Twin Oaks Community

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Twin Oaks Community is an ecovillage and intentional community of about one hundred people ^[1] in Louisa County, Virginia ^[2]. It is a member of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities.^{[3] [4]} Founded in 1967, it is one of the longest-enduring and largest secular intentional communities in North America. Its core values include nonviolence, egalitarianism, feminism, and ecology.

Contents 1 History 2 Membership 2.1 Life as a member 2.2 Community businesses 3 Twin Oaks in the media 4 Cultural significance of Twin Oaks 5 References 6 External links

[edit] History

Twin Oaks shares a similar idea of "community" with five other communities throughout the United States, that aim to help one another, and to “help more people discover the advantages of a communal alternative, and to promote the evolution of a more egalitarian world” ^[5] The community was founded on a 123 acre tobacco farm in 1967 by a group of eight individuals with no farming experience that included Kat Kinkade, who has since written two books about the community.^[6] It was started by a group of communitarians committed to building a sustainable and egalitarian society. Today the community has developed into one of the most successful intentional communities in North America. Twin Oaks and its members are committed to nonviolence, egalitarianism, and sustainability making it an eco-village. The community's initial inspiration was B.F. Skinner's novel Walden Two, which describes a fictional behaviorist utopia. The book inspired Kinkade to search for others who might be interested in putting Skinner's ideas for a peaceful, egalitarian society into practice. However, Skinner's vision quickly faded from prominence at Twin Oaks.^[7]. Despite overtly rejecting Skinner's vision, the initial organizational structure and the labor credit system - both modified - survived to this day.The initial organizational structure consisted of a board of three members appointed by the community to serve eighteen-month staggered terms. While serving as planners, members made long-range policy, controlled and dispensed resources, and generally took care of the overall well-being of the community. After several years it became obvious that the planners were resented by some members and Twin Oaks modified the planner-manager system from that described in Walden Two, to a more favorable system where the planners had a more functional role. The labor credit system was also modified to better suit the communities members. The original labor credit system utilized “variable” credit hours. Certain jobs were worth more credit hours than others in order to make each job desirable. The modified version of this plan in place today uses “standardized” credits; each job in the community is valued the same in terms of credit hours.^[8] The community's stated basic values are cooperation, egalitarianism, income-sharing, and non-violence. ^[9]

[edit] Membership

People interested in joining Twin Oaks write a letter of introduction^[10] to the community and are then invited to attend a scheduled three-week visitor period. During the visitor period, visitors work alongside members, take tours, and attend workshops on Twin Oaks. The visitor period costs between $50 and $250 on a sliding scale. Twin Oaks has one visitor period per month.^[11] Membership application involves a three-hour interview; then, ten days after the visitor leaves, the community makes a decision about the visitor's membership. Twin Oaks strives for diversity in its membership, and about two-thirds of people who apply for membership are accepted. People accepted as members have up to 6 months to join the community. There is no cost to join the community, nor any rent or ongoing costs associated with living there. The community is welcoming and open to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and/or Transgender members.

It is possible to participate in the visitor program with no intention of joining Twin Oaks. In addition, there are three-hour walking tours offered once a week, on most Saturdays. Unannounced visitors are asked to leave; all visitors must arrange their visits in advance.

[edit] Life as a member

A member of Twin Oaks works around 42 hours a week^[12] . Of all Twin Oaks labor, about 35% is directed toward generating income and the bulk of the rest consists of domestic work like child care, cleaning, shopping, maintaining buildings, gardening, and preparing food. Some members do part-time work outside of Twin Oaks, which ranges from selling art to computer programming to construction work. The income from this labor goes to the community, although some portion of this money may go into a member's "vacation earnings." (Members are not allowed to spend this money while at Twin Oaks - not that they could, since Twin Oaks operates as a cashless society within its membership.) Excess labor done in a week accumulates as vacation time, and members take an average of eight weeks of vacation a year. Additionally members may take a Personal Affairs Leave (PAL) for up to a year after having been a member for three years.

Twin Oaks members engage in numerous recreational activities. Twin Oaks has a klezmer band called The Vulgar Bulgars. The community periodically puts on plays, usually in the winter when less labor is needed for growing food. Some plays have been written by Twin Oaks members, and other recent productions have been Cabaret, Hair, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), as well as adaptations of Little Shop of Horrors and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Additional social gatherings at Twin Oaks include large dance parties, movie screenings, coffeehouses, talent shows, and board game nights. Twin Oakers also enjoy theme parties, a recent one being a "Feed Your Friends" party. These recreational activities flourish, in part, because all live television viewing is prohibited at Twin Oaks. The lack of television at Twin Oaks derives from a near-universal community distaste for the commercialism promoted through the medium; however, many Twin Oaks members do watch DVDs/videos and use the Internet regularly.

Theoretically, every need of every member is paid for by the community. Additionally, every member, including children, receives discretionary money of about $70 a month. Items can be ordered from local towns where the "town tripper" goes regularly. Typical items requested by members are library books, candy, tobacco products, alcohol, soda,and DVD rentals.

About 20% of the population is non-white. About 15% of the population hails from outside the United States. There are 13 children living at Twin Oaks. Half of the children are home-schooled and the other half attend the local public schools.

Residents live in 8 very large houses spread out across the community. Each member has a private bedroom, but shares bathroom and kitchen space with fellow house residents. Twin Oaks residences are named after historical utopian communities, Harmony (Pennsylvania), Oneida (Society, New York), Ta Chai, Kaweah (Colony, California), Morningstar (Commune, California), Degania, Nashoba (Commune, Tennessee), and Tupelo, most of which are no longer in existence, except Degania in Israel and Ta Chai in China. Visitors to Twin Oaks stay in Aurora. Llano, which members lived in when Twin Oaks was founded, now houses dairy processing, a business office, the hub of the computer and telephone networks and a communal kitchen for the courtyard. Zhankoye (better known as ZK) is the main dining hall of the community. Meals are cooked for the entire community on a daily basis. Twin Oaks has many popular recipes among their members including Baked Tofu, Macaroni and Cheese, and Vegan Chocolate Chip cookies.^[13]

Within each house is one or two small living groups. (SLGs). There is a three week visitor period for each SLG. Twin Oaks SLGs include the Women's SLG in Oneida and the Sunrise SLG in Kaweah. Sunrise is off the electricity grid and uses solar power for electricity and to heat water. All Twin Oaks buildings are wood heated.

Of current members, the average length of stay is 7 years. Many Twin Oaks ex-members live in the nearby towns of Charlottesville and Louisa and maintain ties to the community.

Twin Oaks members are religiously diverse, and the membership includes Christians, Atheists, Pagans, Buddhists, and more. The community hosts Pagan handfastings, Equinox parties, Christmas and Thanksgiving feasts, and an annual Easter Egg hunt. Twin Oaks also celebrates June 16th, the anniversary of its founding, as a holiday.

[edit] Community businesses

Twin Oaks operates several community-owned businesses, including hammock-making, book indexing and a tofu factory. Tofu is the 2nd most cost effective business grossing around $150,000 a year with distribution in the Eastern half of the US, through distributors. [1] Members work in these community-owned businesses, with the community providing for all basic needs (housing, food, health care, etc.). All income from the businesses is shared among members, as are vehicles and houses. [2] With 85 adults, there needs to have labor assigning jobs, one who assigns work to members. Work is done in teams. Dairy for the milk that is done daily, cheese making, Office, Hammocks Desk, and Tofu making.

The community also has a pond, sauna, sawmill, and dairy

Twin Oaks has helped establish two daughter communities, Acorn Community about 7 miles away, and East Wind Community in south central Missouri.

Twin Oaks also hosts annual intentional community gatherings which are cosponsored by the Fellowship for Intentional Community. The Communities Conference^[14] and the Women's Gathering ^[15] both take place in August or September every year.

[edit] Twin Oaks in the media

The history of Twin Oaks Community is detailed extensively in two books by Kathleen (Kat) Kinkade, one of the co-founders of the community. The first, A Walden Two Experiment, covers the first 5 years of the community. The second, Is it Utopia Yet?, covers the next 20 years. Another book from the 1980s, Living the Dream, by Ingrid Komar (the mother of a member at the time the book was written), also discusses Twin Oaks' history. Many newspapers and magazine articles have been written about Twin Oaks. About half a dozen dissertations and a dozen master's theses have been written about Twin Oaks. Many of these publications are available at the community's website. In 1998, the Washington Post Magazine did a cover story on Twin Oaks.

[edit] Cultural significance of Twin Oaks

Many Twin Oaks members and others associated with the intentional communities movement see Twin Oaks' existence as culturally and politically significant. This assessment contrasts with the popular stereotypical idea that communes are escapist, unstable, and/or insignificant.

Some of the common stereotypes of communes are factually incorrect when applied to Twin Oaks. For example, in contrast to the idea that communes are filled solely with young people, Twin Oaks members currently range in age from 18 to 83, with an average age of about 40 (and substantial variance, with many members in their 20s and many in their 50s). The community has existed 40 years, and its highly organized labor system (in which each member works about 42 hours a week) seems to contradict the popular image of communes as disorganized and transient. Though the community is located in a relatively rural area, its members associate freely and frequently with outsiders. The community has no charismatic leader, and individual members' religious practices are extremely diverse. Wealth generated by a member's assets during membership (i.e. interest earned) belongs to the community, but upon leaving, a member keeps all the money he or she entered with.

Twin Oaks strives to eliminate sexism in their daily life. Some say the community is a feminist utopia because the community members step outside traditional gender roles. Twin Oaks' belief system include egalitarian values in term of political, economic, social, and legal rights to all of it's members. This idealist structure is a sexual revolution being waged within the community. Twin Oaks rejects discrimination of any kind. Women and men are equally encouraged and are highly supported in their endeavors, regardless of stereotypes that come up are in modern society. ^[16] This structure in turn promote non-traditional gender roles. Each member is encouraged to accept themselves freely and are encouraged to be whoever they are without repercussions for other members. Men and women are free to work in any field they wish to regardless of generally perceived "traditional" roles. Many women work in wood working shops along side their male counterparts and both men and women take care of the children as well as the cooking. ^[17] Some women choose to do carpentry or animal husbandry while some men in the group do the cooking and sewing. For women at Twin Oaks, the absence of a competitive job-market promotes equality at Twin Oaks. However, some members also embrace such activities as “Women’s Tea” and “Men’s Movie Night”, but other than these activities, almost everything else is non-gender based. The bathrooms at Twin Oaks are all unisex.^[18] All members of the community are able to recognize their personal contribution toward the survival of the community through work such as farming, which is used both to strengthen communal life^[19] Gender equality through non-differentiation is also expressed by a non-gender specific style of dressing. Each member may choose to wear what he or she would like regardless of traditional gendered categorizations. Members who wish to dress in non-traditional styles are freely acepted.(www.twinoaks.org). The Twin Oaks bylaws states that members “will not use titles of any kind among us” (Kanter, 1972: 22) and all members are referred to by their first names or any other names of their choosing, all equaly acepted among members.

Proponents of the view that Twin Oaks is significant point to its successful endurance as an island of near-absolute egalitarianism, feminism, environmentalism, and non-violence.^{[citation needed]} They maintain that Twin Oaks is extremely engaged politically in building a model of a better world, and that while it is imperfect in terms of class and race diversity, it is far more diverse than most neighborhoods. Additionally, they argue that Twin Oaks has been successful in creating a mini-society in which economic rewards are not tied to race or prior class background, and that the community boasts an extremely low crime rate, including no violent crime in the past decade. Advocates also point out that it costs nothing to join the community and that the community takes care of its sick and elder members as a priority. They reference Twin Oaks' staying power and the impact it has had on its members' and ex-members' lives as evidence for its significance.

[edit] References

1. ^ http://www.twinoaks.org/
2. ^ Twin Oaks Intentional Community Homepage
3. ^ Federation of Egalitarian Communities
4. ^ Twin Oaks Community FAQ
5. ^ The Federation of Egalitarian Communities website. http://thefec.org/ . Accessed:February 8, 2008
6. ^ Kinkade, Kat. 1973 A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community. New York: Quill.
7. ^ Twin Oaks Community FAQ
8. ^ *Spalding, Ashley, comp. Positioned Within "the Outside World" 2000. USC. 28 Apr. 2008 <http://www.twinoaks.org/community/media/academic/thesis.html>.
9. ^ Twin Oaks Community FAQ
10. ^ 3-Week Visitor Program
11. ^ http://www.twinoaks.org/
12. ^ Twin Oaks Community. 15 Nov. 2007. 28 Apr. 2008 <www.twinoaks.org>.
13. ^ CommunitiesConference.org
14. ^ Twin Oaks Women's Gathering
15. ^ Bouvard, Marguerite The Intentional Community Movement: Building a New Moral World. London Kennikat Press, 1975
16. ^ Kinkade, Kathleen. Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider’s View of the Twin Oaks Community in Its Twenty-sixth Year
17. ^ Spalding, Ashley, comp. Positioned Within "the Outside World" 2000. USC. 28 Apr. 2008 <http://www.twinoaks.org/community/media/academic/thesis.html>
18. ^ Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. (1972). Commitment and community. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

5 Kinkade, Kat 1974.. A Walden Two Experiment; The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community.William Morrow & Co . ISBN 0-688-05020-4

[edit] External links

• Twin Oaks Community online
• Federation of Egalitarian Communities
• The Vulgar Bulgars, the Twin Oaks klezmer band
• TOAST Twin Oaks Academic Speaking Tour
• Twin Oaks Communities Conference August 15-17, 2008
• Twin Oaks Women's Gathering August 22-24, 2008