How to start an Ecovillage

Starting an Ecovillage in Your Neighborhood

1. Get together with 3 or 4 neighbors who live in your building or on your block. Try to meet for a potluck dinner once a week for several months. Build friendships and trust with one another.
2. Talk about the problems with the air, the soil and the water in your neighborhood and in our city. These are the three aspects of the planet’s life support systems, essential for all of life.
3. Find out who your elected officials are and how they feel about these issues of polluted air, soil and water. Find out what they are doing or plan to do to make the air, soil and water cleaner and heathier. If they have no viable plans, help them make plans. Start with your most local official, usually your city councilperson. Get to know these officials and their staff persons.
4. Talk about how each of you feel about the problems of pollution of the air, soil and water in your neighborhood. Who are each of you in relation to those problems? How do you or your families contribute to those problems? What could each of you personally do to help solve the problems? What can you do together as a group to help solve the problems?
5. Make lists together of all of these things from #4 above. Set priorities for yourselves personally and as a group. For example, some people may be able to drive less right away, or not drive at all while others may be able to buy less packaging or recycle or compost more. Decide on three things that you could all do together within your neighborhood during a certain period of time, say one month. Keep your list simple, so you have a good chance at success. For example:
   1. Create a neighborhood compost pile
   2. Stop driving in a car one day a week.
   3. Grow 3 different kinds of vegetables in a small plot that you would share.
6. Learn “consensus decision making,” or how to make decisions in a way that everyone mostly agrees. There are many workshops for learning how to do it, so that everyone learns the same rules.
7. Make contact with other neighborhood groups working on similar problems as yours, and form self-help friendships or networks. Learn where the other groups are from your local elected officials or churches or temples or libraries.
8. Think about how everything you do together is partly to help the air, soil and water; partly to help one another; and partly to save money from flowing outside your neighborhood. Also, try to think about how what you do in your neighborhood will help the rest of the city and the planet too, so that your work together is for everyone, not just for your neighborhood.
9. Get the children in your neighborhood involved as quickly as possible in every way that you can.
10. Keep meeting with your neighbors, planning, sharing your lives , including more people, making improvements on your block that connect the social, the economic and the ecological activities in healthier ways. Think collaboratively rather than competitively.

Document Prepared by CRSP