Governance & community management
The hard part of intentional community was never the buildings or the gardens. It's making decisions together, for years, with people you can't avoid at dinner. Governance failure is the most common way communities die. This page covers the tools that work: consent-based decision-making, sociocracy, the legal structures (CLT, cooperative, LLC), and the written agreements that settle arguments before they start.
Start here
Sociocracy For All · ~18 min — Circles, roles, consent instead of consensus, double-linking. The most accessible introduction to sociocratic governance.
How CLTs separate land from housing ownership and keep both out of the speculative market. Directly applicable to holding community land.
First in a short series on consensus process. Pair it with the facilitation techniques on the soft skills track.
First project
Draft your community's governance documents
With your forming group, draft the core documents: decision-making process, conflict resolution procedure, membership criteria, financial agreements, and an amendment process. Then run at least three governance simulations, fictional scenarios that stress-test your processes, before finalizing anything. Finally, pay a cooperative or CLT attorney to review it. Every clause you argue about now is a fight you won't have later, with land on the line.
Other ways in
Six-month sociocracy trial
Before encoding governance in bylaws, run a sunsetted trial: six months of sociocratic circles, consent decisions, and elected roles for your forming group. At the end of the trial, evaluate honestly what worked and what your group tolerated. The trial reveals the lived gap between the model on paper and the people in the room, which is what your real documents need to be calibrated against.
Conflict-resolution tabletop exercise
Script three realistic conflict scenarios appropriate to your group (a member wanting to leave with their financial stake, a dispute over shared labor, a values drift between two factions). Run them as tabletop role-plays with the forming group, using whatever process you currently have. The exercises surface the gaps in your conflict procedure cheaply, before a real conflict tests it for the first time.
Go deeper
Community Experiences
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