Why most communities fail

Most people who dream of living in community picture the good parts: shared meals, children running between houses, a barn-raising, help when someone is sick. Those things are real. But most groups that set out to build a community never get there.

That's not a reason to give up. It's a reason to learn from those who went before. The problems that sink communities are surprisingly predictable, and nearly all of them can be prevented with honest conversation and good structure from the start. This course is about that structure.

Diana Leafe Christian spent years as editor of Communities magazine, visiting and interviewing groups across North America. In her book Creating a Life Together, she estimates that about 90 percent of groups that set out to start an ecovillage or community never manage to build it. They can't find the right land, run out of money, or get stuck in conflict. Often, she writes, they simply underestimate how much time, money and organizing it takes.

History tells a similar story. America in the 1800s saw hundreds of communities founded, from Shaker villages to experiments in shared farming. Most lasted only a few years.

Christian calls many of these problems structural conflict: trouble that's built in at the very beginning, when a group skips the hard conversations. It doesn't show up until months or years later, when it's much harder to fix.

In 2003, anthropologist Richard Sosis and economist Eric Bressler studied 83 American communes from the 1800s. Communes built around a shared faith lasted far longer: a median of about 25 years, compared with about 5 for secular ones. Asking more of members (shared practices, commitments, sacrifices) helped the faith-based groups last but didn't help the secular ones. The lesson for any group is that a deeply shared purpose, something bigger than convenience, holds people together through hard years.

Political economist Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for studying how ordinary people successfully share land, water, forests and fisheries, sometimes for centuries. She found eight design principles that successful groups had in common. They fit an eco-village remarkably well.

"Community" can mean many things. The more a group shares, the more commitment and structure it needs. Many failures come from people who wanted different points on this line without realizing it.

Use this check whether your community is a dream, a group of friends meeting monthly, or already on the land. Have each household fill it in separately first, then compare.

The communities that last aren't the ones with the best land or the most money. They're the ones that do the slow, unglamorous work first: saying clearly why they're there, writing down how they'll live together, and learning to work through conflict with grace. Build that foundation, and the houses, gardens and shared meals have something solid to stand on.

Next, we start building: a shared vision, and the written agreements that turn good intentions into a way of life.

Work through these together. Your answers save on this device as you type, and print cleanly for your records.