The vanguard Integration Center project is of course the most complicated one, as work started on it while the concept was still being developed. 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 July 2025. We have an accepted offer on a seemingly highly-favorable parcel, and are in the process of due diligence. This parcel is a 2-hour train ride from downtown New York City, followed by a 20-minute car ride from the train station. It is large and hosts several streams and springs.
There are some aspects of local zoning law that may make this parcel work very well, but our due diligence is slow because we are seeking confirmation that the zoning board would be amenable to the project.
Funding is in place, and we will likely form an LLC to buy the land with, as an interim form of the company that will later become (most likely) a cooperative.
Having been pared down to just one person last year, the founding group is now growing again, with ten friends joining together in the current planning activities.
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.
After numerous false-starts, the route we are now pursuing is to buy agricultural land and start a commercial farm. The retreat center will be oriented to providing farm-stay retreats, which are recognized as legitimate agribusiness operations of a farm. The Partner and Colleague members will be employees of the farm, because farms are often allowed to house their employees on-site. We should know within the next two months (hopefully much sooner) if this plan will be acceptable to the locality.
This plan creates additional challenges, as we will need to also start up a commercial farm operation. However, as we continue to work out the details, this path seems very valuable and elements of it will likely be built into the general business plan. No matter how an Integration Center organizes itself, it will always have a farm as its mechanism of drawing participants into the food cycle. By starting our farm as a commercial operation, we will be forced to pursue the best farming practices.
We intend to be slow and deliberate in starting up the farm, and are starting to look into how we can create partnerships with other local farmers (a great permaculture practice) to help us establish the commercial operation and to help us get some products to market. (We will need to have a state-defined minimum volume of commercial sales to get the full protections of agricultural status.)
Lessons Learned
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