Federation of Egalitarian Communities: Constitution and Seven Principles
Details
- Author: Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC)
- Category: Constitutions
- Published: 1976 (federation founding)
- Source: Federation of Egalitarian Communities
- Source URL: https://www.thefec.org/about/us/constitution/
- Access: public
Description
The seven principles all member communities of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities must hold as core values, and the federation's own constitution governing how those communities relate to one another.
Annotation
The FEC framework is a constitution about constitutions. To join the federation, a community must encode the seven FEC principles into its own bylaws or equivalent fundamental documents. This makes the FEC a useful case study in how a meta-level constitution shapes the constitutions of its member communities.
Full text
The Federation of Egalitarian Communities was founded in 1976 to link income-sharing intentional communities sharing a common set of values. Member communities have included Twin Oaks, East Wind, Sandhill Farm, Acorn, Skyhouse, and others. The FEC publishes both its own federation constitution and the bylaws of its member communities on its website.
For a community to qualify for full membership in the FEC, the seven FEC principles must be encoded as core values in the community's own bylaws or equivalent fundamental documents. Communities applying for membership must also have a collective binding agreement with a defined process for changing it, meaning the community must have a working constitution-amendment procedure before it can join.
The seven principles (paraphrased from the FEC Constitution):
1. The community holds its land, labor, income, and other resources in common.
2. The community assumes responsibility for the needs of its members, receiving the products of their labor and distributing these and all other goods equally, or according to need.
3. Decisions are made democratically.
4. The community uses non-violent means to resolve internal disputes and external conflicts.
5. The community actively works against racism, classism, sexism, ageism, and discrimination based on sexual orientation.
6. The community acts to conserve natural resources and protect the natural environment.
7. The community cooperates with other communities and forms inter-community cooperative networks.
For a researcher, the FEC is structurally interesting in two ways. First, it is a federation, not a single community, so the constitution governs relations between communities rather than within one. Second, the FEC publishes the bylaws of its member communities (Twin Oaks, Acorn, Skyhouse, the now-defunct Krutsio and Appletree from earlier eras), so a researcher can read the same seven principles encoded in twelve different ways across different communities. This is a near-perfect natural experiment in constitutional translation.
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## Living examples and entry points for community builders
If your community is considering full income sharing and trying to understand what that commitment actually requires to hold together over decades, the FEC member communities in North America are some of the most thoroughly documented examples available.
Twin Oaks in Louisa County, Virginia is the oldest and largest FEC community: roughly 100 members, founded 1967, income-sharing since the beginning. They manufacture hammocks and tofu, operate a seeds business, and have a decades-long visitor program. East Wind in Missouri has operated since 1973 with around 60 members and runs a nut butter business and other enterprises. Acorn in Virginia, founded 1993 with around 40 members, is younger and somewhat smaller. All three share income fully, govern democratically, and apply the FEC's Seven Principles as membership requirements, not aspirational guidelines.
NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation) organizes student housing cooperatives across the US and Canada, applying cooperative governance in a very different context but drawing on some of the same democratic principles. The Global Ecovillage Network connects a wider range of intentional communities worldwide, most of which are not income-sharing and are less economically radical, but which share FEC communities' interest in democratic governance and ecological sustainability.
Where the door is:
- All three main FEC communities run visitor programs and are genuinely open to people considering communal living. Visiting is probably the most useful research you can do before committing to anything.
- "Communities" magazine, connected to the FEC and the broader intentional communities movement in North America, has been running since the early 1970s and contains decades of first-person accounts of what income sharing actually feels like from the inside, including accounts of what goes wrong.
- The FEC website has current information on all member communities, their visitor programs, and their membership criteria.
- The question that tends to separate people who are drawn to income sharing from people who are suited to it: is full income sharing a non-negotiable founding commitment for your community, or is it an ideal you are working toward?
One caution that the FEC communities themselves emphasize: joining a full income-sharing community is a significant legal and relational commitment. Members' finances are genuinely merged with the community's. Leaving involves a process that FEC communities have developed carefully over decades because it is complicated. Before you study the Seven Principles, study how these communities handle membership transitions, both joining and departing. That process will tell you more about how income sharing actually functions than the principles document will.