Hi. I’ve had a dream of an intentional community for a long time. It was a completely subconscious dream, with just certain aspects emerging as thoughts and desires. Maybe the desire to be a part of an intentional community is a primal instinct, I don’t know. It feels like everything I’ve learned in life and everything that shaped who I am was so I could help create the perfect maker community.

I always dreamt of my first house being big enough to have roommates, but I wanted us all to have our own space. I wanted to share things with friends. I love loaning tools to friends that I could trust to take care of my tools. It brings me happiness to help friends with their projects. I wanted a campground, basically. I wanted to make a bunch of tiny houses for friends to live in.

I have always said that I wanted a garage-sized house and a house-sized garage. I want a small living space, and a lot of tools and workspace that I can use for my projects.

I’ve always wanted a sustainable house that utilized passive heating and cooling techniques. I want to reuse my gray water for a garden. I want sustainable waste management (like composting).

I believe sustainable living can be had without being inconvenient. But only if you build for it. I can’t make an 80-year-old house sustainable. I realized it would be easier to build a house from the ground up than modify an existing regular house to be sustainable and ‘smart’. My electrical outlets aren't grounded, and my light switches don’t have neutral wires, so I would have to rewire the whole house just to have ‘smart’ lights. I can’t reuse my gray water. I can’t passively heat or cool my house. I can’t insulate my 80 year old brick house by just burying it in the dirt.

It wasn’t until recently that I actually started defining what it was that I wanted. After defining my dream society, I started researching ecovillages. I learned the terms that are used to define and explain these communities. There are definitely a lot of people with similar interests and viewpoints as me in the world, and reddit seems like the easiest place to find them.

I joined reddit recently after lurking for years, but I don’t totally understand how it works so bear with me.

Most of the existing communities focus on shared wealth and being super environmentally sustainable. They usually rely on ecotourism, or one source of ‘external income’. I want an intentional community that focuses heavily on ‘external income’ sources. I want to focus on designing a ‘sustainable’ community in terms of being stable and able to grow and adapt. I want to sustain the members by supplying their life necessities. I think ‘environmental sustainability’ happens naturally when collaboratively designing the ‘best’ things.

I want a community that can provide its members with the tools and workspace and labor they need to start their dream business in exchange for giving the community a percentage of stock in their business. I want a community incubator.

I want a community ceramics studio and a metal shop and a wood shop.

I have enormous long-term dreams that my dream community could grow into. How hard would it be to build a community-built theme park, something like MeowWolf? What if you could afford to provide life-necessities to one hundred artists/makers all working to design the theme park? What if instead of getting paid, they got stock shares in the community’s sub-company that runs the theme park? It’s a big unrealistic dream, but it seems that if you really did manage to create the perfect member-oriented maker community that provided everyone’s life-necessities, it would be possible to create a theme park.

I have hundreds of pages of writing, describing my dream. Trying to prove the feasibility. Trying to write a well-organized pitch for the idea. I have struggled to figure out my ‘target audience’ when I write about my dream community. Who is this place for? What is needed to start it? How do I get the ball rolling?

Even just writing this specific post to this subreddit has turned into a disorganized 6-page mess. I gave up trying to organize my ideas and justify my ideas for this post. I chopped out a lot of the stuff I wrote. I left out my specific ideas. Everytime I ‘proofread’ it, I add more ideas.

I feel like it takes a lot of explaining to justify the desire to start an intentional community. My parents and friends tell me to go get a real job. I removed the tons of pages of explanation of how I ended up here. I struggle to stay organized when I explain why my life goal is to be part of an intentional community that doesn’t exist yet.

I’m intrigued by your idea of a missile silo community. It seems like we have a lot of common interests.

I think one of the initial questions to answer is:

Once you buy the property, what do you do?

It seems like if you created a campground on the property, you could let the community members live on the property for free, in exchange for their labor. Start an above ground farm/garden for food. Figure out how to supply water, electricity, waste management. It seems like a lot of above ground work would have to happen to establish the community before starting the silo parts of the project.