Being

I. BEING ________________________________________ Utopian communities are society’s dreams. (Kanter 1972: 237) A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE As stated in the introduction, ‘my organization’ is also ‘my community’. This is important for this study and deserves explanation. Having spent my adolescence in Germany and Holland in the sixties of the last century, I was very impressed and influenced by the cultural revolution that swept Europe at that time. I threw myself with gusto into the battle against authority, capitalism, sexual repression and the bomb. Influenced at university both by the critical impulse of Horkheimer (1947), Fromm, Marcuse (1964) and Habermas( 1968, 1971, 1973 ) and eastern philosophy, something in me cried out for a radical break not only with certain thought structures but also with my immediate personal life-style. Although eventually entering relatively ‘established’ and well-paid professions, marriage and parenthood, both my partner and I in time became deeply interested in alternatives to established society and to what we then perceived as normative life styles. We were also interested in a renewed personal and transpersonal spirituality. The issues triggering this interest were the experience of de-sacralization of world and universe, de-soulment of life-world and humankind, increased self-centredness of social actors and increasing disregard for community, manifesting themselves in wide-spread alienation, social exclusion and paralysis, and in an increasing threat to the human and natural environment. Together we began to search for radically new models of human relations and social institutions, which could be lived now, not ‘after the revolution’ or ‘in retirement’, and in a practical, everyday-day way. After a move from the city to the country, where I retrained in biodynamic horticulture, my partner’s engagement in voluntary work with severely disabled persons and my interest in ecology and direct work with nature, led us to join a community movement in Britain, which combined both these aspects and promised opportunities for personal growth and social reconstruction - and a radical change from the life-style of our parents. Almost twenty years on we are still part of this movement and live and work in one of its communities. To enable an understanding of the field of issues to be investigated, a short description of the organization/community and my position/situation in it will be necessary. THE ORGANIZATION The Camphill Community Movement was founded in Scotland 1939 by a group of artists and physicians around the Austrian paediatrician Karl Koenig ( 1902 – 1966) who had fled to Britain from Nazi-occupied Germany and Austria. The group was inspired by the educational and social principles developed through Anthroposophy by the Austrian natural scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925) . Committed to helping the terrible plight of the handicapped child in society at that time, this group started a school community for children with special needs on the donated Camp Hill Estate in Aberdeen. From here the impulse grew steadily into a worldwide movement, centred on serving the care for the disadvantaged and the environment. Anchored predominantly in rural village-type settings, it developed into three main groups of highly autonomous communities: school communities for children, educational communites for adolescents, and life sharing communities for adults. The latter, a group of British adult communities, decided 1953 to form The Camphill Village Trust Ltd. (CVT), a company Ltd. and registered Charity, which today comprises 11 intentional Communities, partly in rural, partly in urban settings. Together they are home to over one thousand people, 450 of which are officially registered as having ‘special needs’. The individual centres operate semi-autonomously, with decentralized, collaborative group management structures, accountable to Local Management Committees (LMC) as executive boards for each community, and ultimate legal responsibility in the hands of a central board of directors, the CVT ‘Council’ . I am one of the resident directors of the CVT and a member of the CVT Finance and Planning Committee. Since 19 years my family and I live in the 100 strong Oaklands Park Community, where, next to my task as manager of the communities large horticultural enterprise (employing 22 people), I teach biodynamic horticulture, am a member of the Core Group (cooperative management group) , the Finance Group, the Local Management Committee and the Land Management Group. My wife, who is also fully engaged in all aspects of the organization, our four children, and I share a house with five adults with special needs. The Camphill Village Communities provide supported living and meaningful work for adults with learning disabilities as one of their focus activities and are thus legally required to be registered as ‘care homes’. All members of the community live out of a renewed ‘Village Impulse’ (Coe et al,. 2001; Jackson, 1999), a concept, as the mission statement says, ‘connecting the need for social sustainability with that of environmental sustainability: to work for social renewal with a contemporary, urban consciousness in a rural setting – aware of the global, creating local community’. Committed long-term co-workers attracted to this way of life come from many nations, are generally ‘ideal-motivated’ and have, by means of a shared philosophy, a relatively well defined shared system of meanings, values and beliefs. Members claim, that at the core of each centre’s values stands the idea of ‘Community’ as a place and space where individuals of varied abilities strive to create, through mutual support, an environment conducive to the full development of each person’s individuality. One of the most important conditions to achieve this, so is claimed, is to realize each individual’s right to meaningful work, as this is the basic human right ‘to be needed’, to be allowed and encouraged to ‘contribute’. With regard to the work with ‘disadvantaged’ people, it is the stated aim of the communities to redeem the conventional distinction between ‘residents’ and ‘staff’ (or, in modern jargon, between ‘client’ and ‘care provider’), as these distinctions exclude the reality of lived mutuality and interdependence in the relationships between all members. In this philosophy there are no clear ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’, there are only different ways of giving and receiving (Cahn, 2000: 30 ff.). The carrying co-workers, who tend to be artists, farmers, crafts people and ex-professionals, run craft workshops, bakeries, cafes, retail shops, organic farms and gardens, and live together with their children, volunteers, and what would conventionally be termed ‘residents’, in shared homes, mostly in extended family households. There is no ‘staff’, all administrative work and household tasks are shared according to ability, and everyone has ‘full employment’ in various workshops, land work and administration. From the professional ‘care perspective’ no clear distinct in the conventional sense is made between ‘work-life’ and ‘private-life’, it is assumed that to care is what one does or gives as part of being human. No one is part of the community because s/he is ‘in the Care Profession’ or because s/he has chosen to live in a ‘Care Home’ – all, so is assumed, live and work in the community out of a personal moral-ethical impulse to create a life of mutual support and care as an intrinsic human aspiration. Implicit in the underlying philosophy, following Steiner’s radical social approach (Steiner, 1982:24), is an attempt to separate work from income, ability from remuneration, and to have decentralized, collaborative, non-hierarchical and participatory management. There are no ‘employment contracts’ and no ‘salaries’ in the conventional sense. All co-workers, regardless of time served, are ‘volunteers’ and work without contracts. All income, consisting of income support and government grants for some individuals, sales from workshops and land activities etc., is pooled. Sophisticated structures to discuss individual and communal needs have been developed over half a century of practice. These needs are met within the boundaries of communally planned and approved budgeting procedures. The meeting of a person’s financial needs, so is stated in its philosophy (Steiner, 1982:24), is entirely disconnected from her work performance or quantitative achievement. In turn it is assumed that each person strives to contribute what she can towards the well being of the whole community, according to her abilities. The administration of all aspects of community and organizational life is shared by all via an elaborate structure of meetings and mandated groups. Consensus decision-making is attempted. In conclusion one could say, that people working in the organization tend to describe themselves as ‘idealists’ pursuing a ‘life-style choice’ or ‘vocation’ rather than as ‘holding a job’. THE DILEMMA Ideals and aspirations aside, the organization faces serious challenges from within and without – and indeed, as will become clearer, to my perception the very dichotomy between ‘within’ and without’ seems to constitute the main challenge. Urgent attention, in my view, needs to be given to a review of boundary definitions and to processual and structural change. Traditional ways of working and of relating to the community’s wider environment are beginning to default in a shifting world requiring great flexibility and will to change. Without any immediately obvious single reason, crisis situations within the community are on the increase, relationships between co-workers become ever more complex and entrenched, management and developments are more difficult to guide. Co-workers feel over-burdened with the demands made on them by bureaucratical demands resulting from the restructuring of the care sector, by hugely increased administration in all spheres of life, by increasingly demanding young volunteers, by increasing demands on them as parents, by relationship strains, by the general acceleration of life. To uphold community ideals in the face of these challenges requires structural changes and realignment of internal and external boundaries of the organization which may initially seem painfully in conflict with cherished assumptions. It becomes ever clearer to me, that to enable changes to happen, some of these assumptions and the resulting value structure of the community will have to be seen in a new light by community members. The increasing intensity of struggle involved in the community process and the increasingly palpable loss of trust of co-workers in community as guarantor for possibilities for self-actualization, pushed me to investigate my own relationship to the fundamental questions involved. Although still trusting the underlying presuppositions of anthroposophical social science (Bruell, 1984, Steiner, 1973, 1977, 1963) I began to question whether the particular form of implementation of theses ideas we were living, the life-style we provide for ourselves and people with special needs, is still appropriate and ‘true’; whether we still have faith in the main tenets of the philosophy, and whether there is still congruence between espoused theory and theory-in-use (Argyris and Schoen, 1996: 13). I had the suspicion that a changing concept of ‘community’ and of the understanding of the relationship between community and the individual was lying at the root of these questions. In practice, communal activities not directly connected to work tasks, such as common harvest days, preparation and celebration of seasonal festivals, etc., have become less popular; cultural work within the community, e.g. the community choir, drama work, study groups, etc. is in decline - yet all members express great thirst for such activities, and indeed are increasingly intereted in involvement into such activities outside the community context. Looking at these issues, I thus had rich material at hand when I finally decided to investigate aspects of my own organization for the MDSR dissertation. Too rich, indeed, I thought, as I struggled with the complexities of the community process, trying to pick up an isolated relevant thread in this web of relationships. So I started from taking a good look at my own reasoning for exposing myself and my family to such an intense and exhausting experiment. It was time for me to reassess the fundamental motive of my being here. A starting point for me was to revisit the philosophical basis that had brought me into this situation and to see it in a contemporary epistemological context that would possibly re-validate my involvement and re-establish ‘first principles’. I would then try and find a group of co-workers that would be willing to scrutinize and explore some of the manifestations of our life with me, in the hope to gain some insight into ourselves in relation to the community impulse, to share our excitement for it, and to explore aspects of discontent with its current manifestation. My personal interest within the inquiry, gaining in contour as the inquiry group progressed, gravitated increasingly towards questions pertaining to the tensions and relationships between ‘individual’ and ‘community’, between ‘community and environment’ and their mutual and interdependent development. As mentioned before, although a long-standing and respected member of the community, co-creative of, and thus co-responsible, for its values and artefacts, I was becoming personally more unsure whether the form of community life practiced in our organization was still appropriate and relevant for our chosen ‘client’ group, for me, for our time – I was not, however unsure about the necessity for community, or was I ' It remains to be said, that the life-saturating economic, social and cultural involvement and the resulting interdependencies that go with such a community venture, make these questions fundamentally existential for those involved. It is not only about my work place, it is about my life! Due to the complex nature of the human psyche and its defence- and rationalization mechanisms, and due to the equally complex mysteries of group life, it is, understandably, difficult to define and gain access to the ‘real’ issues. However, my hope was that any honest and sincere inquiry of cooperative nature would at least contribute to what Freire calls conscientization : ‘the process in which people, not as recipients, but as knowing subjects, achieve a deepening awareness both of the socio-historical reality which shapes their lives and of their capacity to transform that reality.’(Freire, 1972)