Community Paper

Technical Description: 4 page research paper

This will be a research paper where you will study and describe a community of your choice. As always, poor grammar, spelling, or organization will result in grade deductions, but to receive a top grade, the paper must demonstrate original thought and serious effort. In this paper, I am specifically looking for:

A. Why was the community formed?

For example, were the founders interested in removing themselves from society, or serving as an example for society? Were they disenchanted with traditional arrangements, mainstream morals, etc.? What were they trying to accomplish by going to the work of founding a community?

B. How do the members attempt to achieve these goals?

Does the community attempt to achieve goals simply by encouraging certain types of people to join (for example, devout christians in a faith-based christian community, or gays and lesbians in a gay and lesbian community), or do they have explicit rules of conduct within the community? If "community" is the goal, do they try to encourage it through architecture, or processes such as consensus-based descisionmaking, or eating together, etc.? There are many different ways to attempt to meet goals, and this section should be an analysis of the community's founding priciples and how these ideas have evolved since then.

C. How well does it work?

This is the place where most of your creativity in the paper will show up. You need to discuss how well the community works, but of course that will be difficult since you probably don't have firsthand knowledge of the community itself. Remember, here you are analyzing whether they are meeting their own goals, not goals that you ascribe to them. For example, if they say that they want to live as communists, then your only question will be whether they are living as communists or not, not whether you like communists. If, on the other hand, they say that they want to live as communists to serve as an example to the rest of society, then you can discuss whether they really are serving as an "example". In some cases there will be external information available on these things (for example if you are researching Seaside), but in many cases you will have to write this section based upon their words, so be sure to either ask probing questions or try to read between the lines on their website. In this section you can also discuss more general themes, like how the community fits within the intentional community movement, and how it fits within society as a whole.

I strongly encourage you to contact someone in your community by phone so that you can get a better idea of who they are, what they do, and how well it works. Many people are excited to discuss their communities if you are respectful of their beliefs and show a genuine interest in what they are doing.

Some of you will have discussed specific projects with me that do not conform nicely to these particular guidelines. As long as we have discussed it, that is fine.