Projects
We are taking a balanced approach to listening and understanding where and how communities thrive, as well as how they are challenged. Most interesting, and promising, is what shows up in the patterns and gaps. We start with this and then organize ideas and efforts into project contexts to explore and test their actual value to communities. Current projects include…
Community Connections Visits
You have to be there. And this takes connection and time. While systems, methodologies and solutions are important, creating and evolving communities is about how we want and get to feel living life with and for one another. What distinguishes HomeWorlding as a new kind of agency is our ability to connect and integrate the systems and life worlds.
Since April 2023, Co-founder Charles Planck, has been traveling to different communities in the southern and eastern US. He will spend time connecting with the always colorful range of personalities within communities as he offers his entrepreneurial, design, build, culture and space making experience to help solve immediate and longer arc challenges that communities face.
Interested in having Charles spend some time connecting with and learning about your community and its essence, challenges, and current and potential opportunities? Schedule a call by reaching out to him: [email protected]
Organizing the Knowledge, Wisdom & Opportunities of Communities
For decades independent communities have been the innovators and bellwethers of what is possible in how we live our lives together and with our planet. There have been many attempts to discover, collect, organize and connect the miraculous though often hard earned knowledge, wisdom and experiences of communities.
This is an incredibly challenging thing to do, as this task is much closer to describing how ecologies or cosmologies are organized and evolve, as this is happening across time, history and cultures. Any knowledge organizing system for communities will need to be both structured in some ways, and dynamic and evolvable across contexts and perspectives, both now and in the future. As a senior archivist and a seasoned cultural anthropologist at the Smithsonian said to us as we described the challenge of our project, “You got it! Wouldn’t that be nice? Good luck! And please let us know if you come up with anything!”
We have begun working on this project as we do community visits and offer our “Visualizing and Mapping the Econologies of Healthy Communities” workshop. Are you someone who’s feeling the possibility and opportunity of this challenge? Please let us know!
Community Interconnections & Collaborations
One of the early and most ironic discoveries of our travels and research has been that for groups of people who have intentionally brought themselves together to create and evolve their communities, the communities themselves rarely connect, share or collaborate.
We also quickly realized that the main reason for this is that each community, who often worked incredibly hard to get things going in the first place, is often too busy and overloaded taking care of a huge range of needs, projects, and work, to say nothing of the social and interpersonal dynamics that are always part of community life. The bottom line, unsurprisingly, is that many of us are reinventing the same wheel again and again in isolation.
The world of communities is wealthy in its knowledge, experience, capacities and resources – except for the fact that this incredible value cannot be fully realized until it is connected, shared and exchanged. HomeWorlding is exploring ways, contexts and systems that we might all be able to make this happen for one another. Interested in exploring with us? Let’s connect.
Space, Village & Resource Design Lab
Most intentional communities, ecovillages and homesteads do not have or go through a process of designing a central plan. Interestingly, even in the world of architecture, there is a gap between the designing of individual structures and the more macro scope of urban planning, skipping over space society has spent most of its time evolving in – the village.
To be sure space, village and resource design and planning are important in terms of space making and utilization. History and culture is rich with examples in this respect. And, there may be more clever ways we can plan for, and meet the dynamic challenges and changes that are invariably part of our communities’ futures.
Beginning with our experience is co-working design and development, as well as pop-up, multi-use, self sustaining, and leave-no-trace village design experience from Burning Man (the third largest city in the state of NV for the week it exists) we have been collecting ideas, best practices, design principles and requirements, and most importantly, connecting with some fascinating characters who also feel there is so much potential for communities to do better at all this than we have. Are you feeling this too?
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