Joining an Integration Center as a Colleague Member and working toward Partner Member status requires a significant amount of personal dedication. An Integration Center is a regenerative healing community, and its participants must show commitment to this mission.
Following are the three pillars of membership, explaining what is expected of Colleague and Partner members.
While the pillars of membership may seem burdensome, agreeing to and meeting these requirements puts a Colleague member on a track to earn Partner status without making any financial contribution. Partners become co-owners of the project, so it is understandable that these requirements are significant and strict.
1. Willingness to Live a Sustainable Life
Integration Centers provide a means to escape the unhealthy cycles of mainstream life, and inherently that means living a different lifestyle than the mainstream. One goal of Integration Centers is to model a sustainable lifestyle that could be lived by everyone in the world.
Largely vegetarian
In many ways, Integration Centers attempt to model the lifestyles of the indigenous peoples who inhabited the land that the Center is on. Almost all of those lifestyles included hunting and fishing as a way to round out their diet. But those were nomadic peoples who occupied many acres of land per person. In all but the most resource-abundant places, it was often several thousand acres per person.
On a planet with over eight billion people, a meat-centric diet simply is not sustainable. The end goal of Integration Centers is to distribute humanity out from dense cities into a global network of small villages. Those villages will be relatively close to each other, and will need to produce all of their food on their own land. That food production will need to be in balance with the local biome. Adding meat animals to the equation simply does not work with the current scale of human population, as meat consumes far more land per calorie than does plant-based food. (Read Pillar 3 for more depth on this.)
There may nonetheless be some opportunities for Center members to consume animal meats. Project 1 is looking to add chickens to its permaculture design for egg production. While these chickens will mostly be egg-laying hens, there will occasionally be excess roosters that can be culled, as well as old “stew hens” who have passed their egg-laying years. Additionally, it may be possible to integrate some edible fish, crayfish, and/or mussels into aquaculture systems, but this has not yet been determined.
Anytime there is an opportunity to kill an animal for its meat, the members wishing to consume that meat will need to be the ones who kill and slaughter it.
Limited luxury and technology
In order to live and model a universalizably sustainable lifestyle, members of Integration Centers will need to live a life that is much less dependent on electronics, plastics, and consumer goods.
While Integration Centers do not eschew technology, they use it sparingly and conscientiously. Certain technologies have a very high value for their environmental cost, and will be maintained as possible. These include at least one internet-connected computer, refrigerator/freezer(s), various steel implements (knives, chickenwire, stoves, tools, etc), basic household improvements such as electric lighting, and select high-utility goods from consumer culture such as, perhaps, a clothes washing machine.
As much as possible, any acquired products (including clothing) will be pre-owned products scavenged from the mainstream culture (eg, from thrift stores). In accordance with polycrisis response planning, preference will be given to mid-tech products (mechanical, reparable items) as opposed to high-tech products (electronic, plastic-heavy, unrepairable items).
In early Integration Centers, some leeway will be given to integrate a broader range of products from the mainstream culture in order to make the transition to the lifestyle more bearable and acceptable to new members, as well as to not overly shock retreat residents.
Physical work
The end goal of an Integration Center is to create a sophisticated permaculture design that makes life quite easy and low-effort. However, the first ~10 years of a Center’s startup will involve a significant amount of labor for constructing buildings, implementing permaculture design elements, and growing annual plants.
After that startup period, there will still be a few hours of daily physical work needed from each person to maintain the systems and to continue production of annuals (high-effort plants, especially vegetables). Members will also need to cook and to maintain the cleanliness and functionality of their space and the commons.
2. Commitment to Personal Growth
Integration Centers are healing communities. In order to hold a nurturing healing container, the members of each Center must work on their own personal development continually.
In addition to that service to the healing mission, this personal-development work is also intended to be a way to improve the governance and cohesion of the community.
Most intentional communities fail, and some of the largest factors in these failures are poor governance and internal conflict. Integration Centers intend to greatly reduce these problems by focusing heavily on the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual wellbeing of all members.
Willingness to do multimodal therapy
A core requirement for Colleague membership is that such members engage in at least four different kinds of therapy for at a bare minimum of one year.
This approach requires that Colleagues work on their mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health simultaneously, so that they can benefit from synergistic effects.
The Colleague Member Curriculum lays out this multimodal therapy approach. This work is to be done to standards set by the Center, and typically will involve working with certified, outside practitioners. Typically, self-directed work will not be considered sufficient, as there are real and practical limits to how much one can heal oneself in isolation.
Even after a member has graduated to Partner membership, they will need to continue their personal work. There is no defined end to growth; and members are expected to always be looking to improve themselves.
Willingness to learn to be a space-holder
The retreats offered to Associate Members strive to create a safe and healthy container for healing. To that end, the resident (Colleague and Partner) members of the community need to be able to meet these retreat-attendees where they are, holding them safely and without judgement.
A good introduction to this sort of space holding is to learn about empathic listening. Colleague members may be required to take an outside course in this sort of practice, such as these free online courses from Coursera or Zendo.
Willingness to live in community
Integration Centers are premised on healthy and tight-knit community. Members will be given personal space, but will be expected to be able and willing to participate in a vibrant community.
Additionally, as Integration Centers are healing communities with a focus on the mental and emotional health of resident members, all Colleague and Partner members will be expected to show a significant degree of vulnerability to each other.
3. Understanding the State of the World
The mainstream of society operates in a state of enforced ignorance about what perils we are facing now and in the near future. This ignorance comes in part from there being no profit in recognizing the problems we face. It is further enforced by the fact that since so few are talking about it, recognition of the world’s problems isn’t able to flourish.
Colleague members will be expected to be open to understanding the actual (and easily-verifiable) facts of what is happening in the world.
The critical sickness in environmental systems
While climate change is a major issue facing humanity, there are numerous other crises happening at the same time (referred to as the polycrisis).
About 75% of the world’s land surface has been severely altered by human activity. Meanwhile the warming, acidifying oceans have been severely depleted and filled with plastics.
Since the Industrial Age began, biodiversity has radically declined, pollution has spread everywhere, and almost all bird and mammal biomass on the planet is now just humans and their livestock. Many species and ecosystems are now facing critical decline and failure.
And climate change is now drastically altering the nature of the Earth, leading to the present where we are about to exceed several critical tipping points, taking us into a new and dangerous planetary ecosphere.
All of these issues have synergistic effects on each other, and increasingly the world is going to face numerous and varied large-scale catastrophes.
The growing destabilization of social systems
All of those above problems are now creating massive societal issues that are going to get much, much worse in the near future.
Humanity faces impending food-system breakdowns, widespread water insecurity, unsurvivable heatwaves, as well as escalating natural catastrophes such as much more extreme storms, wildfires, and droughts.
The next few decades are very likely to bring substantial regional food-shortages/famines, massive refugee migrations, resource wars, and rising authoritarianism. We are already beginning to see these effects, though they will likely increase exponentially as the polycrisis escalates.
The destructive nature of “everyday life”
All of the above problems ultimately stem from the lifestyle that modern society has developed. (Yes, there are institutional factors that greatly exacerbate these problems, but the lifestyle itself is at the core.)
Our insatiable appetite for meat has consumed forty percent of all habitable land on the planet (while the crops we eat and use for textiles consume another ten percent).
Our use of “consumer goods” and petroleum-fueled transportation has brought on the climate crisis, polluted the Earth, and further driven biodiversity loss.
Our disconnection from the food process has lead us to live stranded on fallow land while our food is produced through industrial farming on distant, heavily-damaged land.
Modern societal crises like the destabilizing wars raging in Africa, the awful labor conditions in much of the world, the vast rich-poor gap, and so much more ultimately derive from the systems that support this modern lifestyle.
The deep sickness in individuals and culture
Ironically, that lifestyle which is so destructive to the environment produces a culture that is deeply damaging to us as individuals.
Half of all human beings will suffer a significant mental disorder in their lifetime. In “advanced” economies, as many as 90% of all adults will suffer from a non-communicable physical disease in their lifetime.
The culture that we live in enforces these sicknesses, trapping most people into cycles of debt and labor that keep them stuck in their unfulfilling job, stuck in their food-fallow home, lacking social supports, and deprived of even understanding what could be different in their life.
A significant mission of Integration Centers is to provide a means by which people can escape those vicious cycles of labor and debt.
Life in an Integration Center
Given the severely of the above requirements, living in an Integration Center may be challenging and unappealing to most people.
Those people are not yet ready to join, and that’s okay. Early Integration Centers are targeted toward the most dedicated people who are most willing to take responsibility for the consequences of their lifestyle, for their own growth, and for the healing of others.
Part of the objective of Integration Center retreats is to introduce people to the lifestyle and the mentality, and to find the ones who wish to contribute further.
Over time, as the surrounding societal structures corrode, as environmental catastrophes accelerate, and as the “cost of living” for the modern lifestyle becomes unaffordable, the Integration Center lifestyle will begin to appeal to a much larger group of people.
The people who live in Integration Centers will be co-owners of a food and water system that cannot break down except under the most catastrophic of conditions. This means they will have food and water security basically guaranteed for their lifetime and for their descendants as well. This in itself will become a radically valuable feature in a world where food and water insecurity are blossoming.
In the startup period of an Integration Center, life will be laborious but extremely rewarding. Members will be working with their hands, connecting directly to the Earth, creating meaningful and useful outputs, and building a healthy and close-knit community.
After the more-intensive startup years, life in an Integration Center will become relatively much easier than life in mainstream culture. Work will involve engaging with retreat participants in fun activities, doing relatively-light farm work, and doing simple maintenance and domestic tasks. There is expected to be ample free time, which will be spent in community with emotionally-healthy, loving friends.
Even growing old will be a positive experience compared to mainstream life, as one will be a valued and contributing member of the community, helping with childcare and acting as a revered keeper of the community’s collective wisdom.
Further reading: Membership Levels
Further reading: Colleague Member Curriculum