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· 100 People Sharing Our Lives ·
Twin Oaks is an intentional community in rural
central Virginia, made up of around 85 adult members and 15 children. Since the community's beginning
in 1967, our way of life has reflected our values of cooperation, sharing, nonviolence, equality,
and ecology. We welcome you to schedule a visit.
We do not have a group religion; our
beliefs are diverse. We do not have a central leader; we govern
ourselves by a form of democracy with responsibility shared among
various managers,
planners, and committees. We are self-supporting economically,
and partly self-sufficient. We are income-sharing. Each member works
42 hours a week in the community's business and
domestic areas. Each member receives housing, food, healthcare,
and personal spending money from the community.
Our hammocks and casual furniture business generates
most of our income; indexing books and making tofu provide
much of the rest. Still, less than half of our work goes into these income-producing activities;
the balance goes into a variety of tasks that benefit our quality of life - including milking
cows, gardening, cooking, and childcare. Most people prefer doing a variety of work, rather
than the same job day in, day out.
A number of us choose to be politically active in issues of peace, ecology, antiracism,
and feminism. Each summer we are hosts to a Women's
Gathering and a Communities Conference where
we welcome both experienced communitarians, and seekers who are new to community living.
The Saturday Tour: We give
tours of Twin Oaks almost every Saturday afternoon from March through
October, and on most alternating Saturdays from November through
February. Your tour guide will tell you about the history, culture
and philosophy of the community and will be available to answer
any questions you may have. The tour is from 2 - 5 pm, and much
of this time is spent walking around the community. Please plan
to arrive at 1:45. Please dress appropriately for the weather (it's
very hot in summer and there's no air-conditioning, and can be
cold in winter), wear comfortable walking shoes, and let us know
if you have particular mobility needs. It can be a long tour for
children--please consider the limits of their attention span when
considering bringing them or not. Do not bring pets and please
do not wear perfume/cologne. Phone (540) 894-5126 Ext. 0 during
regular business hours to make reservations. Our operator will
double-check that a tour is being offered on the date you want.
(Sometimes we don't offer scheduled tours for various reasons.)
We request a $5.00 donation per person for the tour.
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Help
support us: spread the word about our hammocks,
soyfoods & book
indexing businesses; also, please visit
our donations page.
Leaves of Twin Oaks E-Newsletter. Sign
up here to receive our Leaves of Twin Oaks email newsletter.
Find out the latest happenings at Twin Oaks, including community
social and cultural events, our joys and challenges, lightly
spiced with some communal politics.
Twin Oaks videos
on YouTube.
What's New at Twin Oaks
Beltane. In photo below Oakers dancing the May
Pole, in our usual fun and chaotic
style. [Posted 7-May-2012].
FEMA and the quake. As a follow-up
to the Earthquake, we've had two visits from FEMA. They came
out to assess the damage done and to determine if we were eligible
for relief funds for finishing reparing damages our buildings
suffered from the earthquake. Their most recent decision is that
we are not eligible, since we are not individual home-owners.
[Posted 08-Jan-2012.]
Fire at East Wind. Our sister community in Missouri,
East Wind, recently had their biggest and newest building burn
down. No one was hurt, but they are still recovering from the experience.
Read more here. [Posted 08-Jan-2012.]
Vegan
in Community: a recent visitor wrote her time at Twin
Oaks on a DC-based vegan
blog. [Posted 20-Oct-2011.]
August 23 Earthquake (then a hurricane a week later)! Twin
Oaks was hit pretty hard by a powerful 5.8 quake — we were
less than 4 miles from the epicenter. There was a tremendously
loud thundering noise, and buildings shook extremely forcefully
for 20 or 30 seconds. Most bedrooms and public spaces got a thick
carpet of debris — books,
clothing, food, furniture, bookshelves, broken glass, layered so
thick that you couldn't see the floor in many spaces.
We suffered many broken water supply and drainage pipes and some
gas lines. ZK, our main dining hall, had some structural damage,
and MT (auto building) walls were badly cracked and shored up soon
after to some extent — we're still considering how to repair
it. The brick chimney on Llano collapsed onto
the path beside the building. Will be dealing with all of the effects
for a number of months.
The best news is that, mercifully, no one
out of the 100+ people here was seriously hurt. A few people
had minor injuries — it really seems miraculous that we
are all okay. Some
photos
can be seen here. [Posted 4-Sep-2011.]
Recent
news & photos pages.
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Our 3-Week Visitor Program: The three
week visit is
a structured program designed to give the visitor some general education
and experience in living at Twin Oaks. It is an opportunity for the
visitor to consider membership and for the community
to consider prospective new members, but you don't have to be interested
in membership in order to participate in the program. The visit is
a prerequisite to applying for membership, and visitors
who are accepted for membership need to spend at least a month away
from Twin Oaks after the end of their visitor period.
The fee for
the three-week visit is on a sliding scale of $50-$250. This is
used to pay for outreach and to offset expenses of the visitor program.
We strongly encourage people with significant financial resources
to pay at/towards the high end of the scale. If you can't afford
to
pay at the low end of the scale, we can make arrangements for a
reduced fee.
The visitor program includes meetings,
tours and conversations with members, through which the visitor
learns about what it' s like to live at Twin Oaks, including the financial,
legal, health, labor and governmental structures
at Twin Oaks. Visits are arranged by letter, not over the phone.
Please
write to us well in advance of your proposed stay. But before
you do, please read this.
Please do not drop in and expect to get a tour or be able to stay overnight. To be a guest
here, a member must first agree to be your host.
Twin Oaks Community
138 Twin Oaks Road # W
Louisa, VA 23093 USA
540-894-5126
540-894-4112 Fax

Please do not send email attachments. Please send only plain
text email, not HTML formatted mail. When you write, please tell us how/where
you heard about Twin Oaks. If it was through another website, we'd like
to know which one, and the URL if possible.
Bumper Sticker for
an Income Sharing Cmty:
"My other car isn't mine
either"
Read About Income-Sharing
This page can be found on the web at www.twinoaks.org .
This page was last updated
May 7, 2012
INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES WEB-RING
This Intentional Communities site
is managed by Twin Oaks Webmaster.
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