About Us

About Us

This website is sponsored by the American Association for the Furtherance of Community, a 501(c)3 educational organization incorporated in 1981.

We are a group of people who have spent 30 years looking at how to put back into human life the community level of support. Community is about developing human beings and also developing the space between and among people which can be described relationally, culturally and in terms of their citizenship. The Association for the Furtherance of Community sponsors a 25 yr long experiment in intentional community called the Goodenough Community. We wish to serve the greater communitarian movement by providing a forum for sharing, research, collaboration, learning, stories, wisdom, history and more.

As sponsors of an intentional community, this form of community is dear to our hearts. We are indebted to the Fellowship for Intentional Community and its local chapter, the Northwest Intentional Communities Association. These two groups provide information about the intentional communities movement through their websites and journal, Communities magazine.

Here, we are focusing on the what we can learn together to bring a sense of community back into contemporary life; we are interested in research, demonstration, collaboration, and stories from experience. Community exists wherever groups of people make a good life together, freely learning and collaborating to grow good crops of people. There is no judgment in this world as people care about what others think about them and wish for them. People living with a sense of community have a good personal life and a deep social commitment.

It is our premise that the skills and values of a shared, communitarian life can be learned and applied to any number of gatherings, groups, neighborhoods, as well as shared living projects. In fact, we agree with those, who propose that society at large must adopt communitarian principles and practices in order to be viable. You can learn more about our views here.  We are providing a place for book reviews, columns from a group of interested writers, news, community oriented stories, blogs, and so forth. We have been inspired by the work and writings of Rudolf Steiner, Ken Wilber, Amitai Etzioni, Sri Aurobindo, John L. Hoff, Peter Senge, and M. Scott Peck.

We encourage you to join us. As we form this website, we are interested in your input about what you would like to see.

Here are some beginning questions:

What does the word, community, mean to you?

What experiences of community have you had? What have you learned?

What do people need by way of education, skills, and support to create a more community focused life?

How could this website serve you? If you are a member of a community, social action group, or other organization, how could this website serve your group?

You can register your views and wishes by email to the following address: goodenough@aboutcommunity.org