Winter 23/24 Update
It's been a busy winter so far but we're making good progress on our path towards establishing a resident-developed full-time community for Maine creatives. After wrapping up our open call process in December, we are thrilled to announce that we brought on six new members to our core planning team this January. You can read more about our new team members here. Please join us in welcoming them!
Partial workgroup photo from Feb. mtg at De'Bramble Gallery in Freeport.
From left: Siri, Chris, Peter, Sam, and Brooke B.
And a huge thank you to everyone who shared this open call and applied. We're grateful to each and every one of you. We are now doing some internal planning and learning in order to move critical pieces of this project forward as outlined in the updated project summary. We hope to host more community outreach events again later on in 2024 and 2025.
In January, we attended an Intentional Community Planning Forum where we met groups from Maine and beyond who are interested in or already developing their own communities. Some of the local projects we connected with are: Tiny Sol-ar Ecovillage, Bright Coastal Homestead, Blue Hill Ecovillage, and Maine Cooperative Development Partners. We encourage you to look into their project websites.
Partial group photo of attendees to the Intentional Community Planning Forum. Phippsburg, Maine, January 2024
It was great to get to know more projects and start to see the ways we can help and/or learn from each other. When possible, we will continue to try to share outer ecosystem events and opportunities from the Maine-based intentional community sphere.
We'd love to share this great quote by Henry David Thoreau that Angela Faneuf of Blue Hill Ecovillage offered the forum attendees:
Do not be afraid to build castles in the sky.
That is where they belong.
But once the dreams are in place,
Your job is to build the foundation under them.
MACoho's biggest need at the moment is to grow our operational seed money via our GoFundMe. These funds will go directly towards things like legal help for entity formation and an external consultant for helping our team co-develop this community. We're grateful for anything you can give towards these efforts. It takes a village, so let's build one!