Foundations for Success: 10 Considerations to Create a Healthy Project
By Core Team Member Tim O’Hara
After more than 20 years, we have been able to identify some trends that have led to our survival as a business and a community. The following advice is appropriate, and perhaps some of it even necessary, if you expect to live successfully in a communal work and living environment doing land-based work.
Students in our annual Permaculture Design Course
Communal Continuity
It’s imperative to assemble a group of individuals that you can depend on, year after year. If the only people that are visiting your project are there for shorter or medium length stays, you will never feel as if you have a community to lean on during the harder stretches of running a project of this nature. Create realistic and concise agreements with one another and develop incentives that make everyone feel well taken care of.
Privacy
We learned the hard way that having your own private space is critical for long-term happiness. We decided to focus on building before planting in our early years. That has meant that our agroforestry spaces are a bit behind where you’d expect after 20 years of working in those spaces. But without privacy, it’s impossible to keep people around who are doing the important work in the orchards and other spaces. Create private spaces for everyone, with a focus on creating lovely, comfortable, healthy homes for your core team.
Collective Decision Making
Micromanaging is a recipe for burnout. Don’t fall into the trap. Develop trust with your partners and allow each leader to make decisions in their realm up to a certain value. Big decisions, that affect everyone, should be discussed by your entire team, but small decisions, like whether to buy 5 or 10 avocado trees, should be left to those managing the orchard spaces.
Balance and Rest
It’s imperative to figure this out before burning out. Burnout can be permanent, leading to the abandonment of your passions. Build into your day-to-day lives the time to run, breathe, nap, walk, draw, meditate and think. The work will never be done, so don’t try to do it all each day. It will be there waiting for you in the morning after a great night’s rest.
A Solid, Well-Taken Care of & Committed Core Team
We’ve got an amazing core team. But it took us longer than it should have to realize the importance of building a strong team at the center of our project. If we expect community members to stay committed, they need to have their needs met. And everyone has a unique set of needs. Create a compensation agreement that makes everyone feel valued.
Community Connection
Be an active member in your town. Demonstrate, over and over again, that your project exists to benefit everyone in your community, especially those most in need. Join your local woman’s group, offer free yoga classes once a week, develop a kids soccer camp, or create a language exchange.
Fair Share
Share what you have. It’s your easiest path to acceptance though far from the easiest practice to bring to fruition. It has taken a lot of time, energy and sacrifice to create Rancho Mastatal, and sometimes our knee-jerk reaction to “spreading the wealth” is instead to move to protect what we’ve created in the interest of stability and to prepare for future unforeseen issues. But true stability comes with sharing.
Communal Meals
This may be the hardest bit of advice to embrace for some. Sharing a meal takes more social energy, but weighed against the time you save on cleaning and cooking, it’s worth it. Communal meals encourage group debate, laughter, learning and the development of a strong social fabric. Humans have tended towards eating in front of screens or on the run. These trends lead to poor eating habits and encourage humans to disconnect from one another. To eat well today means a monumental and coordinated effort growing, processing and cooking food. Celebrate this activity each and every day and you will be rewarded in ways unexpected.
Make Time to Dream
We “talk shop” a lot around here. We love what we do and enjoy talking about what we’ve created and how we can improve it. It’s important for us to create spaces that allow for dreaming and scheming. Having the space to “zoom out” and move for a time away from the day-to-day allows for creative brainstorming that can lead to breakthroughs and new ideas that might otherwise never come to the surface. Dare to dream, and dream to create your ideal version of life.
Don’t Get in Over Your Head
This is much easier said than done. When you commit to a land based project, your to-do list immediately seems endless. There’s never enough time in the day to do everything that you need. Start small and work towards simple solutions whenever possible. Build and perfect one system at a time, as much as you can do that. Don’t add chickens, goats and fish in the same year but rather add one species and then see how that changes your life before adding another. We made the mistake of throwing too much at the wall early on in our development and when not everything stuck, it felt overwhelming picking up the pieces of many systems simultaneously.
We try to share our failures and successes frequently so that others can get to where we did in less time and with less effort. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with questions, comments, or suggestions and all the best in your journeys.
Check Out These Past Blogs About Permaculture and Community
How to Run a Permaculture Internship
Enriching Community Soil: 5 Simple Strategies That Support Sustainable Relationships