Overview: Cambia Community is offering a supplemental Monday program to the Twin Oaks Communities Conference over the labor day weekend.
These are three separate parallel threads, two of which are offered at Cambia (which is less than 2 miles from Twin Oaks) and one (Business Plans) is at the Sophia House Conference Center (which is less than 1 mile from Twin Oaks). Each of these programs deals with different aspects of intentional community living. Specifically:
- Yurts: While these inexpensive dwellings are applicable in many settings, they are especiallyappropriate for intentional communities because oftheir DIY nature and their flexibility citing and mobility.
- Sustainability Exhibits: Intentional Communities are by their nature demonstrations of sustainability. Cambia’s museum trail and demonstration site is an access point for the public to interact with the why and the how of communities leading the way for sustainable future.
- Business Plans: Intentional Communities need to make money to survive. If you want to start your own worker coop there are known successful steps, including business plans.
Venue: Cambia Community is a tiny new income sharing community less than two miles from Twin Oaks with big ambitions. When Twin Oaks decided not to have a Monday program for the Communities Conference, we thought it was a great opportunity to invite participants to our place for Labor Day. Cambia is dedicated to promoting sustainability and whimsy. Come by, it might be your cup of tea.
YURT CONSTRUCTION – THEORY AND APPLICATION
This workshop is a study of yurt building that you will walk away from with the skills needed to build beautiful yurts for any climate and out of any materials you have access to. The skills you’ll be learning to build these artistic structures like wood bending, mortise and tenon, dynamic knotwork, and textile pattern design. We will also be talking about how these structures are part of modern culture, from the current state of nomadic Mongolians, to how you can avoid building codes with small, collapsible yurts.
This single day workshop has two parts. The shorter morning session will focus on the theoretical side of yurt history and design. The longer late morning and afternoon session will get participants out building different aspects of a real yurt on site.
Complete workshop description and presenter bio
Thumbs Cassidy is a peripatetic communard who is traveling across North America building yurts and mentoring in their construction. He is on the board of Next GEN, the youth chapter of the Global Ecovillage Network. He is an associate member of Cambia Community.
SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION EXHIBITS AND EXPERIENCES
This workshop harvests key accessible sustainability principles and presents them in fun and interactive exhibits. We will tour our outdoor museum trail and participate in a hands-on workshop focused on natural building, passive solar design, and alternative building technologies. You will learn key sustainability concepts, get your hands dirty mixing cob or clay plaster, balance your carbon footprint and use fun gadgets.
This workshop is for anyone interested in sustainability, but especially educators, curators of sustainability presentations, and people interested in building their own homes.
Click here for the full workshop description and presenters bio.
Sutherland has 6 years of experience building community, including an off-grid village (Praxis Community) in Northern California as well as Cambia Community. This includes the social as well as physical aspects of community building. She has experience in natural building, timber framing, cob, earthen floor, slip straw, waddle and daub, as well as conventional construction and framing. She is also a ropes course and team building facilitator, working with many groups from children with disabilities to military and corporate executives. Ella is a crafter, a writer, an artist and researcher of sustainability exhibits.
Gil Benmoshe is an innovator, designer, builder and an organizational entrepreneur. Gil has many years of experience creating community, landscape design for ideal human interaction, designing alternative energy systems, developing and facilitating educational cooperative content such as economic games and team building activities in various contexts including conferences, events, and professional settings. Gil has his graduate education in psychology and worked as a lecturer and a researcher in the California state university system.
WORKER COOP BUSINESS PLAN REVIEW & CLINIC
While this workshop is designed to stand alone, it also fits into previous workshops offered during thecommunities conference.
Sept 3 (Cambia Labor Day program) Worker Coop Business Plan Review & Clinic. Business plans will either be submitted in advance or developed over the previous two days at the Twin Oaks event. This workshop will review briefly each of the business plans which are being worked on both by the facilitator/experts leading the workshop and by the other start up designers. Based on this input a collection of recommendations will be made for how to improve the business plan, what kinds of support possibilities (financial and technical) exist and how to connect with them and what the best next steps might be.
Complete workshop description and presenter bio
Jim Johnson has spent over twenty years working with and for co-ops. He’s a co-founder of the Democracy At Work Network,and currently serves on DAWN’s Board of Governors. Jim is as a certified Peer Advisor, actively providing technical assistance to worker co-ops, start-ups. Through DAWN, he is a member of the Grassroots Economic Organizing media collective (www.geo.coop), which has been chronicles the worker co-op and solidarity economics movements around the world.