The Communitarian Economy: Trust-Based Donation Funding at Tamera

The financial model that has sustained Tamera, a peace research village of around 100 people in southern Portugal, since 1995: no membership fees, no salaries, no ownership of the land. The community runs on donations and on income from week-long seminars on love, water, and peace research. Diogo Serras Lopes and Vera describe it as a political will-based economy: the funding exists because people who share the vision choose to sustain it.

The Communitarian Economy: Trust-Based Donation Funding at Tamera

What the communitarian economy is, and what distinguishes it

Tamera is a peace research community in the Alentejo region of Portugal, founded in 1995 by Dieter Duhm and Sabine Lichtenfels. It runs on a funding model that its members call the communitarian economy: the community depends entirely on voluntary donations from supporters worldwide, charges no membership fees, pays no salaries in the conventional sense, and asks members to contribute their professional skills and labor without financial compensation in return for housing, food, and full community life.

This is distinct from income pooling and from cooperative wage-compression. In an income-sharing community like Twin Oaks, members pool their earnings and the pool meets their needs. In Tamera's model, there are no individual earnings to pool: the community is funded by external donors, and members live from that donated fund. The members are not employees. They are not worker-owners. They are participants in a project that external supporters believe in enough to fund.

The model rests on a theory about money's relationship to mission. Tamera's founding thinkers held that charging for community life would corrupt it: that if the community sold its services or set fees for membership, it would begin optimizing for revenue rather than for its stated mission of peace research, human reconnection, and model building for a future beyond war. Voluntary donation from people who are moved by the work is, in this frame, the only funding mechanism that does not compromise the community's independence.

The Tamera archive interviews speak to how this works in practice. Joshua Gottenko, a long-term community member involved in governance and conflict process, describes the challenge: the community needs money continuously; the mission that generates donations is real but not easily marketed; and the relationship between giving and community health is delicate. Sabine Lichtenfels, co-founder, speaks to the founding intention: a community that lives by trust rather than by contractual economic relationships.

How the model works in practice

Members of Tamera contribute their professional skills and labor to community projects: water retention landscape construction, permaculture design, peace education programs, publishing, music, the Global Campus online learning platform, international partnerships through the GRACE network. In return, the community provides housing, food, healthcare, and the basics of personal life.

There are no individual salaries. A software developer who joins and works on the Global Campus platform earns nothing in wages. An architect who designs community buildings earns nothing. A teacher who runs peace education seminars earns nothing as an individual. What they receive is full community provision: room, food, belonging, and the ability to work on something they consider meaningful without the economic pressure of market employment.

The community is funded by people outside it who find the project credible and worth supporting. Seminars and workshops bring visitors who pay for the experience and the teaching. Individual donors give through the community's fundraising operations. Foundations and mission-aligned funders support specific projects. Publications, recordings, and educational materials generate some revenue.

The founding logic, attributed to Dieter Duhm, is that the community must remain permanently dependent on the generosity of the world, rather than on its own income-generating capacity. This dependency is presented not as a vulnerability but as a spiritual and political commitment: the community does not want to be a self-sufficient economic unit. It wants to remain accountable to a wider circle of people who believe in the vision.

The structural tensions this creates

Permanent fundraising pressure

Tamera's community of roughly 160 residents (as of 2024) requires continuous fundraising to meet basic operational costs. The community cannot build up the kind of financial reserves that would insulate it from donor fluctuations. Joshua Gottenko's account of community governance includes ongoing tension around how much energy goes into the public-facing fundraising work versus the internal research and development work that is supposed to be the community's primary mission.

The legibility problem

Tamera's research areas, re-learning how humans can live without war, healing the relationship between the sexes, building water retention systems as models for dryland agriculture, are not easily communicated to general funders. The community has built a global supporter base by doing this communication for decades. But the work of translating complex, sometimes esoteric research into donation-generating messaging is itself a form of labor that shapes what the community emphasizes and how it presents itself.

The member contribution asymmetry

Without salaries, there is no formal mechanism for tracking individual contribution. Members who bring skills that directly generate revenue (fundraising, seminar facilitation, media production) are economically more visible than members whose work is internal to the community (water systems maintenance, kitchen, childcare). This can produce resentment similar to what informal income-sharing communities face: the contribution tracking is social and cultural, not economic and auditable.

The dependency on Duhm and Lichtenfels's vision

Much of Tamera's donor network was built on the personal credibility and intellectual output of Dieter Duhm and Sabine Lichtenfels. The question of whether the community's fundraising capacity survives a generational leadership transition is one the community is actively working on. The Global Campus and the GRACE network are partly responses to this: attempts to build institutional infrastructure and a wider leadership base that can sustain the mission beyond the founding generation.

FROM THE FIELD The Tamera archive includes interviews with Sabine Lichtenfels (co-founder), Bori (community coordinator), Joshua Gottenko (governance and conflict process), Uri Ayalon (community member and educator), and Aida Shibli (Palestinian community member working on Israeli-Palestinian peace dimensions of Tamera's work). Across these interviews, the communitarian economy appears not as a solved problem but as an ongoing experiment. Joshua describes the fundraising tension directly. Sabine speaks to the founding intention of keeping money subordinate to mission. Uri and Aida bring perspectives on what it means to live this model as people whose own political and cultural contexts are among the reasons Tamera exists. The interviews do not describe a community that has resolved the tensions in its funding model. They describe a community that is living them.

What this model requires

The communitarian economy requires something that most organizations cannot produce: a mission compelling enough to generate ongoing voluntary funding from people who are not receiving services proportionate to their donations.

Most organizations that try to operate without fees or salaries either build a charismatic founder whose personal network funds the project (and face collapse when the founder leaves), or develop a body of intellectual or spiritual work that builds a genuine global community of belief (which Tamera has done, over decades, with genuine difficulty).

It also requires members who are genuinely willing to live without personal financial security. The people who join Tamera and stay are not choosing between Tamera and a comfortable market career. They are making a specific choice about what makes life meaningful. The community's ability to attract and retain the skills it needs depends on there being enough people in the world for whom this choice is real.

The model is not transferable to most contexts. An architecture firm, a technology company, or a retail cooperative cannot fund itself through voluntary donations from people who believe in architecture, technology, or retail. What Tamera has, which most organizations do not, is a mission that enough people around the world find worth supporting purely because they believe in it.

Comparison with other models in this collection

Tamera's communitarian economy sits at a specific point on the spectrum of community financial models. It shares with the commune economy (Twin Oaks, Samar) the commitment to full member provision from a common fund and the absence of individual wages. It differs in that the fund comes from external donors rather than member earnings. Members do not pool their income because they do not have individual income to pool.

Pour Tous at Auroville is the closest structural comparison: both Tamera and Auroville run on a combination of donations, visitor fees, and project revenues, with members receiving provision from the common fund. The difference is scale and legal structure: Auroville is a legal entity under Indian law with significant government involvement; Tamera is a private association in Portugal with full independence from state support.

Pay solidarity (Mondragon) and labor credit systems (Twin Oaks) both operate within a market economy context: they constrain or track economic relationships that still exist. Tamera's model tries to exit the market economy context entirely for its internal life, while remaining dependent on the market economy externally through its donor base.

How to engage with this framework

QUESTIONS TO START ASKING Is your community's mission specific and compelling enough to generate ongoing voluntary funding from people who are not your members? Most communities cannot answer yes to this. Tamera spent decades building the credibility and network that makes this possible. What would that look like for your community?

What happens to your community if donations drop by 30% in a given year? A community without reserves, without fee income, and without member earnings has very limited options. How would you respond?

Who in your community has the skills to translate complex mission into fundraising communication, and how much of their time is this taking? If fundraising consumes the majority of your visible leadership's energy, that is a governance problem as well as an economic one.

What is your plan for sustaining the model beyond its founding generation? Tamera's Global Campus and GRACE network are partial answers. What are yours?

4 steps toward a trust-based donation model:

1. Build the credibility before you need the money. Tamera's donor network was built over thirty years of publishing, teaching, and demonstrating results in water systems, peace education, and community life. A community that launches with a donation model before it has demonstrated anything will not generate the trust the model requires.
2. Develop multiple funding streams from the start. Individual donors, seminar and event revenue, foundation grants, and publication income are all different relationships with different time horizons and different risks. A community that depends on any single stream is not running a communitarian economy; it is running a single-donor dependency.
3. Track contribution without salaries. The absence of wages does not eliminate the need to track who is contributing what. Social and cultural tracking without formal mechanisms produces the resentment that informal income-sharing communities face. Build visible, community-wide acknowledgment of the full range of contributions, including internal maintenance work that does not appear in public-facing output.
4. Make the leadership transition plan explicit before you need it. If your founding generation leaves, what does the donor network transfer to? This is the question that ends most donation-funded communities. Tamera is working on institutional answers. Start earlier than they did.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

Tamera's website at tamera.org is the primary entry point. The community publishes extensive written material, maintains the Global Campus online learning platform, and runs regular international seminars. The GRACE network connects partner communities and projects in multiple countries.

Sabine Lichtenfels's writing, particularly Grace: Pilgrimage for a Future without War and Temple of Love: Shaping a New Culture of Love, documents the founding vision of the communitarian economy. Dieter Duhm's Terra Nova: Global Revolution and the Healing of Love provides the theoretical framework for the community's mission.

The five published Tamera interviews in the ToGather archive provide the most direct access to how the communitarian economy is experienced from inside: Sabine Lichtenfels, Bori, Joshua Gottenko, Uri Ayalon, Aida Shibli.

Sources and connections

The primary grounding for this entry is the Tamera archive: five published interviews with Sabine Lichtenfels, Bori, Joshua Gottenko, Uri Ayalon, and Aida Shibli. Tamera's published materials, website, and the Global Campus platform provide supplementary documentation.

Connected library entries: The Tamera Forum covers Tamera's conflict resolution and governance practices. Pour Tous: The All-Goods-Free Economy is the Auroville structural comparison. Pooled Income and Needs-Based Maintenance is the income-sharing comparison. Ostrom's Eight Design Principles provides the commons governance framework. Community Land Trust covers the land ownership model that typically accompanies communities practicing trust-based funding.