Twin Oaks Bylaws

The Bylaws of Twin Oaks, a 100-person income-sharing community in Louisa County, Virginia, founded in 1967 and one of the longest-running secular communes in the United States.

Twin Oaks was founded in 1967 on a former tobacco farm in Louisa County, Virginia, originally inspired by B.F. Skinner's novel Walden Two. It now houses around 100 adult members and a smaller number of children. It is income-sharing: members pool all income and the community covers all needs, in exchange for a labor commitment of around 42 hours per week.

The governance documents Twin Oaks publishes include:

• Articles of Incorporation (1986). The Corporation is organized for apostolic and communal purposes: to form a self-contained intentional community, having a common treasury and providing for its members an environment in which they may live in harmony with nature and their fellow humans.
• Bylaws. Articles cover Governance, the Property Code, Dissolution of the Community, and Amendment of the Bylaws.
• Membership Agreement. The contract a new member signs.
• Statement of Religious Beliefs and Practices. (The community has historically taken religious-corporation status under U.S. law, with implications for taxation and property.)

Twin Oaks runs a Planner-Manager system: a small Board of Planners holds the long-range and high-stakes decisions, while a much larger set of Managers each holds responsibility for one functional area (kitchen, vehicles, hammocks business, etc.). Most operational decisions are made at the Manager level. Major decisions go through community feedback processes before Planner action.

Twin Oaks is a founding member of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. Its Bylaws are written to satisfy the FEC's seven principles, which means a researcher reading the Twin Oaks Bylaws is also reading one expression of the FEC framework in operation.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your community is thinking seriously about income sharing, or about how to build a labor system that does not collapse into informal hierarchies of who works how hard, here is what others have done and where the door is.

Twin Oaks, in Louisa, Virginia, has been running full income sharing with a labor credit system for nearly 60 years. Everyone contributes labor, labor gets credited, and the community supports everyone's material needs from shared income. The system is documented in unusual detail because Twin Oaks has been studied, visited, and written about since its founding in 1967.

East Wind Community, in the Ozarks in Missouri, runs a very similar labor credit system and is a Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC) member. It is a useful comparison because it reached similar conclusions through a partially independent path, which gives more confidence that the approach is not just Twin Oaks-specific.

Acorn Community, also in Virginia and also an FEC member, is smaller and somewhat more informal, but shares the income-sharing foundation. The three communities together form a kind of cluster that has developed inter-community labor exchange and resource sharing on top of their individual income-sharing structures.

The Federation of Egalitarian Communities as a whole is worth understanding as a context. FEC membership requires full income sharing, so the network is a collection of communities that have all made the same core commitment but worked it out differently.

Where the door is:

• Twin Oaks runs scheduled visitor weekends. This is the most direct entry point, and the community takes visitors seriously as a way of testing fit before anyone commits to anything.
• Kat Kinkade's "A Walden Two Experiment" (1973) is a first-hand account of Twin Oaks' founding years. It is specific, honest about failures, and much more useful than secondary accounts.
• The FEC website documents the income-sharing requirement and connects to member communities. If full income sharing is under consideration for your group, talking to people in multiple FEC communities is worth more than reading about any single one.
• One question worth putting to your group directly: is full income sharing a foundation for your experiment or a ceiling? Some communities start with partial income sharing and discover that the partial version has its own complications, and full sharing would actually be cleaner. Others find that even thinking about full sharing reveals incommensurable values that are better surfaced early.

One caution: Twin Oaks has maintained full income sharing for 60 years through very detailed internal governance. The labor credit system has categories, exceptions, minimum hours, and processes for handling disputes. Communities that want income sharing but simpler typically discover that the simplicity breaks down the first time someone contributes significantly less, or earns significantly more outside, or has a health situation that changes their contribution for months. The detail in Twin Oaks' system is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is accumulated problem-solving. Starting simpler is fine, but expect the detail to accumulate.