The Conversation That Breaks Them

The conversation communities avoid, usually the one about money, is the one that decides whether they hold. Drawn from interviews across the archive, including Kibbutz Samar and ADM Amsterdam.

What this essay argues

On the single conversation, usually about money, that most communities avoid until it is too late, and what the archive shows about the ones that face it early.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. This essay draws on interviews at Kibbutz Samar in Israel-Palestine and the long-running ADM squat in Amsterdam, among others in the archive.

The essay

It is almost never about the money. It is about what the money represents.

Community meeting at the dates plantation in the anarchist kibbutz Samar

I expected money to be an uncomfortable topic. I did not expect it to be almost invisible.

After fifteen years of visiting intentional communities and co-living projects across Europe, Israel, India, and Portugal, I kept finding the same thing. The conversations people had before they started living together were detailed, sometimes exhausting. Pages on governance structures, decision-making, and conflict protocols. And rarely anything about finances that everyone assumed was settled.

It was almost never settled. It was just postponed.

Why do communities wait until it breaks

Ilan Meyer has spent thirty years as an organizational consultant inside communities. He has accompanied more than forty kibbutzim through the hardest transitions they have ever faced. In a previous post, I wrote about his concept of small-f and Big-F friction. But there is another thing he told me that took longer to sit with.

Communities almost never have the real money conversation because they found the wisdom to do so early. They have it because something cracked, and the cost of staying quiet got too high.

He was describing something the behavioral scientists Tversky and Kahneman spent their careers documenting. Humans are loss-averse by nature. We do not move toward better situations. We move away from the unbearable ones. You can tell a community that a clear financial agreement now will prevent three years of conflict later. Most of the time, they will not act on that until they are already inside the three years of conflict.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is how we are built. And it means that the money question, across almost every community I have visited, arrives late, under pressure, with less trust in the room than there was at the start.

'Future Play' – an event celebrating 30th anniversary of the Amsterdam artists’ squat Nieuw en Meer

What Kibbutz Samar learned over forty years

Nir Menachem grew up in Kibbutz Samar, in the Negev desert. For decades, Samar ran on something close to trust: members contributed what they could, took what they needed, with almost no formal allocation system. It worked for a long time because the people who built it understood the spirit of what they had agreed to. A genuine choice, not just a signature.

Then the community grew. New members arrived who had not been part of building the original arrangement. What Nir described to me was a slow, grinding shift. An informal system that ran on deep mutual trust started producing friction when that trust was not already there. The arrangement had never been built to explain itself.

Nir at the Kibbutz Samar workshop

Ilan, who came to work with Samar later, described to me exactly how this plays out. A member in his late forties, in a management role, contributing for decades, could not help his child buy an apartment. His neighbor, who had arrived with private assets inherited from outside, was living comfortably off those assets while contributing less. Both were operating within the rules. But the rules were producing something nobody had agreed to: a new kind of inequality that came from outside the community rather than from within it.

Eileen Mascot joined Samar in 1987. She watched the culture shift over thirty years, from open blurred finances toward clearer lines between personal and communal money. The change brought tension and also, she told me, relief. The old system had required something the community could not always guarantee: that everyone understood what the arrangement actually meant, not just what it said.

Uriel, a carpenter who has been part of Samar for decades, named it plainly. Forced equality without genuine agreement is not solidarity. It is just a rule that produces resentment in people who never really consented to its logic.

The co-living version

Co-living projects go through the same arc, usually faster, with less history to cushion the landing.

Someone moves in who earns significantly more than everyone else. Someone else loses a job six months in. The grocery arrangement that worked in January stops working by September, and nobody quite knows when it broke. Nobody said anything when the cracks started, so nobody knows how to say something now.

Co-Living in Northern Portugal

What makes this hard is that it is almost never actually about money. It is about what money carries. Security. The feeling that the people around you see your situation clearly. A household where one person is quietly anxious about rent and another has not thought about it in months is not just financially uneven. The gap in how much each person has to lose shapes everything: the risks they take, the patience they have, the conversations they avoid.

What did the communities that lasted do differently

Ilan worked with a kibbutz called Kfar Masrik. It had resisted change for years, held in place by two brothers who were genuine ideological socialists with deep trust inside the community. When the economic model began to produce real strain, one of the brothers said something I keep returning to.

Show me a model that maintains the values, not just at the beginning but over time, and I am willing to consider a change.

They built what Ilan called a Scandinavian model. Income is tied to contribution, but education, health, and basic welfare are still held in common. Maximum income gaps are defined and enforced. When one of the brothers, Eyal, stood before the community and said this was not the model he wanted, but it was one he could sign, 84 percent voted yes.

What Eyal was protecting was not the ideology of income equality. It was the guarantee that no one would be left without the basics because they could not afford them. That is a different and more durable thing than a financial rule. It is an agreement about what the community is actually for.

Daan next to his DIY house in the former location of ADM squat in Amsterdam

At ADM Amsterdam, Daan, who has lived there for eleven years, described something that looks completely different on the surface but rests on the same foundation. ADM operates with almost no formal financial structure. People cover their costs, nobody distributes profits, and the land question sits outside the market entirely. What holds it together is a culture that genuinely does not orient around money accumulation, backed by a physical reality that makes that possible. They never had to negotiate what Eyal negotiated, because the stakes were different. But the underlying question is the same: what is the floor here, the thing nobody will let someone fall through?

The co-living houses and intentional communities I have visited that stayed together long enough to matter share something like this, even when they cannot name it. A shared answer to the question underneath all the structures. And a willingness to come back to that question when circumstances change, rather than waiting until the silence becomes a confrontation.

The conversation itself

Ilan calls it a value inquiry. Before you discuss the arrangements, you should first explain what you are actually protecting. He frames it as moving house. What do you take with you, what do you leave behind, and what do you need to buy new?

Not what each person wants individually. What the group agrees the community is for.

The questions are not complicated: what do we carry forward from how we have each been living? What needs to change? What would make each of us feel safe enough to take a real risk together?

These are not financial questions. But they determine whether the financial conversation produces something people actually stand behind, or just a policy that holds until the first difficult year.

The communities in trouble, across everything in the archive, were rarely the ones without money. They were the ones who had never really talked about it.

Former ADM squat before their evacuation, Amsterdam.

What is the archive for?

I started the ToGather archive because I kept sitting in rooms where people were describing the same patterns, in different languages, in different countries, without knowing anyone else had gone through the same thing. There are now interviews from over thirty communities across Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. The money question comes up in nearly all of them, usually after something has already cracked, usually described with the exhaustion of people who wish they had gotten there sooner.

What Ilan described from forty years inside kibbutzim, Nir confirmed from growing up in one. What Eileen saw over thirty years in Samar, Uriel named in a single sentence. The difference between forced equality and genuine agreement. This is not a theory. It is what people found.

Right now, I am running a crowdfunding campaign on Artizen to keep this field research going. More researchers in more communities, more interviews before the founders who built these places move on, and the knowledge moves with them, and support for the people already doing this work on the ground. If you want to read more interviews like Ilan’s, from communities working through exactly these questions right now, that is what your support makes possible.

Support the ToGather Project on Artizen

The archive is open and searchable at http://togatherproject.eu/

Bringing this into your own community

Before you negotiate the numbers, run the value inquiry Ilan Meyer describes. Treat it like moving house: what do you carry forward, what do you leave behind, what do you need to buy new? Ask what each person is actually protecting, and what the floor is, the thing nobody will let anyone fall through. Have that conversation early, while there is still trust in the room, not after something has cracked.

Read the original

This essay was first published on the ToGather Substack, written by Sharon Avraham. Read it on Substack.

Related in the Living Library

• The Communitarian Economy (Tamera)
• Pour Tous: The All-Goods-Free Economy
• Pooled Income and the Commune Economy
• Ostrom's Eight Design Principles
• Steward-Ownership