We’re glad you made it! This is a blog devoted to income-sharing communities, also known as communes. It is a huge repository of information about communal living, income-sharing, and even sharing in general. It is not focused on other kinds of communities, although we do have some information about communities in general, as well as what you need to know about starting a community or joining a community. For more information about other kinds of intentional communities or community living in general, you should check out the Foundation for Intentional Community.
For those truly interested in the idea of income-sharing and income-sharing communities, this site is a treasure trove. We have over a thousand posts here on various aspects of communal living, including lots of reports about various aspects of life in the communes, as well as thoughts and essays about sharing income as well as life. And pictures! There are lots of pictures here.
For those who think that this is some idea that will never work and all the communes vanished with the sixties, you can read about Twin Oaks which has been up and running for fifty-eight years now, and East Wind which is celebrating its fiftieth-first anniversary this year. (2025) Our goal here isn’t to convince you to join or start an income-sharing community (although that would be great). Our goal is to let you know that income-sharing is not only possible, but it really isn’t that difficult.
If you are new here, we have a welcome page with more information about what’s on this blog and how to use this site.
We’re still catching up on November Facebook posts. These are from late in the month.
Twin Oaks has been doing a lot of remodeling. Here they have created a new food processing area in what they are calling their CHOP kitchen.
This did very, very well on Facebook, with seventeen likes, eleven loves, a share, a reach of just over four hundred, and apparently six hundred and forty-nine views.
SESE wanted to remind everyone that you can now plant various alliums (ie, onions, garlic, and shallots).
This post got an amazing amount of traction. There were seven likes, six sads, four loves, three cares, two wows, seven comments, and five shares. It also had a reach of over a thousand and one thousand nine hundred and thirty-six views. Sometimes bad news gets a lot of reaction.
Finally, East Wind posted a video about roasting cashews.
This did very well on Facebook, with eighteen likes (including East Wind Nut Butters), six loves, a reach of almost three hundred and seventy, and (according to Facebook) six hundred and six views.
East Wind Community writes: “We embraced the beginning of winter with a beautiful sunny Artmas exchange. All participants crafted a handmade creation of their choosing (any art medium) to be exchanged with another member.
The energy radiating from person to person as gifts were being exchanged was pure magic A lovely way to welcome winter solstice
I often write about communities as “laboratories for social change”. I see them both as experiments and as models for what we could create if we really wanted to live differently.
As far as I’m concerned we need a radically different society, one where we value diversity, equality, and inclusion (which the current administration seems to think is a human rights violation), and where we share what we have to make everyone stronger, and where we take care of those on the margins. I’ve talked about the work of building a new way of living as (to quote the IWW constitution) “…forming the structure of the new society in the shell of the old.”
I just read an interview by Andrew Boyd with adrienne maree brown (in his intense book on climate change, I Want a Better Catastrophe). He summarizes what she has been saying to him as “…to navigate the crises that are coming at us, we’re going to need many teams, many community networks, that have that kind of trust, that can respond with versatility and speed and unity…”
And she responds, “Exactly.”
If we are going to navigate the crises ahead and create a new society in the process, we are going to need more than simply building and living in communes. Yes, I think we will definitely need communes, but we will also need all sorts of other communities, a large variety of cooperative enterprises, lots of alternative forms of energy, building, farming, health care, and economic structures—and many other new ways of doing things. But beyond these scattered efforts, we are going to need to find ways to connect them all. The two that I can think of right away are networking and mutual aid.
And on a more local (and I think deeper) level are the emerging clusters of communities in places like Louisa County,Virginia, and Rutledge, Missouri. Perhaps the next step is to network the networks.
But more important than this is combining it with mutual aid. As I’ve written, mutual aid extends income-sharing. It also makes networks stronger. And as we create strong networks where we care for each other, we also create new social structures, “…forming the structure of the new society…”
Okay, now we are at mid-November in terms of Facebook posts, with a bunch of posts, all of which I think are interesting (okay, I think all our posts are interesting) and all of which did well–and some did very, very well.
The post that did the best is the one that’s up first, from Twin Oaks which seems to be creating a lot of new businesses these days.
Apparently this was very interesting to a lot of folks because this post got twenty-three likes, seven loves, two comments, with a reach of almost six hundred and ninety and a thousand and sixteen views. Impressive!
SESE was thinking about the season.
This post didn’t do nearly as well, with only three likes, but it still had a respectible reach of over a hundred and sixty and had two hundred and forty-seven views.
We’ve already published a bunch of pictures from the Alpha Farm wedding but this was where and how we introduced it on Facebook with a few pictures that aren’t in any of the other posts.
While this post did quite well on Facebook, it’s interesting that the post on the shrouds got almost double the number. Do people really prefer funeral arrangements to weddings? Anyway, six likes, five loves, a reach of more than three hundred and twenty, and five hundred and sixty views.
Finally, for all of Twin Oaks’ different business, right now their stake in the ‘SEEDS BIZ’ is the most profitable for them.
(Incidentally, this month–January–is the busiest month for selling seed and both Twin Oaks and Acorn are usually very occupied with that.)
This post did pretty well, with thirteen likes, three loves, a reach of nearly two hundred and seventy, and four hundred and nine views.
We have printed pictures from the wedding at Alpha Farm before. Here’s more pictures, this time from the actual ceremony, including them literally tying the knot.
Living Energy Farm November – December 2025 Newsletter
New Protocol for Donating to Our Work We can now process tax-deductible donations ourselves through Living Energy Lights website at livingenergylights.com. If you’re thinking about making charitable donations this year, please keep us in mind. Sometimes people give money directly to Living Energy Farm. That’s fine too, if you don’t need the tax deduction. We are no longer processing donations through Virginia Organizing. (We still think they are a great organization!)
Living Energy Lights is Now a NonProfit! We first conceived of Living Energy Lights as a LLC that would make money for LEF by building and selling DC equipment, like our solar cookers. Over the years, it has become clear that we were putting the cart before the horse by marketing products that require a context like the Direct Drive DC Microgrid (D3M) to really shine. While we have not stopped building and selling DC equipment, the focus of Living Energy Lights has shifted to education, consultations, and other ways of supporting D3M installations. Given that most people interested in D3M are not wealthy, this has not been profitable work. This year, the IRS made it official by granting Living Energy Lights 501(c)3 status. This will be useful in allowing us to directly receive donations, and also lowering some of our overhead costs. We’ve rebuilt the livingenergylights.com website to reflect the restructuring of our organization. Check it out!
Lucy with Miguel at the coconut farm in SE Puerto Rico where he lives and works with his wife Dinora. Miguel always keeps the volunteers stoked with coconut water!
Spreading Durable and Inexpensive DC Microgrids In Puerto Rico As we head to press, our Puerto Rican installers, Millo and Ricardo, are joined by John and Lucy from our stateside team for an installation that expands on a project we did in January 2024 at Urbe Apie, which works on urban revival to reclaim abandoned and neglected spaces in downtown Caguas. We installed a pump, fridge and charging station in their community garden, Huerto Feliz, two years ago. There is a building called Valle Garita next to the garden that is also in the care of Urbe Apie. They are transitioning the third floorinto a hostel and transition space for people in need. These structures are independent from the city utilities. Now the aforementioned crew is working on a project is to install lights, charging facilities and refrigeration for the hostel. Lucy and John first visited our friends Miguel and Dinorah before starting the project in Caguas. (You may remember we did a fundraiser specifically focused on helping them set up D3M on their coconut farm.) Miguel and Dinorah are elders, farmers, and lifelong environmental activists. Their coconut farm in southeastern PR is the site of one of our biggest Puerto Rican installations, done in February 2023. It’s a magical place just across the street from the Caribbean Sea, but also one of the most challenging climates we’ve worked in. The high heat, humidity and salt in the air are extremely corrosive. On return visits, we have been doing repairs to their plumbing and electrical while scheming ways to add more protection to electrical connections and exposed steel (like their pressure tank). We’re keeping their system working, and it’s teaching us a lot about the need for local skill building.
Miguel and John assessing the wellhead plumbing at the coconut farm.
We began our partnership in Puerto Rico with El Departamento de la Comida, a Puerto Rican food sovereignty organization, in 2022. Puerto Rico is infamous for its frequent apagones (blackouts) and the high cost of electricity. At the time we thought that in this context, D3M would spread by its own economic merits once it was established. This has not turned out to be the case. The sunk investment everyone has in AC appliances is a hard nut to crack. The flood of cheap batteries coming out of China doesn’t help the (short term) economic argument, either. Regardless of the reason, it’s now clear that while some people want D3M in Puerto Rico, the mass adoption we were hoping for is not manifesting there any more than it is here in the US. We are still looking for a context where D3M will spread on its own economic merits. Perhaps this will be true in Sub-Saharan Africa, or in the US or Puerto Rico as the power grid gets more expensive and unstable. For now, the folks building D3M in Puerto Rico are mostly activists motivated by political and ecological concerns, just like in the US. We have built strong relationships in Puerto Rico, and we are keeping a modest supply of materials in shipping container that we have parked at a friend’s farm. We are continuing to support community organizations in Puerto Rico as opportunities arise, and as resources allow.
Ricardo bringing a nickel iron battery box out of storage for use at Urbe Apie in Caguas Puerto Rico.
Spreading Durable and Inexpensive DC Microgrids in Sierra Leone As we mentioned in the last newsletter, our friend Ryan (a young electrical engineer from Cal Poly with a burning enthusiasm for D3M) has been traveling in Africa. He is supporting several projects, not the least of which is a solar conversion of a food supplement plant in Sierra Leone run by Project Peanut Butter (PPB). That plant produces peanut butter based supplements for malnourished children at a rate of 45,000 packets per week (!). Given the weakness of local grid power, the PPB plant runs on a 45 KW generator. Translate, a big unreliable machine that burns money at a fairly rapid rate. Ryan has made his first visit to the plant. Ironically enough, the generator was broken for over a week while he was there, which shut down production and slowed the process of gathering needed data. Using the information from that first trip, Ryan and Alexis are making plans for a phased conversion of the plant. The PPB products save thousands of lives, so interrupting production is not an option (though interrupted production is the current state of things). The first phase of our plan is to gather a lot more data, and test downsizing some motors. It was no surprise that everything in the PPB plant appears to be greatly over-sized. That is the standard across the grid powered economy, across the world. This is a huge issue that just gets left out of all the hoopla about “renewable energy.” The bottom line is that, outside of massive industries such as metal smelting or oil refining, labor costs are the primary expense for most businesses. Material costs come next, and energy is generally a very small fraction of total operating costs. The easiest thing for the engineers who design factories to do is to simply make everything grid powered and oversize it all a bit. Then it all works, and the engineers get to tally it on their resumes. But the net impact is that energy systems all over a gridpowered economy are over-sized, and often obscenely inefficient. The measured power use at PPB runs from 1/5th to 1/10th the name-plate rating on most of the motors(!) But before we charge forward with some puny little solar motors, we need to start swapping one or two motors at a time so we can assess results. In this case, a cheap little gizmo called a rectifier comes in handy. That’s a thing that costs a few bucks and allows us to run DC motors on AC. That will allow us to keep the generator running while we work on conversion and test results.
The first industrial DC motor on its way to Sierra Leone. It’s 3 horsepower, nearly 3 feet long, 125 pounds. Retails for $4,000. We got a new one at surplus for $580 delivered.
Ryan will be back in Sierra Leone in a few days. He will be gathering much more detailed data on the needs and facilities at the PPB plant. He will also set up a modest solar rack and test at least one motor swap. Money has already been allocated to cover this phase (from PPB, not us, mostly). From there, we will look at the results of our work, and plan the next phase. That will involve swapping more motors and machines to run direct drive solar. We will probably set up a high voltage battery set to flatten the curve of solar supply. Although the average solar supply is high in Sierra Leone, the weather is quite cloudy for significant parts of the year. We will likely keep the big generator in place as emergency backup. Given the high voltage battery setup, why not just run an inverter? There are two reasons. The first is that a conventional solar kit is far more complex (with inverters and what not). One of the engineers peripherally involved in the project is suggesting precisely that — inverters and ‘variable frequency drives (VFDs).’ That’s fancy talk for some very complex electronics. A straight DC system is dramatically simpler, and that simplicity translates into reliability over the long run. The second reason to avoid a conventional inverter setup (with or without the VFDs) is that the such a system has zero flexibility. It’s either off or on. A DC system tolerates changes in supply, changes in weather, with no electronics whatsoever. At the end of the day, the financial impacts of these choices will tell the real story. As Ryan and I (Alexis) work our way through this re-design process, it is clear and personal that D3M is a radical improvement in terms of efficiency, reliability, and reduced environmental impact, but it’s not nearly as straightforward as AC power, and puts a lot of potential risk back on the designers. This process sharpens the focus on why the mainstream engineering world avoids the level of detailed energy analysis that Ryan and I are undertaking. In the long run, D3M could shut down the grid and all of it’s huge environmental liabilities. In the short run, we are swimming against the current.
Nika learning how to make parts on a solar direct drive lathe at LEF.
The Rosenberg Differential Controller Circuit Deb and Alexis have been working on finishing up the work on taking Magnolia off grid. (Magnolia is a house about a mile away from LEF proper that we own.) We have run into an issue in that our standard direct drive solar hot water setup was not working just right (for reasons that would be a bit tedious to explain…) We need the pumps to only run when the solar hot water collectors are hot enough, not any time the sun is out. One can find a number of ‘differential controllers’ that do just that, except they are all complex, costing hundreds of dollars, and they run on AC. We found a $25 low voltage differential controller on Ebay from Romania. Great — except it doesn’t work. David (Rosenberg) has been a member at LEF for a couple of years, and he is our electronics wizard. So we asked him to build us a simpler one — and he did! Two slightly different kinds in fact, one to run the hot water system, and one to run the space heating. They both work great. Don’t know if we will market the Rosenberg Differential Controller Circuit, but it is quite simple, cheap, and effective — just the way we like it. And there is nothing else like it on the market. Thanks David!
Spreading Direct Drive DC Microgrids — A Sober Look at Obstacles and Opportunities When Ryan (same as aforementioned) was at LEF this past summer, we spoke at length about the spread of D3M. The reality is that renewable energy does not really compete with grid power because the latter is so effective at meeting energy demands around the clock, and broader environmental concerns are a weak component of marketing. It’s a lot like trying to get people to eat healthier food when the less healthy stuff tastes so good. Carrying through with that analogy, we need to find people who are energy hungry. We have looked for that in various locations, and the results are cataloged in this and prior newsletters. The largest group of energy poor people on the planet are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ideology aside, if a village somewhere in Africa were running several small gas or diesel engines to run generators, pump water, grind grain, etc, then we could shut down those engines. D3M would represent a dramatically cheaper energy source, ecological concerns aside. So I asked Ryan to look for our ‘mythical African village’ that might benefit from a D3M conversion. Below is an email he sent recently.
Hello Alexis, The mythical African village has of course been on my mind this whole trip, I was especially optimistic about visiting Tanzania for this reason.
So far I have not been able to identify anything as ideal as you hope, there are of course many challenges. One of the main challenges is that there’s not really any cohesive small village. I’ve seen very few people living in tight communities, and those who do are just so poor that they barely have existing sources of energy. There’s really no middle ground where people are both living in acommunity and doing industrial scale work like at LEF. Any place where there is a more cohesive community doesn’t have electricity, and if they do it’s one single solar panel and tiny lead acid battery on a single home.
What I have seen are farms that have maybe one diesel machine, and never more than one, and are using firewood/charcoal for cooking. This could be a good avenue for installations. I think farms would really benefit from this. The only oddity of farms that I’ve seen is that they don’t do any post processing of goods that I can see. Places that grow corn don’t have mills, and people who have diesel mills have that one single machine as their entire business. I think subsistence farming is quite rare, and when it’s done it’s out of a complete lack of money and likely not so much extra time to be dealing with other things.
(W)hen I say “hey we’ve got this idea for solar that could run your corn mill for free”, they just say, “oh yea solar would be great so we can have a TV and refrigerator and sound system etc…” The paradigm of electricity here is the exact same as the US, bringing convenience and comfort, so in broad strokes it’s really hard for people to understand that electricity can do other things I think.
I think PPB is really the home run DDS (D3M) installation, but of course that’s far out of the scope of anything most Africans would be able to design, manage, upkeep, or have the money to construct.
Ryan’s email is both instructive and sobering. It is great that he is willing to put in so much effort to make the PPB solarization happen. It is also a bit discouraging to realize that our mythical village where we might shut down multiple gas or diesel engines and serve the whole village with a modest set of solar panels may be hard to find. That said, we have to keep doing what we can. Our current plan is to build out the PPB project. We will try to document the process in a manner that will hopefully make it appealing to other entities running production facilities in areas with poor or no grid power. Such entities would see the financial benefits of D3M and make decisions based on the financial considerations, not broader ecological concern necessarily. As per Ryan’s email, shutting down a single grain mill in a village in Tanzania (or elsewhere) would also be financially beneficial if that mill operates many hours per week. Perhaps we will pursue farm conversions as well. We also talk quite a bit at LEF about the project to build Energy Independent Cooperative Housing here in the U.S. That would look like shared wall housing (like condos) with shared energy systems like we have at LEF. It seems that it is rare, even on a global scale, to find energy systems that are shared on the community level. Perhaps building models here could have farther reaching impacts. We have spoken with quite a few interested parties and potential funders, though there do not appear to be any big opportunities on the near horizon. As much as we are trying to build better energy systems, we are trying to build a culture of people who relate to energy differently. That is a big mountain that may take a while to climb.
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A screech owl who took up residence in our barn for a bit. Some welcomed rodent control, and a reason to leave old trees standing (for nest sites).
Living Energy Farm is a project to build a demonstration farm, community, and education center in Louisa County that uses no fossil fuels. For more information see our website http://www.livingenergyfarm.org, or contact us at livingenergyfarm@gmail.com or Living Energy Farm, 1022 Bibb Store Rd, Louisa VA, 23093. Living Energy Lights is the nonprofit outreach arm of our project. Donations to LEL are tax deductible. NOTE, THE PROCESS OF DONATING TO OUR WORK HAS CHANGED. Click here to make a tax deductible donation to support our work. (That’s the Living Energy Lights website, livingenergylights.com)
As usual on Fridays, I am reposting some of our Facebook content. Having taken a month off, at this point the content is from early last November.
In my last Friday post, I pointed out that I didn’t understand the difference on Facebook between what they call “Reach” and what they called “Views”. The Reach number comes up when I look at what they display on my content page (and that’s what I’ve been putting in these Friday posts). However, when I click on a particular post info on the content page, it displays more information, including Views. There’s a bit of difference between Reach and Views and often quite a bit of difference. I’m still trying to figure out what information I want to put in these posts. In the last post, I put pictures of both the Reach and the Views, which is a bit more work for me. (Thanks, Facebook!) I said I’d think about it while Commune Life was dormant and come back with something. For now, I am only going to publish the pictures of the Reach numbers, but I will mention the Views number.
It was a quiet week for the communities. Meanwhile, I’ve started posting on Mastodon as well as here and Facebook. (Our Mastodon feed can be accessed here.) My friend “ts” who is on Mastodon got me onto it. They also pointed me to this article after I posted about needs.
I thought this was a really interesting article, but it didn’t inspire a lot of interest. It got three likes and a Reach of only seventy although clicking on the info said that it got a hundred and thirty views.
SESE posted about how they store their seeds.
As opposed to the last post, this did very, very well, with twenty-four likes, eleven loves, four comments, and one share, plus a Reach of five hundred and fifty-five and Views of nine hundred and two!
Finally, East Wind posted about a truck filled with squash.
This post also did very, very well. (Our posts lately seem to either have really great numbers or lousy ones.) This got thirty-four likes, nine loves, one comment, one share, and a Reach of eight hundred and sixty-one which somehow became one thousand three hundred and fifty-eight Views. Not bad for getting the word out.
We’re back and into a new year. I won’t say ‘happy new year’ because there are too many unhappy things going on right now. Instead, paraphrasing my lovely friend Susan, I am going to wish everyone ‘the best possible year’. But I do want to talk about hope in the new year.
In spite of everything, there’s a lot of hopeful things going on. I do think that the communes are a source of hope. It’s amazing to me that Twin Oaks has been around for fifty-eight years with its version of radical sharing and East Wind for fifty-two. I’m glad that the Federation of Egalitarian Communities has been revived and it’s exciting that Alpha Farm (which has actually been around for fifty-three years) is on track to become a full member of it. I’m grateful for communities like Living Energy Farm which helps poor communities around the planet go off the grid, Serenity Solidarity which reaches out to and helps marginalized folks, and Acorn Community which held a Roots and Resilience conference to connect BIPOC farmers and intentional communities. I do think that income-sharing communities are a model for a different way that we all could be living.
But beyond the communes, the vast array of intentional communities offer a lot of possibilities. I’m also excited about many different ways of sharing, including people who see libraries as a direction for rebuilding society. However, the things that I’m most excited about these days are networking and mutual aid. Communes and communities are important but networking and mutual aid take things beyond a small group of people living together to reaching out beyond themselves.
I hope to talk about all these things in the year ahead, along with reposting and reporting about all manner of things happening in the communes. Now, into the year ahead…
I’ve developed this schedule for Commune Life where I take off the months of August and December, so I can travel and do things. So I am wrapping up for the year here. I’m hoping that all our readers do something to celebrate the change of the season and we will return in 2026, with lots more posts on communes, communities, communal living, creating community, income-sharing, all kinds of sharing, and mutual aid. See you next year!
I really don’t understand Facebook. I have been posting what FB calls “Reach” and claiming that was the number of views. I just discovered that there are more statistics that can be seen if you do the right things and it gives the number of views, which is quite different. For this post I’m going to mention both the “Reach” and the “Views” and try to figure out what I will do in the future.
This is about the FB posts from the end of October/beginning of November. There wasn’t much posted from the communes so I reposted some older pictures and blog posts and so will only include a post from SESE, something I found on the LEF website, and a question I wrote for a Facebook post.
SESE posted about soil tests, which are important if you want to grow things.
This post didn’t do that well, it got only two likes and a Reach of ninety-three–but then Facebook claims elsewhere that it got a hundred and forty-one views.
Looking for stuff to post, I happened along LEF’s website and noted that they had a section on joining LEF.
This post did pretty good, with five likes, a love, a share, a Reach of two hundred and fourteen, and three hundred and twenty-two views.
Finally, every so often (especially when I’m desperate for things to post on FB), I ask a question and invite comments. If I don’t do it too often it usually gets a bunch of comments and views–and sometimes a lot of comments and views if I ask a controversial question. This question wasn’t controversial, but it still got a fair number of comments and the Reach and Views was pretty good.
Here’s the responses I got:
As you can see, it only got two likes and a love, but it got nine comments, a Reach of two hundred and eighty-six, and five hundred and three Views, which really makes me wonder what the difference between Reach and Views is.
. All participants crafted a handmade cr
magic
commune life 