What I Got Wrong About Intentional Communities

After dozens of field interviews, Sharon's assumption that people who choose community have it figured out gave way to a harder finding: the hard parts are the same everywhere, and the answers are unglamorous.

What this essay argues

An early synthesis essay. Sharon sets out what the interviews actually taught him about governance, belonging, and money, and how little of it matched what he expected walking in.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. The findings here are aggregate, drawn across the interview archive rather than from a single community. Where later essays name names, this one reports the pattern.

The essay

On governance, belonging, money, and what people who've been doing this for decades actually learned.

I spent years assuming that people who choose to live in community have figured something out that the rest of us haven’t. Some practice that makes collective life hold together while everything outside keeps fragmenting.

Sitting with people was more useful and more uncomfortable than finding that thing. The hard parts are the same everywhere. The people who’ve been at it for decades have real answers, and those answers are not glamorous.

On governance

I walked in thinking governance was either beautifully fluid or hopelessly chaotic. Neither was right.

It’s almost always invisible until something breaks. The communities that have lasted aren’t the ones with the most elegant decision-making systems. They’re the ones who kept working on it. A conflict over shared space, a disagreement about money, a new member who didn’t fit: these became the community's actual work rather than failures of it. Some places run with almost no formal rules. Others hold structured forums for surfacing conflict. What they share is a refusal to route around the hard stuff.

On belonging

I also thought belonging was the reward for getting everything else right. Stable finances, functioning governance, and then people would naturally feel at home.

That’s not how it works. I heard people describe feeling lonely inside communities, feeling like outsiders after years of membership. The distance between what the founding documents promised and what they were actually living in. What moved people across that distance was almost never a system. It was one specific thing: a particular conversation, being handed a real role, being seen doing something that mattered. The communities that understood this built those moments on purpose.

On money

I expected either post-capitalist experiments or cautionary tales of collapse. Instead, money was everywhere, and everyone was thinking carefully about it: gift economies, shared labor, transparent budgets, land held in common. The specific model mattered less than whether they had chosen it together and kept coming back to it. The communities in trouble were almost never the ones without money. They were the ones who had never really talked about it.

None of this is utopia. It’s people working hard at something most of us were never taught: sharing a life with others on purpose.

That gap is what I built ToGather to address. Decades of hard-won knowledge, sitting inside people who have worked through land disputes, governance crises, generational handoffs, and money fights. It just wasn’t anywhere you could find it.

There’s an AI Research Companion tool on the ToGather platform that lets you ask those questions and get answers from actual interview transcripts and field notes. Not summaries. What people figured out over thirty years.

If you think this kind of knowledge should be more widely accessible, here is how you can help.

If you want to support the work, I have a project on the Artizen crowdfunding platform. Artifacts start at $10, and every purchase right now is matched 3x by Artizen's fund. That means $10 becomes $40 toward more field visits, more interviews, more communities documented before their founders move on, and the knowledge moves with them.

It is live now. You can visit the platform, explore the communities, and ask the Research Companion a question yourself before you decide.

Support it here. And if you know someone who is building or living in a community, send this to them. That's who this is for.

Bringing this into your own community

Pick the one of the three this essay names that your group avoids most. If it is governance, write down how you actually make decisions before the next hard one arrives. If it is belonging, build one real moment on purpose: hand someone a genuine role, or have the conversation that has been waiting. If it is money, put the uncomfortable question on the table while things are still calm, and agree to keep returning to it.

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

• Community Purpose-Setting
• Tuckman's Stages of Group Development
• Ostrom's Eight Design Principles
• Sociocracy 3.0