The vanguard Integration Center project is of course the most complicated one, as it is navigating uncharted territory. Work started while the concept was still being developed; and the project also hit numerous unexpected pitfalls as lessons were learned. Those early hurdles helped refine the process so it will be easier for others.
Current Status
As of November 2025. After half a year of work attempting to navigate the locality’s zoning process, the sellers of the 100-acre farm we were attempting to buy decided to sell to someone else. So the deal collapsed in October.
That puts us back to the start of Phase 0, but we have quickly moved on to evaluating parcels again, and hope to be able to write an offer on another parcel by the end of 2025. Funding is in place, so we just need to find the right land.
We learned some very important lessons from the failed deal, and will be working those into the business plan as well.
Having been pared down to just one person last year, the founding group is now growing again, with nine friends joining together in the current planning activities.
Lessons Learned
Commercial Farm
To help blaze a path forward, the first project is somewhat-intentionally being started in a place where zoning laws are particularly tricky to navigate.
One route we have been pursuing is to buy agricultural land and start a commercial farm. The retreat center would be oriented to providing “farm-stay retreats,” which are sometimes recognized as legitimate agribusiness operations of a farm. The Partner and Colleague members would be employees of the farm, because farms are often allowed to house their employees on-site.
Parcel Selection
Having started as something we were just “looking into” in 2022, the early parcel-identification process went slowly. There was much to learn about what locations to look in, what kinds of parcels to look for, what locality-restrictions to look out for, what natural features to be observant of, and so on.
Much of that learning has been collected on the Evaluating Parcels page.
Privilege
Designing and building this project has been enabled by multiple layers of privilege, and part of the process has been learning about and acknowledging those privileges. That process has shaped the business plan, which is aimed at leveraging existing privilege in order to diminish its power.
A lot of that privilege gets summed up into money. And some money is needed to start this project; from the initiators and/or from donors.
Accumulating money usually comes from leveraging privilege. The Integration Center Model is for people who look at the cost of the privileges they have benefitted from and who see the cost to the environment and to other people. It provides a way for people to spend that privilege-fostered money in a way that removes privilege and yet also helps secure their own future in a way that traditional financial investment cannot.
Community Health
In late 2023, while in the process of writing a contract on the second parcel we had identified; our community broke apart. The two issues were mostly unrelated; but the obvious lesson was that the project had to be much more concerned with health from the very outset, as our first priority.
We had to be more healthy within ourselves; which became the focus for a while. That process lead to the development of the Colleague Member Curriculum, which entails a variety of modalities of healing administered by outside professionals. All people who live at the first Integration Center as Colleague or early Partner members will need to complete this curriculum.
This solution is not a sure one, and we will be evaluating how it helps. But we believe the fact that we will all be committing to our own personal growth in a variety of modalities gives us a good basis for forming a healthy community.
Join Project 1
If you would like to communicate about working on building this particular Integration Center with us, use the contact address for this site.
Return to: Implementation Projects
Further reading: About the Integration Center Project