Tamera’s 30th Anniversary Summer University: Building Community in Times of Global Crisis

As Tamera turns 30, we invite friends, fellow voyagers and all those engaged in community-based alternatives for an immersive gathering. Together, we want to look back on our journey, situate ourselves in today’s global context and ask: What makes intentional communities contextually relevant today, as we confront a crisis of civilization?

Overview

Tamera and many other intentional communities find themselves in a moment of simultaneous crisis, renewal and opportunity, as fractals in a larger story of collective transformation. This is an opportunity to come together and make sense of where we’re coming from, where we are now and where we might be going.

On the occasion of our 30th anniversary we invite our planetary family to unite in vulnerability, depth and renewed vision. To celebrate and to grieve together. To listen and respond. We hope that by weaving our truths together we can better orient ourselves in this extraordinary moment that calls us to both hospice a dying world and to help birth other ways of being, knowing and loving. We seek to contextualize our own evolution and the crossroads we are currently facing as a community within the wider movement of liberation struggles and intentional communities. We want to create a space in which our interdependence as a planetary community becomes a tangible source of strength for us all.

The signs of a collapse have long been visible for those with eyes to see. As we’re facing genocides, ecosystem and climate disruptions, unprecedented inequities and refugee streams, rising fascism and mental health emergencies, it’s hard to deny the accelerating death of capitalist modernity.

The Healing Biotopes project, from which Tamera arose, began in the 1970s with the understanding that neither resistance against the existing system nor reform within it would be enough to alter this destructive global trajectory. Instead Dieter Duhm, Sabine Lichtenfels and other founders turned to radical social experimentation to find ways of living together that could make post-capitalist realities possible.

They also realized that, regardless of our intentions and political ideals, we will continue to be unwell and violent as long as there’s lying, mistrust and coercion in our relationships. How could we live so that the sexual or loving opening of one person to another no longer creates suffering and contempt in a third? What are the necessary conditions for creating a society in which cruelty becomes unthinkable? How to create lasting trust among people and all beings? How can we ourselves model and embody the world we want to live in? Those inquiries have guided Tamera’s journey through the decades and have led to a love school, a multi-generational community, international partnerships, a water retention landscape, and successful ecological activism, a solar kitchen and more.

In recent years our inability to integrate our divergences towards a renewed shared purpose, intergenerational tensions and conflicts over issues of leadership, power and privilege have led us to uncertainty. We know that we aren’t alone in these challenges. Other intentional communities — and alternatives and social movements more broadly — are going through similar crises. We believe that we need each other to make sense of what we’re going through and to understand what life asks of us now.

This gathering is dedicated to finding out together: What could make intentional communities (more) relevant to today’s liberation struggles? How can we learn from each other’s experiments and weave an unbreakable web of solidarity? How can we raise a field of collective healing and nonviolent liberation together?

Who is the gathering for?

• Friends and allies of Tamera
• People building or interested in building community
• Activists
• Peace workers

Explore with us

• Tamera’s evolution: What was the original vision which sparked the community’s founding? What have been the significant milestones in the last 30 years? Where are the current crossroads and what’s our vision for the future?
• Intentional communities around the world: Where are we as a movement for intentional community and creating living alternatives? Which strengths and limitations, learnings and struggles do we share and how we can support each other in going through them? How do we respond to the growing worldwide quest for community building?
• Community building: What can hold communities together, even amid crisis and conflict? How can people cultivate deep and lasting trust?
• Free love & sexuality: What is the political relevance of freeing sexuality and love from fear? How has our vision of free love evolved over the decades? Where’s the edge of sexual liberation and healing love today?
• Ecology: How to expand our definition of community beyond human beings, restore kinship with our fellow beings and create land-based ways of living that contribute to Earth’s regeneration? How can intentional communities be a response to the climate crisis and catalyze bioregional regeneration and autonomy?
• Nonviolent liberation: Facing unspeakable injustices and the erasure of communities in the geopolitical south, what does genuine and effective solidarity require for those of us in the north? How can nonviolence actually end wars and oppression? What does building and maintaining community mean under the onslaught of genocide?
• Power and privilege: To what extent do intentional communities perpetuate some of the toxic traits of western culture that they’ve set out to transform? Why are so many alternative spaces in the geopolitical north heavily white and middle class dominated? How can we make our spaces more equitable and more accessible and relevant to the global majority?

Gathering content

We will offer a dynamic program that invites the wholeness of our being — mind, heart, soul, feelings and body — and allows for emergence. We will work with varying formats of different scale:

• Panels and councils for everyone
• Breakout groups to deepen particular themes
• Home groups for more intimate sharing and processing
• Forum-style global circles to harvest
• Ceremony and ritual for express gratitude and grief, invite vision and invoke healing
• Bodywork
• Celebration and dance