Twin Oaks Intentional Community
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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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Twin Oaks videos on YouTube. What's New at Twin OaksBeltane. 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.] 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.]
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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.
More About Twin Oaks Community
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
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