All posts tagged: #faggtropolis collective

Chapter 1: Part 3

April 25, 2020

Before she began really reaching out, Noel thought through a possible iteration of what Faggtropolis Collective could look like from birth through its early phases of life. She wanted to have some idea of what she was trying to enlist people for, but she had to balance this with wanting the details to be a truly collective and co-creative process. She tried to paint her mental image in broad strokes:

In the beginning, there are some people and some of them own residential properties in or around the same general area. The people come together and meet with intention to discuss forming a permaculture collective. These meetings begin as informal group discussions once every two weeks. As things start to solidify, they begin to resource, bringing more people into the group, as necessary. People come and go from the group over the months that follow. At a certain point, the group stabilizes. With a stable group of founding members, the group assesses its resources and determines what other resources might be necessary to design and implement a coordinated permaculture-guided garden/landscape utilizing all of the properties the founders have to contribute.

At or around this phase the group of founders founds an organization together that they all have an equal share in responsibility for. At the same time or soon thereafter a rough draft design for the properties is created. The founders create and implement a contractual agreement regarding the use of the properties and each of their part in the organization, as well as what to do should any of them wish to leave or change their role.

With the organization formed, everyone’s basic rights and responsibilities as a founding member of the collective in place, properties on which to grow, and a plan for those properties the founders move on to the funding phase. So far everyone involved has been donating their time, and where there are costs, they are shared. One promising way to get this thing off the ground at this point would be to start applying for grants to seed fund the organization. These may be grants for either nonprofit or for-profit organizations, depending on what the founders end up deciding together.

In either event, the seed funding is to implement the initial plan, as well as building out a tracking system and database so that the organization knows what food it has (or will have) and can build on to itself with future properties. The plan implementation and computer system design become the pilot for the larger collective. It is likely some salaries, plants, and equipment will be what the grant or other initial funding must cover – and potentially for more than one year. By the end of that first year or so, the founders have their initial properties implemented, and they have a system that is ready to add more properties. The initial properties are not yet producing much, though there are predictions for when various things will become available and it is not too far off.

At this point, it may be that grant funding is applied for to buy another property – perhaps one that is a little larger that can serve to house a greenhouse/nursery-type operation and larger-scale food forest. If this is the next step, then design and implementation of the food forest and getting that property going may come before finding more urban properties to add to the collective at various levels. Another possible rout would be to move directly at that point to establishing how public membership would work in this collective, along with various engagement and commitment levels. For people working for the collective full time, or who own properties that are fully dedicated to the collective, and likely some others, they would be a part of the collective in the employee sense. Another form of membership could be community membership – in these cases there would not be any say in collective decision making etc., but these members would support the collective in various ways and to various degrees. Some members may choose only to give money. Some may give money in exchange for permaculture landscaping services. Or perhaps those things could happen somewhat simultaneously.

The collective could potentially end up in a place where it was self-sustaining by donation for food, donation for permaculture landscaping, and donation for classes. And, the collective could be feeding not only itself, but also its surrounding community. When the collective is functioning at this level, growth could be huge. Growth ought to be cautious, and ideally everything about the collective would be open-sourced. At a certain point the collective may choose to stop enlisting new properties and instead move on to another venture for those properties – like beginning an in-collective solar energy arm, for example, or adding in a store and some healing arts offerings – and/or it could focus on helping others start their own seeds.

The possibilities seemed quite endless. As it turned out, it would take about five years for Noel’s own seed to get to the point where it was functioning at a somewhat sustainable level, ready for some new growth and evolution.

Chapter 1, Part 2:

April 19, 2020

She imagined herself and her co-creators as archetypal characters, like she was dreaming a play without yet knowing who would play the parts, or how the story would weave together. She imagined:

 Noel:  a property owner with a modest yard, with a full-time job outside of the collective, who has dedicated (and continues to dedicate) a significant amount of time to her emotional and spiritual development. Noel was a truth-seeker and a change-maker. She was in a process of ever more conscious co-creation and co-evolution with others and with the universe. She was living in her authentic self from a place of love, and had healed many of her past traumas, and she had a working process for continual healing and the maintenance of personal balance while in motion. She saw her herself as making change by embodying the change, creating space, and giving permission for others to step into their authentic selves as well. She has no desire to control, is a clear communicator, and has no desire to lead at all, but rather to move with others in a direction. Her natural role is that of leader within this collective. She is a natural healer, peacemaker, and empath who has developed her own self-healing tools. She understands herself and that she is constantly evolving. She understands that everyone else is as well, and this fuels her compassion and hope. She listens and hears – she looks and sees. And, she articulates and translates well the goals, needs, and ideas of other individuals within the collective to each other, and is good at helping everyone stay together on the same page. Noel brings her self-aware authentic self, her articulation, her non-hierarchical leadership, some property that she has never considered hers, and a burning desire to help move society forward towards a symbiotic relationship with this earth and a new level of human consciousness. Her real talents are her broad vision and perspective as well as her ability to hold space, give permission, and catalyze change.

Jackson: a property owner with a modest yard, who has taken permaculture design courses, and has designed a couple of projects. Jackson may not know everything there is to know about permaculture, but he does have a good idea of where to start. And, what’s more, he has some connections to permaculturists who have been consulting, teaching classes, and designing for years. He has done some deep personal work and has a solid meditation and self-care/healing process and practice in his own life. He is a changemaker who seeks to help people see that they really do have the power to change themselves by taking a hard look at what they are doing and working systemically to make improvements. He is interested in the top-level design process for permaculture more so than the implementation, and he has a good understanding of how to work with computers to coordinate projects. He has another job now, but also has an interest in transitioning out of it. He also has a broad base of knowledge of plant based diet and nutrition, which would help in designing the projects to connect in a useful way and ensure the projects are yielding not only a variety of foods, but foods that would theoretically allow for members of the collective to thrive without having to go outside of the collective unit.

Millie: a property owner with an extensive garden in a large yard, who knows a lot about plants and growing things and is also interested in building sustainable community.

Ellie: previous owner of a landscaping company, and hobby-herbalist, interested in healing herself and bringing plant medicines to the world.

Isaac: a human of many talents, who was good at understanding systems, and could build and implement pretty much any design …

Each of these initial members could ultimately help fold in more members, and membership in the collective would be sure to grow, and Noel figured those archetypal characters would become clearer with time. She realized as she was thinking about it that, no matter the skillets and abilities of the individual members, they would all need to share some fundamental values, a certain type of vision of the future, and a level of self-actualization and self-awareness appropriate to the endeavor. There would have to be some core characteristics shared by all members of the collective:

(But first, Noel quickly disclaimers herself in her head: “None of this speaks to the specific beliefs or practices of the members, and that is also an important point – for this collective is not designed to carry with it any set belief structure – no specific teacher or guru – for it is not about control, and must be built in part on the understanding that every individual will have their own, completely unique, way of interacting with the universe and understanding what is.”)

We know that we do not live in a mechanistic, Newtonian universe. We understand that this model for understanding our reality is very useful in many circumstances, and we are not abandoning that or saying it is wrong. What we are saying is that this model is not enough to describe what we know about how the universe works. Evolutionary biology, quantum physics, and eons of religions and spiritual practices point to a different model of the universe. The universe can be modeled as a non-locally connected, constantly evolving, organism. It is a massive complex adaptive system, made up of many smaller component complex adaptive systems. Life is not meaningless: life is evolution. We do not “understand” consciousness, yet each of us experience it and know it well. As humans, we are here to evolve and create greater and greater symbiosis for evolutionary growth. We are ready to move beyond our individual egos and to understand ourselves, and to feel ourselves, as integral parts of the system in which we exist. We are ready to move past duality – to take on and embody the fact that there is no plain right and wrong, or up and down, or black and white, and that all is relative, and all is rich with complexity. This does not mean that there is no moral compass, this is to say we are finding our moral compass in a new way. What this all means is that there are possibilities, humans can change, we can be better, and we can learn from our mistakes both individually and collectively.

We build progress narratives and seek to create, then enforce, feedback loops that will lead our selves and our species and our planet to regenerative and healing virtuous cycles. We understand that in doing so what we are doing is finding, breaking, and reversing a multitude of vicious cycles in play at this place and time on earth individually as well as collectively across multiple levels and layers of society. We understand that this is not anyone’s “fault” and that this place we find ourselves in is a step in our individual and collective evolutionary journeys. We understand that our systems here are coming under severe strain and that the way to move through this time is to ensure that we understand that we must find new solutions, and that while we can build on and incorporate what we have learned, the cycles must stop – we, as individuals, and collectively at various levels, must work towards learning from history so that it actually stops repeating itself. And, although we are at a tenuous point in our evolution as a species, and we have much damage to heal, we do believe that we can do it. We have hope in ourselves and in humanity. We have hope, and we look at open eyes at the state of the world and the current state of humanity and what we have done in our collective slumber fueled by consumerism, addiction, distraction, and massive-scale cognitive dissonance. We do not expect to be “perfect,” and we do not expect to become “healed,” or for life to become “easy” or “blissful” always. We know we will make mistakes, and we know these are lessons and a necessary part of our process. We live to keep healing and evolving, and we are willing and ready to consistently put in the work that it takes to do so. And we are ready to set aside all blame – of self and of others – to forgive and to love. To choose love and trust over fear and suspicion.

Our understanding of our selves and our place on this planet and in this universe informs how we want to live and how we want to interact with each other. We believe that it is time to move on from our current understanding of wealth in general, and of personal property in particular. We find value in healing and in evolution. We find value in co-creating with each other and with this planet and this universe. We seek to improve ourselves and to help ourselves in service to the whole. We understand that when we form smaller groups, or collectives, that they are always a part of a larger collective, and that we always must respect and understand our relationship to that larger whole. We must therefore always seek to help, rather than to take from or to use, that larger system as we build resilience within our smaller, more local, collectives. We understand that moving away from property ownership as presently established, and moving away from an economy based on accumulation of material wealth, are not going to happen overnight – and they are not going to come from some larger top-down plan, or new economic structure. They must emerge from the bottom – and part of the reason for this is that one thing the new structure must not have at all is a top-down, imposed structure. This is what we ultimately must move past.

In our current times, material wealth accumulation is impossible for a multitude and extreme for a few. Even though some individuals and groups thereof have amassed giant piles of material wealth, the basic needs of many are not being met. We believe  that the new measure of the wealth of a community, or a species, is not by how much a few of them have, and it is not by adding up what they all have, but it is by the level of needs that are being met for everyone. Now, we have had ideas about ways to work on the inequity of wealth distribution many times. And we have a lot of good ideas from all that work, but we do not have some perfect and implementable system. Why? Because the problems are interconnected and complex and to come up with one would simply be impossible. But one thing is clear, in order to move on from this system the ways in which our basic needs are being met must change. Since near-global capitalism, and global commodification will never work to change this, we have to do something different. And, whatever we do has to also be able to co-exist with the larger systems in place. The idea is not to change the system from within the system (which doesn’t really work for such fundamental shifts), and the idea is not to come up with a sparkling new system and implement it. Instead, the idea is to incorporate some parts of the system while growing a replacement system from the ground up through healing and trust building and likely through facing much adversity.

Collectivism is a way forward that seems to be emerging somewhat naturally due to the pressures of our system. Collectivism means resource sharing and putting all intention towards the collective good. Ultimately, it would break down private ownership. This would not mean there is no ownership. Small level collectives would have use of certain things and materials – they would “own them”, in a sense. But it would be understood more like a resource allocation of what is needed for that small collective to do what it needs to do as a part of the larger collective…

Noel realized she was out on a bit of a tangent and reigned her thoughts in a little. Back to what the members of the collective would need to fundamentally have in common:

We do not have interest in ownership, possession, or control. We have no interest in the accumulation of material wealth. We are not interested in continual growth in the sense of number of members, or of land/resources, or of money. We are not interested in merely being sustainable. We want to be regenerative and evolutionary in our collective endeavors. We see a reasonable step to take in this direction is to have more of our basic needs met without reliance on the larger economic structures of society, and without the need for things to be transported over great distances. A starting point to this is to build a collective that has its basic needs for food met without economic engagement, or without the need for money at all. When we set out on this journey together, we will respect all our individual needs and journeys, while fully committing to our co-creative journey together. We will work to communicate fully, to bring our authentic selves to all we do, and to trust each other fully. We understand that we will hurt each other, make mistakes, and have disagreements – and we all agree to work through these things nonviolently, and with empathy. We understand that challenges make us stronger, and we are not interested in pride or ego. We understand that we are fully investing in this collective vision and what may grow or evolve from it together, and that no one of us could do any of this alone.

She thought that was a pretty decent start, at any rate. Next would come the interest gathering phase. Noel would have to reach out to those she knew might be interested in joining her in this endeavor of starting a seed collective. She knew her next step would be reaching out to her friends and connections to start to find those who shared this dream and were ready to work to bring it to life, such that the collective grow out of a co-creative process, naturally evolving into what it needed to be with work, laughter, leadership, shared vision, trust, and love. 

FAGGTROPOLIS CHAPTER ONE

April 17, 2020

(Envisioning the Beginning of the Beginning)

image of roots growing down and up in front of a glowing white moon. Almost all black and white with a splash of yellow and deep read, signalling the beginning of a process of change -- and initiation.
Initiation (Oil on Canvas, February 2020)

Part 1:

There was no doubt the pandemic that struck the world was a good time to think about community building and change. It seemed like a good time, as well, to revision and strengthen existing community and relationships as well. As such, the time seemed right to take those first steps towards the vision of Faggtropolis that seemed at times so large, so far away, that it was impossible to see where to start. A lot of the time this was worst when the seer was attempting to be the sole origination point for his vision. Instead, it had to be a collective effort. Essentially from the beginning. The large-scale vision was a brighter future that was waiting in a distant potentiality. The current time period made that brighter future seem rather illusive on many fronts. The beginnings of severe climate collapse had appeared. A pandemic had struck the entire globe, both pointing to the problems we need to address with the way we have been doing things by showing us how the environment around us begins to heal if we can just stop what we are doing, and seeming to welcome in a potential new rise in fascism and a new low in economic stability, with a significant chance that efforts to stimulate the unstable and crashing global economy would in turn lead to an even greater rate of human-caused environmental degradation. It was possible the brief reprise of the first pandemic would be enough to turn the direction of the economy and beckon in the rise of a more environmentally resilient way of life for humans, but it was highly improbable. But this only meant that getting started was more important than ever. Or, perhaps, just that the time had arrived. In either event, Noel knew that there were many people that shared her vision of the future, and she knew that she personally had come to know several people – especially in recent years – who could (and likely would) be instrumental in shaping the rest of her life and contribution to that future because she saw clearly that it was not hers alone – either to dream or to create. So, Noel sat and pondered where to start, and how to gather the group of humans that would be a part of her seed collective. She hoped there would be many seed collectives formed that could work together, but she had to start with hers.

Noel was a property owner. She didn’t have a lot of land, but she had a reasonable lot with a house. She had several friends who were similarly situated. Some of them, like Noel, had employment they could do from home, so they were not being severely impacted economically by the pandemic. Some of them, however, did not. She also had friends with various backgrounds and amounts of knowledge and skill around building, landscaping, permaculture design, growing plants, computer programing, accounting, and more. And those friends had friends, and so on. Some friends owned property and were wonderful gardeners, knowledgeable in helping plants that provide food for us thrive. Noel envisioned the start of her seed collective to be a group of friends and friends of friends coming together to collectively start a collective organization (in which all had equal value as integral parts) that could work towards becoming a permaculture collective with the goal of providing for itself and for those that cannot provide for themselves within the collective’s community. This would be achieved by creating food forest/permaculture projects on the properties of those members who own property, as well as ultimately funding a property to serve as a larger food forest and also seed nursery and incorporating bamboo and hemp for use in building and other. The idea would be to be as food independent as possible, and to be as local and symbiotic as possible. Initially, however, it would just be the properties of the initial members.

The land-owning members of the collective (or, at least those who wanted) would agree to have their land used for permaculture production. We would need to have enough permaculture designers and gardeners etc. to plan and then implement the projects on these initial properties. We would have to have people working on building out a database and modeling system to keep track of the designs and plans. The initial properties would be designed to be all part of the same system of properties – meaning that they would be designed to work together, and to provide a good variety and hopefully to ultimately meet most of the food needs of that seed of people (at least to get as close as possible), and also to have a range of medicinal herbs and plants that would also be available for the collective members. All additional foods and herbs and other useful plants would be donated to the collective’s community.

The initial group would likely need to be on the smaller side, and the first real step would be to identify that group of people who might be ready to take the step of formally forming an organization of some kind, and beginning to work on how seed funding might best be obtained. Noel was seeing a group forming, and then getting a preliminary idea of how many properties might be involved (the scope land-wise of the initial permaculture project), and how many people it might take to implement this design. If a permaculture designer is not in the initial team, perhaps the team could consult with one at this early phase. With a basic idea of that scope, then we would understand how many people we might want to be able to support with the seed funding as implementers. Initially, Noel envisioned applying for seed funding – possibly as a grant and starting the collective as a nonprofit organization – that would cover the needs of several people who would be designing, building, and implementing the permaculture projects. Other people who were members that contributed land perhaps, but were still working in other employment, would keep that employment and would not take any money from the collective at first. All would be equal members, though, and that is very important. Equal in consideration and worth. Not necessarily all equal in what the collective would (particularly initially) be able to provide. Regardless of how the seed funding was obtained, it would have to be able to pay for the living of whoever would contribute their full service to the collective.  

Noel tried to think through how many fulltime, or full commitment (?), members might be reasonable. She realized she was not going to find a number and would eventually just have to make her idea known and see who wanted to work on building that part of the dream together with her. But the idea would be that the seed funding would cover those who would be fully time committed to working for the collective good on collective projects. Members would have a balance with their personal time and personal projects, but these members would be spending most of their time on collective projects. These members would need to receive enough money to live comfortably from the collective. Economic support to match contribution in hours – but there is no hierarchy or pay scale, and everyone works together to ensure that all members are receiving what they need to live fulfilled, creative, lives.

In the beginning, it seemed there would be a lot of work for a designer, and this designer could work on the initial farm design (across all the properties) and could coordinate implementation. This would be quite a lot of work and may be more than one person. This person, or group, would work with a plant person or group. These teams would work with a landscaping and gardening team that would implement the designs. The same teams that implement designs could accomplish maintenance and possibly harvest. Eventually there may need to be a distribution team for all that is collected. Some people could fill more than one role, and ideally collective members would be able to spend time in multiple groups and learn more skills as they wished. Part of the funding could be for education. Members could be supported financially to the level of their contribution, in terms of what the group considers to be fair and reasonable – and always subject to more conversation and continual change.

All members would agree from the beginning that this organization, again, however funded and ultimately whether “for profit” or “nonprofit” would be non-hierarchical and evolutionary. The organization would be formed to meet a specific evolutionary goal, which is working towards healing and creating resilient communities that are symbiotic with our planet. Forging a path for a brighter future for humanity, and for this planet, although if humanity ends up going away, the planet will continue on and be just fine without us too, so really it is coming from a place of hope for humanities continued inclusion in the evolutionary path of this planet in this time and space. Ultimately the path of the organization would be determined by its members, and more than that, by what emerges from their work together and their interactions at the local level.

What this would mean in practice, is that all founding members (and all members taken on in the future) would have an equal consideration in terms of their voice in the organization regardless of role at a certain time. Leadership would be agreed upon and would never be just one person. Initially, Noel could see something like four or five landowners, a designer and a plant person, and maybe two or three landscapers. The designer could also help with implementation, if it worked out that way, and so could the plant person. Some of the landowners could help with implementation, or be designers, etc. The teams can overlap…

Noel’s head was spinning. A group of her friends – new and old – could come together. Some of them would own land on which pilot projects could be started. Some would be able to work on designing the projects. Some would be able to implement them. Once this happened, it seemed like the next step would be working towards a sketch of possible projects that could be included with a grant proposal, or a business loan proposal, or a proposal to investors or donors (whatever the case may be). But the first, first step would be trying to gauge interest and find that group of people.

How long had she been sitting here? She did not know. She made a habit of never keeping clocks around, and if they were, she liked them to be wrong (and differently so if there were more than one in sight). She had left her devise at home. It was a beautiful day, so she decided to walk home with an eye towards perhaps working in her own, modest, garden. While Noel really wanted to work towards this permaculture collective, wanted to catalyze it, to contribute, and to grow it, she had a feeling she would not end up being in that part of things. She saw herself more as a supporter and space holder, and as someone that everyone could come to. She felt at home thinking of herself in that type of nurturing role. Carefully helping make spacer, hold space for, and caretaker through the rise of collectivism.