decision making. Constitutions from communities that have held themselves together for decades or centuries. Books that turned out to matter. Toolkits that came out of one place and turned out to work in others. Each entry is a real document with the original voice intact, a link back to the community or thinker the practice came from, and the live URL. You can read it in the order it was built, or click through by theme.

People sometimes ask how the interviews and the tools relate. In my early field visits they did not relate. I came back with stories. Then I started seeing the same shapes repeat across communities and started looking for whether the shape had been named before. Almost always it had been. Now when I sit with a community in their kitchen, the question I am holding is whether the failure mode they are describing has already been documented elsewhere. Most of the time it has. The Library is where I keep the answers, so the next conversation can start with a tool instead of a re-derivation.

If you have read this far and you are thinking about your own community, my suggestion is this. Pick one of the three failure modes Ilan names that you recognize in your own place. Pick one tool from the Library that addresses it. Try it for six weeks before you decide whether it works.

Treat the Library as a shelf. Take one thing off at a time.

You can browse it at togatherproject.eu/library .

If this landed with you

If something in this piece landed with you, I want to hear about it. Reply here, or find me through the archive at togatherproject.eu. This is field research, and the best field research is a conversation.

If you know someone who is sitting in a kitchen right now figuring out how their community is going to make a hard decision, share this with them. That is exactly who this is for.

And if you want to support more of this fieldwork, more interviews, more honest documentation of what actually happens when people try to live together, ToGather is currently running a campaign on Artizen.

Support ToGather on Artizen

## Bringing this into your own community

Treat the Library as a shelf and take one thing off at a time. Name the failure mode you recognize in your own group, weak decisions, thin trust, or a stalled flow of new people. Pick one tool that addresses it, from Sociocracy 3.0 to Liberating Structures to Forum, and try it for six weeks before you judge it. One tool, actually applied, beats five admired from a distance.

## Read the original

This essay was first published on the ToGather Substack, written by [Sharon Avraham](https://togatherproject.eu). [Read it on Substack](https://jointogatherproject.substack.com/p/the-tools-exist-we-rarely-use-them).

## Related in the Living Library

- [Sociocracy 3.0](/library/sociocracy-3-0)
- [Sociocracy For Communities](/library/sociocracy-for-communities)
- [Holacracy](/library/holacracy)
- [The Tyranny of Structurelessness](/library/tyranny-of-structurelessness)
- [Liberating Structures](/library/liberating-structures)
- [Restorative and Transformative Justice](/library/restorative-and-transformative-justice)
- [World Cafe](/library/world-cafe-brown-isaacs)