Community Purpose-Setting

A deliberate practice in which a community articulates, tests, and revises the shared purpose that holds it together. Documented across four communities in the ToGather archive.

What it is, and what it is for

A community's purpose is the answer to why this particular gathering of people is worth the costs of living closely together. Purpose-setting is the practice of arriving at that answer deliberately, testing it against lived reality, and returning to revise it when the community drifts or the world changes.

The practice matters most when it is not exercised. Communities without a legible shared purpose tend to find that decisions about money, space, membership, and direction turn into proxy battles for unstated disagreements about what the community actually is and who it is for. Purpose gives those conversations somewhere to land.

Purpose in the intentional community context covers three questions that communities often collapse into one:

Vision: the world this community is working toward, whether or not it reaches that world in its own lifetime.

Mission: what this particular community does, concretely, toward that vision.

Culture: who this community is in its daily life, and what it expects of members in the ordinary moments between major decisions.

When all three are legible, members can say yes and no to requests without every refusal feeling like a vote of no-confidence in the community itself.

Where it came from

Purpose-setting as a deliberate community practice has roots in at least three traditions that converged in the late twentieth century.

The first is organizational development. Kurt Lewin's action research in the 1940s and Peter Drucker's management writing from the 1950s onward introduced the idea that shared purpose was something an organization could articulate, measure, and revise. This tradition entered the nonprofit sector and then intentional communities through facilitation tools and practice networks.

The second is the intentional community movement itself. Kibbutz communities were working with collective purpose from the early twentieth century, often through the mechanism of the takanon (community bylaws). Many found that a founding purpose tied to a specific historical project, settling the land in Israel-Palestine, did not automatically survive the completion of that project.

The third is the field of participatory facilitation: Open Space Technology, Theory U, Appreciative Inquiry, and similar frameworks that gave groups structured ways to surface shared purpose rather than having it asserted by founders alone. These frameworks reached intentional communities primarily through facilitators who crossed between organizational development and community life.

The Together Institute's Community Canvas (2017) formalized purpose-setting as a distinct domain within intentional community design, placing it at the center of the Identity section alongside values, roles, and naming practices. The Canvas frames purpose as a diagnostic: a community that cannot answer the Identity questions will struggle with all the Experience and Structure questions downstream.

How it actually runs

There is no single procedure for purpose-setting across communities. The practice takes different forms depending on where a community is in its lifecycle: founding, consolidation, transition, or crisis.

At founding

Some communities begin with a clear, externally given purpose that does not need to be developed so much as owned. Tamera's founding purpose was explicit from the beginning: to develop a model of non-violent coexistence between humans and with nature. Early members came because they accepted that framing. The process at founding was less "what should our purpose be?" and more "do you believe this enough to stake your life on it?"

Ananda Kalyani follows a more explicitly organizational model: a mission statement developed by the founding group, articulated, revised, and periodically re-announced. Dada Mahapragyananda described a recent revision cycle: "We recently revised our vision and mission and renewed efforts to remind people... what that vision and mission are." The revision happened because members had drifted from the founding framing, and the community needed to re-anchor.

At transition points

The more common scenario in the archive is purpose-setting as a response to disruption. Kibbutz Samar's founding purpose was tied to a specific project of land settlement in Israel-Palestine. When that project was completed, the community found itself holding a structure without a clear reason to hold it. The answer Samar arrived at, over several years, was a radical libertarian individualism: a community built around maximal individual autonomy.

Feytopia's approach was more structured. Season seven brought a formal visioning process with facilitated breakout groups. The sentence that emerged, "defining a new way of living and gathering," is a working purpose rather than a finished one. Its value is less in its precision and more in its capacity to focus decisions.

The recurring practices

Across the archive, communities that maintain purpose over time tend to include at least three elements:

Annual revisiting. A structured session, at least once per year, where the purpose question is opened rather than assumed. Not a vote on whether to change, but a check on whether the current articulation is still alive.

An on-ramp for new members. Some way of transmitting purpose to people arriving after the founding generation, rather than assuming they will absorb it through proximity.

A named process for raising purpose-concerns. When a member feels the community is drifting, what is the path? Communities that lack this tend to suppress purpose-concerns until they surface as crises.

What it is and what it is not

Purpose-setting differs from several adjacent practices that communities sometimes mistake for it.

Governance design is the set of rules and roles through which a community makes decisions. Purpose is the answer to what those decisions are in service of. Communities that invest heavily in governance design without a clear purpose tend to find their structures technically functional but politically contested, because members use governance tools to argue about purpose without naming it.

Community visioning focuses on concrete preferred futures (what will our land look like in twenty years) rather than on the normative question of what the community is for. Purpose-setting and visioning are complementary and sometimes run in the same session; they address different questions.

Culture work addresses who the community is in its daily life, which is a downstream question from purpose. Many facilitation frameworks treat culture as the primary lever, which can produce communities with strong internal cohesion but no legible rationale for that cohesion.

The Community Canvas explicitly separates these three domains. Purpose sits inside the Identity section upstream of Experience (culture, rituals, safety) and Structure (governance and finance). This sequencing is deliberate and worth holding.

Communities practicing it

Ananda Kalyani is a spiritual and ecological community in central northern Portugal, built around the practices and mission of Ananda Marga, a meditation and social service tradition.

Purpose at Ananda Kalyani is more explicit than at most communities in the archive. Dada describes it as a design principle: the community exists to serve a mission, and the structure follows from that, rather than the mission following from the community's preferences. Anandeshvarii adds a practical corollary: a clear purpose allows a community to make clear decisions about who it invites. Communities without one tend to use vague criteria that collapse under pressure.

Kibbutz Samar is a radical libertarian kibbutz in the Negev desert, founded in 1976 with roughly 200 residents.

Samar's purpose is defined partly by what it refuses. Where most kibbutzim operated from a collective obligation framework, Samar built its identity around the absence of mandatory collective obligation. Uriel described the moment when the founding purpose was completed and the community had to decide what came next: "once the mission of settling the land was completed, the economic partnership lost its meaning." The purpose Samar arrived at after that reckoning lives in the structure rather than in a document.

Tamera is a peace research and education community of roughly 170 residents in southern Portugal, founded in 1978 and relocated from Germany to Portugal in 1995.

Purpose at Tamera is explicitly political. Sabine Lichtenfels connects purpose to organizational survival: "I think the most communities fail because of this, that they don't have the connection to what is happening on this globe and what is our task or purpose in relation to that." The community's Forum practice and ecological experiments are meant to be research activities, not ends in themselves.

Feytopia is a seasonal intentional community in Burgundy, France, running four to five months per year, currently in its seventh season.

The season-seven visioning process described by Jessica Flor Angel shows purpose-setting at a stage of early consolidation: developed enough to know it is not just a gathering, not yet settled on exactly what it is. The sentence that emerged, "defining a new way of living and gathering," is a working purpose whose value is its capacity to focus decisions rather than its precision.

How to begin practicing this in your own group

1. Name the difference between vision, mission, and culture before you try to write any of them. The three questions point toward different conversations, and conflating them tends to produce statements that are neither visionary enough to inspire nor specific enough to guide.

2. Surface where purpose-setting already happens informally in your group. Most communities develop implicit purpose-practices before explicit ones: the stories told to new members, the rationale given for challenged decisions, the objections that carry weight when they invoke "what we're here for."

3. Start from current practices, not from an ideal. If the purpose your group writes bears no connection to how members actually spend their time, it will be decorative. Work from current practices outward to the purpose they imply, then ask whether that purpose is the one the community wants to claim.

4. Develop a named process for raising purpose-concerns. When members have no path for saying "I think we're getting away from what we're for," they use indirect routes, governance fights, recruitment disputes, financial conflicts, that are harder to resolve than a direct purpose conversation.

5. Pair with complementary practices. Purpose-setting works alongside Tamera Forum for surfacing what is alive at the relational and political level. It pairs with Sociocracy 3.0 as a governance framework that operationalizes purpose through the concept of organizational driver. Design governance after, not before, you have some answer to the purpose question.

6. Expect a year-three reckoning. The purpose a community writes at founding is usually the purpose that sounded right to the founding group. After two or three years, the community is different and members' interpretations of what the purpose means have diverged. Build in a formal revisiting process early enough that the divergence does not compound into a crisis.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

The Together Institute, which developed and maintains the Community Canvas, works directly with communities on the Identity section. Their facilitation offerings are one structured path for groups wanting support with the purpose questions.

The Global Ecovillage Network's CLIPS curriculum includes purpose articulation as part of its multi-day course for emerging communities, alongside governance, economy, and ecology.

Three entry points for community builders:

Read the Identity section of the Community Canvas, available free at community-canvas.org. It is a diagnostic, not a prescription: it asks the questions your community should be able to answer, not the answers it should give. Use it as a self-assessment before investing in a full purpose-setting process.

Run one session on the question "What is this community for, and what would we give up to stay true to that?" Open Space Technology (a separate Library entry, forthcoming) is one format for this; a dedicated meeting with space for honest dissent works too.

Contact a community that has done this work publicly. Feytopia, Tamera, and Ananda Kalyani have all described their purpose processes in interviews available on the ToGather site. Reaching out to ask how a process unfolded is legitimate and often welcomed.

One caution: Purpose statements developed in facilitated sessions often reflect the values of whoever showed up. Members who are skeptical, newer, or from cultural backgrounds different from the facilitation-comfortable majority still have a stake in the purpose question. Include them, or the purpose will encode the bias of who was in the room.

Where it gets hard

The founding generation problem

Communities that develop purpose at founding tend to embed it so thoroughly that it becomes invisible to later members, who absorb it as "how things are here" rather than as a deliberate choice that could be re-made. When the founding generation reduces its participation, purpose can dissolve without anyone noticing, because no one younger was taught to hold it as a choice.

Purpose and exit rights

Communities with strongly articulated purposes face a harder version of the departure question. A member who cannot align with the community's purpose is, in some sense, in the wrong place. But the threshold at which misalignment becomes grounds for asking someone to leave is rarely articulated, and applying it feels harsh even when it is honest. Communities that avoid this question tend to carry unproductive tension for years between members whose sense of purpose has quietly diverged.

Political commitment versus lifestyle preference

Sabine Lichtenfels at Tamera names this directly: communities that lose the thread of what is happening in the world outside their gates tend to collapse into lifestyle communities that survive well but do not do the work they might have done. For communities whose purpose is connected to a global claim, non-violence, ecological transformation, political change, the daily work of maintaining a shared household is absorbing enough that the political commitment can fade without a deliberate practice for keeping it alive.

Scale and purpose coherence

Sabine also raised the scale question: "If a community grows beyond 50 people it's more challenging and then to really figure out what is our common track." Larger communities tend to develop subgroups whose implicit purposes diverge, and the shared purpose becomes a least-common-denominator statement that no subgroup fully claims.

The completed-purpose problem

Uriel's account of Samar captures the most extreme version: a community that completes its founding purpose and finds itself holding a structure without a clear reason to hold it. The milder version, where the original urgency has faded and the community has not named that it is in different territory, is common across communities built around an external crisis or a specific historical project.

More resources

Canonical primary sources

Community Canvas by the Together Institute. The Identity section addresses purpose, values, and naming directly. Available free under Creative Commons license.

Trainings and residencies

CLIPS course, Global Ecovillage Network. A multi-day facilitated course for emerging communities, covering purpose alongside governance, economy, and ecology.

Theoretical lineage

Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom's design principles for commons governance imply that shared purpose is a precondition for effective collective management.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. The equivalent failure in purpose is refusing to make purpose explicit, assuming it can be felt rather than named.

Companion frameworks

Tamera Forum. A relational practice that often brings purpose-questions to the surface before governance discussions do.

Sociocracy 3.0. A governance framework that operationalizes purpose through the concept of organizational driver. Purpose-setting and Sociocracy design work best in sequence.

Membership and Selection. Membership criteria should flow from the community's purpose. The selection process and the purpose-setting practice are most effective when developed together.

From the ToGather archive

Anandeshvarii on Devotion and Belonging at Ananda Kalyani. On how a community's spiritual mission shapes daily life and membership decisions.

Uriel at Kibbutz Samar. On the economic structure that followed after the founding mission was completed.

Eileen on 35 Years Inside Samar. On the transition fatigue that comes from living in a community that has outlived its original energetic frame.

Jessica Flor Angel, Founder of Feytopia. On the season-seven visioning process and the question of what Feytopia is for.