Home is a place of activism and change, whether we like it or not. It is where we have agency over our culture, norms, and agreements. In intentional communities, people come together to build a life centred around shared values. While this is cozy and nice, it goes far deeper than cuddle puddles and potlucks. Creating a collective home around shared values also provides a platform for social change. Not only can we use collective space to shift and transform ourselves, our habits, and our behaviours in ways that are very difficult to do alone, but we can also use our collective surplus to be of service to the larger world.

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Domestic Space As A Platform For Impact - A Theory Of Change

Human civilisation is built on collaboration; humans are a cooperative species capable of great things when they work together. Collective living is a microcosm of this fact, and the added benefits are vast - not only do we form a rich social life, emotional support, access to each other’s social ecosystems, but the collective home is also a place to have impact. Home can be a place of prefiguration - building the world that we wish we had, right here in the now.

Through living together we garner many kinds of surplus. Communal living is often financially efficient, whether in regards to rent prices or the reduced costs of buying food communally. It is also extremely time efficient: when you are all living together, one person taking out the trash solves the issue for 15 people.

One person doing an online food order only takes 45 minutes a week, whereas 15 people each going to the store takes hours of human time. A third way that we gain surplus is through space. Often collective spaces have a lot of communal space that would be hard to obtain or afford when living in 1 or 2 bedroom apartments or houses. In the shared house that I live in, we have almost as many common rooms as we do private bedrooms, and these are used for a variety of things.

District Commons is the non-profit engine and programmatic infrastructure that lies behind such experimental commons and autonomous spaces. Our theory of change is that through commoning, we create abundance that is needed to build the transfer culture (behaviours, norms, attitudes), to enact out our prefigurative politics and run social experiments that help us “build the new world in the shell of the old.” There are other benefits and forms of surplus, but I shall leave these for now, as what I wish to talk about here is what do we do with that surplus?

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Mass Incarceration And The Lifer Plight - Creating Windows Where There Were Once Walls

One of the projects that we have been working towards in the last few years has been building community with people who have had very different experiences of life, experiences that have perhaps rendered our lives as segregated from early on. So much of ‘society’ tends to keep people stratified, based on socioeconomic, cultural, age and other arbitrary factors. The community that I am introducing here is our formerly incarcerated community.

Around 162,000 humans are serving a life sentence in US prisons. That is one out of every nine people in prison (according to a new report issued by the Sentencing Project). California has the highest percentage of prisoners serving life. There are currently around 35,000 prisoners serving life sentences in California prisons, representing a quarter of the California’s prison population. Under Governor Jerry Brown, nearly 3,500 lifers have been released from the California prisons in the last five years, a record number. These are humans who have served abominably long sentences, often having entered the system as humans who would not even be of age to rent a car. Not only are “lifer” recidivism rates extremely low, but these individuals have often studied extensively and done extreme transformational work on themselves. To be blunt, but to call out the common misconception, this group is both low risk and also deeply valuable members of society. On their return however, housing is scarce. Perhaps more dangerous is the fact that they are returning to a society where a fifth of people report being socially isolated, two-thirds or more say they have just a few or no relatives or friends living nearby who they can rely on for support. This is a world where social isolation (not to be confused with loneliness) is the next health epidemic, leading to a 29% increased risk of death. For us, we are less about creating housing and more about creating ‘homes’ and the community that comes with that, which is a fundamental part of survival and empowerment.

A few years ago I hosted a lecture on the ‘History of the California Prison System.’ It was a fascinating talk and as we got into the questions towards the end, it became clear that some of the attendees were themselves formerly incarcerated individuals. They were there speaking from their perspective and found a space where they were heard. As we got to talking about their experience, I asked them what they were lacking. At that point, their answer was ‘a place to be, and to build community’. The thing they asked for was a place to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a game that had been their primary form of escape and relief during their years inside. Now on the outside, facing all the pressures of life, they had nowhere to play. Being part of a network of intentional communities, space is abundant, rendering this a simple issue to solve. So the Second Life Project was born. It was our attempt to create community together, a collaboration between the Embassy Network and The Prisoner Reentry Network. We gather together each week to play. The games are attended by formerly incarcerated lifers, residents, and community members. As a united community we leave our backgrounds at the door and join each other at the table as equals. We build life together. We cook, eat, talk about the struggles of life. Years later, I am still learning to play D&D (a truly remarkable experience). Despite the vast differences in some of our experiences, there is much common thinking, and also shared strife. We have deeply become part of the same tribe.

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Having Impact - Intentional Communities Create Home Not Just Housing

Fast forward 2 years, our coliving community and the formerly incarcerated community have become deeply and beautifully entangled despite being traditionally kept in socially far places. We have since built two intentional community houses built around the needs of returning citizens.

These spaces ensure that they return to a community that solves for affordable housing, reintegration from a segregated and stigmatised world, and community of belonging.

Housing is challenging as parole conditions tie them to living in some of the most expensive cities in the world. Building community and social connections are harder still, due to societal segregation, and stigma, especially when one considers the norms that have become ingrained from growing up in prison (intragroup competition, racial segregation and individualism). Last but not least, our homes are solving for loneliness in one of the most socially isolated populations. Crucially these spaces are, and feel like, home, not just housing. They are deeply integrated spaces, comprised of half formerly incarcerated residents and half not. They are a mix of age ranges, racial backgrounds and life experiences. If you joined us for dinner, you would feel the warmth that is hard to describe but what is unique about these places.

Structurally things are going swimmingly. We have a shared bank account and a shared debit card that lives in the kitchen. Anyone can order food for the house on the card, since we have a decentralised ordering and spending system. There are no designated chores, but the houses are clean and sparkling. I think we owe a lot of this to the experience that many of us gained in other community houses, such as The Embassy and The Red Victorian. We have a ‘gripes and gratitudes session’ at each meeting, where there is space to tell people the things that are driving you up the wall that are easy for them to fix or adapt to. We have collectively saved up a little money that we get to decide what to do with soon.The hope is that each house will be able to financially support the beginning of the next house, and that way we scale our collective freedoms. Our second home is undergoing some renovations and there has been an air of burning man sound - a sense of belonging derived from deep participation.

Creating intentional communities with former lifers isn’t just about creating housing, or homes, or even community. Housing is necessary but not sufficient. It’s widely understood that mass incarceration in the US, to a large degree reflects the criminalisation of poverty, and of trauma. For me then, a wider goal is to ensure that returning citizens are not returning to the same world that let them down in the first place, but into a different society, centred around solidarity, mutual emancipation and collective power. I wanted to make sure that this group could bypass the overarching themes of domination, competition, individualism that predominates, and come straight into the commons. As I have previously said, the commons and all that it offers must be open to all who wish to participate, care for and contribute to them.

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Stewarding Autonomy Through Place-based Experiments

The home is one of the primary environments in which we are taught how to behave, where we are socialised to perform certain behaviours and attitudes - where so-called “folkways” and “mores” are transmitted to children and where they are taught how to self- regulate. One of the things that I commonly hear from returning citizens in our support circles, is that they have dreamt of freedom for so long, and yet now that they are here, they find it deeply lonely. In these circles, they reflect on how we live in invisible cages, how no one talks to each other, and how society is segregated. There is so much struggle that strangers can’t look after each other. If you leave home without our wallet and ask a stranger for help, you get looks of fear instead of the aid that you need. And hell, they are not wrong. San Francisco has undergone an influx of young elites and it can be a tough place to fit in for anyone that doesn’t fit the visual or cultural mould. For us then, our intentional home environments are consciously centred around collective emancipation and stewarded autonomy. We work on how to safely navigate autonomy, without getting overwhelmed in relationships, love, intimacy, sex, emotional wellness, work, careers, etc. Our spaces serve as an opportunity to find meaningful impact in the world and to explore how we can all remain free, together.

Our aim has been to set up a release experience for returning citizens that ensures that as they return to unincarcerated life, they not merely be cast back into the punitive, extractive society that set them down their initial trajectories, but instead into an entirely distinct social system - transformative, mutually- supportive post-scarcity social environment built around a commons-based material and emotional ecology. Within these commons, and as commoners, they form the tools, subjectivities and means for both autonomy (knowing what you want) and agency (the means to act upon those wants), as well as critical inspection of desires, and whether what we want serves us or not. We are sharing our learnings and unlearnings, transitioning from extreme notions of territory and private property to sharing a ‘comedy of the commons’ (the opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons, such that individuals participate for the good of the community, rather than extracting resources for their own personal gain). We are experimenting a transition from hierarchies of harm to alternative and transformative systems. We must figure out how to upgrade and leapfrog culture and social formations without inducing future shock. For this reason, I consider our homes as catalytic places of experimentation for stewardarding autonomy and mutually assured emancipation.

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“the Future Is Already Here, It’s Just Not Very Evenly Distributed.”

In short, it has been our ambition that these spaces of experimental commoning comprise sites for the cultivation of ‘transfer cultures’ - sets of practices that guide individuals from our present-day society to a future society that we are currently co-creating. It’s been an incredible journey that started with creating a shared home and coliving experience and now led to world building and future-crafting. In the words of H.J. Ehrlich “We must act as if the future is today.”