Catalyzing Community
by Chris Roth, Fall 2002

Four years in the making, the first of two tapes in Geoph Kozeny’s long-awaited Visions of Utopia: Experiments in Sustainable Culture video, is finally available. Obviously a labor of love, it reflects the perspective of someone uniquely qualified to produce such an exhaustive overview: the fabled "peripatetic communitarian." For fourteen years, Geoph (founder of the Community Catalyst Project) has been on the road, moving from intentional community to intentional community all around this continent, shooting slides (and more recently, reels of video footage) documenting the hundreds of communities he’s visited, and sharing his pictures and experiences with others both within and outside of the communities movement.

As when he spearheaded production of the encyclopedic Directory of Intentional Communities (1992 edition), Geoph’s approach is meticulous and thoroughgoing. He begins with an overview of 2500 years of shared living experiments throughout the world, brings us up to current times, then devotes the rest of this first tape to portraits of seven different intentional communities (tape two is scheduled to depict an additional eleven).

We learn about each community through the voices of its members, with footage of life at the community accompanying their reflections. The entire video is narrated, mostly by community members, some by Geoph. As a result, we don’t see extended "real life" scenes of community life—what might happen, from beginning to end, in a contentious meeting, for example—but we do hear members’ thoughts about such things. Given the ambitious nature of this video, that’s probably all we have time for anyway. I enjoyed meeting these varied individuals, hearing their reflections on many familiar aspects of community life, and being inspired by the realization that so many people, all over the country (and in fact, world), are experimenting with shared living. Such choices receive very little media coverage, so some of us may think we are "islands," but in fact we are part of a large network of people living cooperatively or communally, a movement in which many of us discover similar challenges and rewards.

The settings in this video vary, comprising a meditation/yoga community, a worker-owned conference/retreat center, a school and community for disabled children, an ecovillage teaching and demonstration center, a suburban cohousing development, a small urban activist cooperative, and a large egalitarian community using a planner/manager government. And yet many of the issues confronted by these diverse communities are the same—and ones I have encountered in my own communal living experiences. I especially appreciated the fact that in each video segment, members honestly share the pitfalls of their particular community’s circumstances or ways of doing things: "we are too big for a cohousing community," "people tend to burn out here from overwork," "we don’t always maintain clear communication," or "we don’t make enough space for families with children."

Others might have produced a different documentary—and let’s hope many do—but this one fills an important niche. I look forward to tape two, due in a couple of years. (Order from the Fellowship for Intentional Community Video, 138 Twin Oaks Rd Box TL, Louisa VA 23093, 1-800-462-8240 (US and Canada) or 540-894-5798 (outside North America), email: user="orders" [at] domain="ic.org", http://store.ic.org/video/. Price: $33 includes shipping within the US. Add $2 for shipping by Priority Mail. For mail and email orders, send your complete delivery address, phone number and email address if available, along with a check payable to FIC or credit card number and expiration date.)
----------------------------------------------------------
Talking Leaves: A Journal of Our Evolving Ecological Culture, Fall 2002. Subscriptions $20/year from Talking Leaves, 81868 Lost Valley Lane, Dexter, OR 97431. For more information: http://www.talkingleaves.org and http://www.lostvalley.org."