Are Intentional Communities the Way Forward? Meet the Young People Opting Out of Society and Building Utopia For Themselves

Welcome to Group Project, a series on the many ways young people are building and engaging with community. From queer resistance to finding new hobbies to forging alternate paths, working together is more important than ever. Here's how young people are getting off their phones and seeking community IRL.

On one of the first nice days of spring in New England, Madison Healey, Jo Fuchs, and Gabriel Futterman sit around a wooden table in Kailasha house, the space they share with four others, picking at a bountiful lunch and deep in conversation about what it means to live in a place like this.

Sun washes through a large bank of windows in the rear of the house, blanketing the numerous plants and multicolored textiles in the open-concept living and dining rooms with its warmth. The space is bright, big, and quite lovely, qualities you might not guess from the unassuming exterior — aging wood coats the outside of the home, and there’s no decoration to speak of. At the table, Healey, whose deep green tank top and floral skirt mirror the tulip stems emerging from the freshly thawed ground outside, talks about the importance of conflict resolution, while Futterman talks about his larger utopian vision. They are residents of the Sirius Community in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, an intentional community and ecovillage centered around sustainable living.

Sirius is one of thousands of intentional communities across the country and the world, where people who often share values congregate to live in a more sustainable, communal way. Intentional communities are incredibly diverse, and there are many ways of building these kinds of groups — it’s likely that no two look the same. Still, they hinge on a group of people sharing both space and ideas, working toward a common goal. If mainstream society is largely individualistic, encouraging single people or families to rely on themselves for their needs, intentional community is about refilling your neighbor’s cup, and knowing they’ll do the same for you.

But Healey, 30, Fuchs, 22, and Futterman, 25, are in the minority in intentional communities at large. While young people lead the intentional community movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, it’s less common now to see swaths of people in their late teens or early 20s opt for this kind of life. Still, young people online seem to be interested, even if it’s only expressed through internet trends. The rise of the cottagecore aesthetic and interest in trad wife content is often rooted (at least in part) in an attraction to a “simpler” life, one less dependent on technology and more connected to nature and tradition. For people in intentional communities, their lifestyle may be an alternative to a mainstream that many young people see as increasingly broken.

“What we’re noticing in more dominant trends are these basic things we understand: Housing sucks, it’s hard to find, it’s not affordable, we can't live alone,” says Kim Kanney, executive director of the Foundation for Intentional Community, a “resource hub” for intentional communities. “[Youth today are] waking up to the idea that we need to do this differently.”

That’s what brought Futterman to Sirius, and why he wants to see interest in intentional community spread.

“The reason I'm here is not because it's a comfortable, beautiful, lovely place to live — which it is — but because it is, for me, an act of prefiguration. That means [to] live now what you want to see in the future, build what you're working for post-revolution into the act of revolution and into all of your actions,” he says. “When that system crumbles and falls apart, [it’s about making sure] there is an alternative for people to go to.”

“Living Laboratories”

Futterman sees intentional communities as sites of “utopian experimentation,” which Kanney affirms. Kanney refers to intentional communities as “living laboratories.”

“Intentional community is, by definition, living with a group of people on shared land or housing and doing so intentionally, so that you're writing agreements, have a governance system, and structuring it,” she says. Still, intentional communities can take a vast array of forms.

You might be most familiar with this concept through the hippie communes of the 1960s and 70s, but that’s not the only model for these groups, nor the first. According to Community Finders, the first intentional community in recorded history was Homakoeion, a vegetarian group that formed in 525 BCE. Now, intentional communities may be nestled in the woods like Sirius, or may form in bustling city centers. Intentional communities might require residents to share their income, or have residents make their own money. Some may function largely off-grid while others very much rely on city services.

Sirius is somewhere in the middle. It’s located about 20 minutes outside Amherst, Massachusetts, a busy college town, and has electricity and internet. Still, no one knew whether you could get a pizza delivered on a Friday night (“no one has tried”). They grow a lot of their own food and buy the rest from the grocery store, cooking community meals most nights. Residents work, but typically not full time — Fuchs says she lives “an incredibly luxurious life” under the poverty line. Community members are committed to at least four hours of volunteer work at Sirius each week, and there’s a variety of weekly events and meetings.

The 90-acre community, founded in 1978, houses about 30 people, and when Healey, Futterman, and Fuchs arrived, most of the existing community wouldn’t have qualified as youth. This was one reason why Futterman didn’t initially see it as the ideal place to build his utopian vision.

“We didn't think Sirius would be the right place,” Futterman says, explaining that he, Healey, Fuchs, and some others first tried to start their own venture instead of moving directly to Sirius. “There weren't a lot of young people, it was more of an aging community. There was economic hardship because [of COVID], and also just some of the older folks — this may not be true still — but some of the older folks weren’t as interested in the authentic relating, [in] real connective things.”

Founded by members of the Scottish Findhorn Community on principles of spirituality and sustainability, Fuchs describes Sirius as “very experimental” at the beginning. As the community aged, its culture understandably became more ingrained. Healey was the first of the group to arrive at Sirius in 2020, when she was one of the only young people in the community. After living in Namibia with the Peace Corps, Healey needed somewhere to go when COVID hit and all Peace Corps volunteers got sent home. She’d been interested in tiny homes, then in homesteading, then she discovered intentional community (this, she says, is a pretty typical pipeline).

“I have always felt like I'm wanting to move more slowly and I'm wanting more intimacy, and I am just craving that,” she says about why she sought out Sirius.

Healey found deep value in the intergenerational community at Sirius. For the first time in her life, Healey says she forged relationships with people much older than her, and for a while, she didn’t really notice that she wasn’t around other people her age. After about a year, though, Healey says she started trying to make connections with people her age outside of Sirius. That’s how she met Futterman and Fuchs, and how they ended up moving to Sirius.

“I had a friend here, and then I made friends here and really, really vibed with the way of living,” Fuchs says.

But before Futterman and Fuchs moved in, they, along with Healey and some other friends, tried their hand at starting their own intentional community. For a year and a half, the group of young people plotted — often in a whimsical cottage toward the back of the Sirius property — about how to start their own group, spelling out their vision based on travel to other communities and their shared values. But because of a number of things — not limited to money, power, and group conflict — the vision fell apart. That’s when, Futterman says, they realized that a community is whatever its members make it. Yes, they would inherit the baggage of a community that’s existed for so long, but they’d also inherit its strengths.

“More of us started moving here and living here, and then we're like, why don't we just turn this community into our vision for what we would really want to live in?” Futterman says. Now, he says the community is pretty evenly distributed age-wise — he estimates that about one-third of residents are under 40.

This healthy mix of ages gave way to what Fuchs calls the “newer edge of Sirius,” the people in the community who want to push the envelope and bring back the group’s experimental roots. It’s not that this newer edge wants to change the community completely — Healey, Fuchs, and Futterman all stress the value of learning from elders and of investing time and work into this place that they all love. And, they stress that having a distribution of different ages is crucial — intergenerationality is important in these spaces, they agreed. But there is some tension, Futterman says, between the more progressive cohort and some of the community members who are more stuck in their ways. But that tension, he says, is healthy — but even more so, it’s understandable.

“I think this is true in almost all communities: The folks that have been here for 40 plus years, they see young people come and go all the time. Part of that nature is just that young people are more prone to figuring their lives out and coming and going always,” Futterman says. “But part of it is … if you expect young people to come and go, you're not going to want to give them these long-term responsibilities. You're not going to really want to build a relationship with them. And that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Futterman clarifies that it’s not necessarily a young versus old thing. Some “supporting elders” are on board with the progressive vision and are ready to experiment, and some younger people in the community want to maintain the status quo. But Futterman, Healey, and Fuchs are part of a largely young cohort at Sirius trying to make some change. The seven people who share Kailasha house largely make up that cohort, which has its own culture. They have created their own in-house rules, they have regular house meetings to check in and connect with one another, and they test-drive ideas that they’d like to see in the larger community to see how they might work in practice.

“Here, we can set our own model and we can share vulnerably with each other and be open and express what's real and alive in our hearts,” Fuchs says. “A lot of new things have been born in this house and iterated upon.”

Though their smaller group doesn’t always agree, Futterman says they share a “radical collective vibe.”

“Tons of intentional communities are really just co-housing. Some people just live together, but they spend all their time by themselves and they buy their own food and they have their own lives. We're trying to have more community practices, spend more time together. We cook dinners and have dinners together a lot and we have Sundays all together,” he says. “And we try to really be into each other's lives and really be into each other's emotional space. And I think we want that for the rest of the community.”

Taking the off-grid lifestyle online

Julia Heim, 30, first came to intentional community after college, when she discovered Rainbow Gatherings while backpacking in Europe. These gatherings are a sort of pop-up community, a temporary celebration. Intentional communities, Heim felt, were a similar way of living, disconnected from modern problems and more in tune with the people around her.

“I fell in love with living in community and spending each day living so closely to other people. It’s really good for my mental health to have my community be people who I was present with in real time,” she says. “Anytime I was separating myself from my phone and going into nature with people, I was finding a whole new state of being.”

After a Rainbow Gathering, Heim and her partner Tree started traveling to different communities, which is when they found The Garden, a community in Tennessee that’s part of The People’s Project, a mutual aid network and effort to create and grow sustainable communities. The pair are regulars at The Garden, but they don’t live there full time — they travel from community to community, documenting their lifestyle on social media.

“We want to show people that this is an alternative lifestyle that’s possible,” Heim says, explaining why she vlogs her intentional community lifestyle (even though part of her attraction to intentional community is the disconnection from phones and technology). And, that content is really popular online. “I made tons of content about The Garden and it all went viral,” she says. “When we first got to The Garden, we were probably the youngest ones there. We were 25, 26. Now, some of our close friends are in their early 20’s. They come because they’re seeing it on social media.”

The Garden, which was talked about in a 2023 docuseries called The Garden: Commune or Cult, did become quite popular on TikTok. The show heavily featured Heim and Tree and documented an offshoot of the community located in Missouri, but mainly endeavored to determine whether or not the group is a cult. (For the record, there’s no evidence that The Garden is a cult. “It’s just people sharing land,” Heim says. This is a common stereotype that intentional communities face, but that more often than not is baseless.) The virality picked up after Tree posted a TikTok tour of The Garden, but that also invited criticism and speculation. People online started investigating the group, trying to determine whether or not it was a cult.

The Garden’s social media popularity has brought the community some strife, and it closed its doors to the public for a while because of it. But Heim says sharing her lifestyle online is a way to call attention to intentional community, and to strengthen the network of these kinds of groups. Because she doesn’t live full time in any one place right now, Heim sees her role as being a bridge between communities.

“The idea of these communities is to be self-sufficient outside of the mainstream. The more they’re working together, the closer they’re getting to that,” she says. “If people can move from community to community without leaving the movement, it strengthens the places in being autonomous. The network weaving between the spaces is part of it.”

Calling attention to intentional community on social media has made more young people aware of this kind of lifestyle, but according to Emeshe Amade, an intentional community member, there’s not always overlap between people who might engage with intentional community content online and those who will actually pick up and move to one.

“Following someone on TikTok is a lot easier than radically changing your lifestyle,” she says.

Using an outhouse is the easy part

Amade, 27, lives at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, an intentional community in Rutledge, Missouri. Her journey with intentional community started when she was around 19. “I think I mentioned in passing, ‘I want to end up living in a hippie commune somewhere,’” Amade says. “Someone told me, ‘you know people actually do that?’”

From there, Amade started researching communities, and ended up applying for a work exchange at Dancing Rabbit. She quickly fell in love with both the community and the lifestyle. She slept in her tent at night and worked in the community during the day, but her work felt outside the “capitalist framework of, ‘I need to track my hours.’” There weren’t many mirrors around the community, and Amade says that felt healing, a way to break away from societal expectations around appearance. Her work and life at Dancing Rabbit lent Amade greater meaning.

“I had been a backpacking guide before that, so I enjoyed living closer with the natural world and living a simpler life, having less stuff,” she says. “In a lot of ways I find the modern society and milieu to feel very hollow. I wanted to live out my values in a deeper, more meaningful way.”

Amade grew up in rural Colorado, but she says adjusting to the physical lifestyle at Dancing Rabbit wasn’t difficult. The biggest challenge, she says, is the social dynamic of living in a community.

“I feel like a lot of people think of the physical aspects — using an outhouse instead of having indoor plumbing, or I have to walk and get water instead of having running water. The thing that is most challenging for most people is to learn how to navigate the social dynamics of living in a larger community,” she says. “A lot of us don’t grow up learning the skills of how to do that.”

Living in community, Amade says, is like having roommates on steroids. Everyone comes from a different background, has different ideas, and different styles of communication. Like living with roommates, when conflict arises, it often must be hashed out face-to-face, but unlike with roommates, there might be dozens of people involved, rather than just a few.

Healey from Sirius Community says conflict resolution is a big part of life in intentional communities, and it’s a skill everyone has to learn.

“We're all having an emotional experience all the time, and it can't just be about me and my emotional experience dominating, and me getting my needs met. I need to be able to be like, ‘okay, I would really like for this. That will help me settle a lot. And is that okay for you? Oh, if not, well what could we do?’” Healey says, modeling the kind of communication required for conflict resolution. “It takes really incredible communication skills and self-awareness that, again, if you don't have the experience of living closely with other people and in an intentional way, it's like there are the blind spots that you have.”

Kanney, from the Foundation for Intentional Community, says living in intentional communities is helpful for young people specifically because you have to learn this set of skills.

“Living in community even for a short amount of time means you’re having the opportunity to develop really important skills for living cooperatively with other people. It’s a very idyllic concept, and it's also very difficult to do,” she says. “We aren’t taught those skills. That’s beneficial for everyone, particularly for young people coming out in adulthood and practicing those skills — or even failing at them.”

Now that she’s been living at Dancing Rabbit for a few years and has been flexing those skills, Amade can’t see herself going back to the mainstream — because even the social challenges intentional community presents seem more realistic for Amade than returning to what she sees as a fractured system.

“There [are] so many broken paradigms, there are so many systems that aren’t working. It’s hard for me to imagine how I would plug into those,” she says. “How could I survive and live a meaningful life in the mainstream and not live with my parents or have to work all the time?”

It’s that kind of question that could drive more young people to intentional community in the future.

“Disillusionment is the main thing.”

When Amade first moved to Dancing Rabbit, she thinks she was the only person in their 20s living there full time. Healey had a similar experience at Sirius. But if the numbers were extremely scant just a few years ago, both have seen more young people move to their communities since.

Amade wonders if perhaps the number of Gen Z-ers who identify as queer has something to do with that.

“I think there has been a boost in interest, particularly because a lot of younger folks we have coming through [Dancing Rabbit] identify as queer,” she says. “Maybe there’s a push for people who are looking for radical alternatives — that countercultural movement intersects with the intentional communities movement.”

In Futterman’s view, it’s exactly the drive for radical alternatives that is propelling young people toward intentional community. As traditional markers of adulthood — a stable career, marriage, and owning a home — become either less desirable or less realistic for young people, Futterman predicts more of his peers might seek alternatives in the form of community.

“The American dream is just dying. No one my age takes that seriously,” he says. Futterman, Fuchs, and Healey stress that intentional community isn’t the right fit for everyone, nor do they advocate for everyone to even consider this way of life. Still, Futterman says it may become more appealing if young people feel mainstream life doesn’t hold the same promise it once did for some. “We see the world around us crumbling and there's no certain future… or comfortable life set out for you. I think the people that are drawn to [intentional community] are the people that are like, ‘what's going to come next when the American dream, the economy, when all this sh*t just starts to hit the fan and collapse?’ What's going to survive and what's the most utopian ideal, beautiful thing that we want to succeed it? Disillusionment is the main thing.”

Fuchs came to intentional community after experiencing mental illness in high school, and after witnessing a school shooting. “That completely broke open my reality. I'm like, okay, school isn't safe anymore. School doesn't teach me the things I need to know to survive,” Fuchs remembers. That, combined with feelings of despair and loneliness, led Fuchs to reconsider her possibilities. Our current political moment, she says, could bring other people to that spot. “I feel like as the world is reaching more intense crises, more people are being put in that place of, this is a matter of survival to find something else.”

In a way, Kanney says this is already happening, if not for ideological purposes but out of sheer necessity. As housing gets more expensive and harder to find, young people are living together at increasing rates. Some, she says, are forming their own sort of communities, just based out of a shared house or apartment.

“They’re doing it more informally. They’re not coming out and saying, ‘we are creating an intentional community,’” she says. “They’re seeing things are broken and they’re just doing it.”

For Fuchs, spotting the broken things doesn’t necessarily mean embarking on a journey to fixing those same systems. Instead, it’s about acknowledging when it’s time to let something die, and build something entirely new in its place.

“We're reading a book together. We're in a book club that's reading Hospicing Modernity,” Fuchs says.

“It’s about letting this world die,” Futterman interjects. “Some parts of it die.”

“Yeah, [letting] modernity die,” Fuchs continues. “And being able to appreciate modernity as a creature that is dying and see her for her gifts, and also not let her dictate how we spend our lives.”

There’s a lot of philosophy and dreaming and thought that goes into living in intentional community, and back around the lunch table at Sirius, it’s clear just how much passion for living intimately among your neighbors goes into it, too. Somewhere in the midst of this talk, as lunch neared an end and the conversation dug deeper into the mechanics of community, Fuchs pauses to grab some water, filling a large mason jar to the top but only taking a small sip. As Futterman and Fuchs pick up the conversation again, Healey grabs the jar from in front of Fuchs, gulping down the rest of its contents. Before returning the jar, Healey refills it, placing it back by Fuchs, fully replenished.