Intentional Community on Gambier Island

-Ghost Ranch, Abiqui, New Mexico, June 2007

The other day I was speaking to a woman at a web development firm that has been around since pre dot-com crash days. The company is Communicopia.
When I was scanning their site looking at their Who Are We section I made two discoveries that I found really interesting.

Julia, the woman I ended up speaking with, had been the director of programming for that retreat center on Cortes island that used to be for hippies but is now unfortunately priced in a way that tends to be out of reach of a lot of people. It's called Hollyhock.

Even more interesting to me was the fact that she is part of a group of people who have begun an intentional community on Gambier Island. When I was talking to her I mentioned how interested I was in this community. I asked her if she knew of a new magazine in Vancouver called Granville and how I thought that this intentional community might make a good story for it.

According to the website, the 80 acre parcel of land on Gambier is just 20 minutes by boat from Horseshoe Bay. The community which you can read about is called Lightwork Ecovillage.

The second thing I found fascinating on the Communicopia website was the experience of Jason Mogus, the CEO, and how through his contacts and through a little bit of fairy dust or something, he was flown to Richard Branson's private island in the Carribean to speak about how the Internet and Web 2.0 interactivity might be used to accommodate to an initiative called The Elders. The Elders involves gathering some of the world's well known and exceptional elders to brainstorm on solving some of the world's problems, one problem at a time.

Now, if only we could translate that way of working to everyday people in every community so that we might acknowledge that you don't actually have to be famous and old to be useful and wise; an elder with experience worth listening to. Although years on the planet can equal experience that has led to wisdom and a self awareness wrought from self examination, we might know examples that make that assumption null and void.

The point is, bringing together people in an intentional manner to problem solve is almost always a good thing.