What does it actually take to live in community?

I’m documenting intentional communities around the world as they navigate cooperation, conflict, and belonging in real time — not as an idea, but as a lived practice. This campaign supports the next phase of Liberation Learning, a docuseries exploring how we learn to live together during times of immense change.

View the full Pitch Deck

MY STORY

Why I’m making this project

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself deeply immersed in the world of intentional communities — places where people are trying to live differently.

Sharing land.
Living collectively.
Experimenting with new ways of making decisions, resolving conflict, and caring for one another.

On the outside, these spaces can look like answers.

But being inside them… feels very different.

What I kept witnessing

No matter where I went — different countries, different cultures, different communities — I kept finding myself in the same kinds of conversations.

Honest ones and oftentimes really hard ones.

People asking:

How do we actually share power?
How do we build trust when things break down?
How do we repair harm?
How do we create something different when so much of what we’re trying to move beyond still lives inside us?

These aren’t abstract questions we ask for fun.

They come from real heartbreak, failure, and repeated harm.

In my professional life, I work in educational spaces meant to address these exact questions.

But what I was witnessing in communities — and in my own relationships — was far more complex than what we were teaching.

I realized quickly…

These are not solved questions.

They’re lived, daily tensions that require the willingness to continue experimenting with how we relate.

Why I started filming

My professional role is to curate virtual education that teaches people how to start, grow, and live in intentional communities.

This content provides essential frameworks but lacks practical application and lived experiences.

What I was seeing and experiencing in my personal life was way more complex and nuanced than the virtual education I facilitated in my professional life.

There was so much more vulnerability, contradiction, growth, care, and also struggle.

Yet despite the repeated challenges I witnessed, there was also so much learning happening on the ground inside these spaces — and almost none of it was being captured in a way that felt real, like something people could actually learn from and share across communities.

I became a bit obsessed with how to bridge the gap between theoretical learning and lived experience. My poor boss (but mostly friend!) would get texts from me at 3am, thought-vomiting my passion-driven ideas.

I had to take a different approach to intentional community education.

So I did.

I decided to document community stories for shared learning and on-the-ground education.

Without really knowing what I was doing or where it was going, I bought a camera and started filming.

What’s happened since

What started as a small experiment — originally meant to support FIC's educational work — has grown into something much bigger than I expected.

Over the past six months, I've traveled through communities in the U.S., Portugal, Costa Rica, and Ecuador — living alongside residents, building trusted relationships, and documenting stories that are rarely shared publicly.

I've spent hundreds of hours filming, interviewing, organizing footage, and learning what it means to tell these stories responsibly.

What began as a curiosity has become a commitment.

This project has changed me.

It’s challenged my assumptions.
It’s pushed my growth.
It’s made me question what I thought “community” even meant.

It’s widened my perspective of how I can truly be in service to the movement.

What this project is becoming

Liberation Learning is a docuseries that explores what it takes to live cooperatively — not in theory, but in practice.

Each episode will follow real communities as they navigate:

conflict
decision-making
belonging
power
and the ongoing process of trying (and often failing) to do things differently

This isn’t about finding the “best” community, who is doing it right/wrong, or one-size-fits-all solutions

It’s about understanding:

What this work actually asks of us.

Where I’m at right now

I’ve been funding and producing this project myself — all while working, traveling alone, learning how to produce in real time, and carrying the emotional weight that comes with community immersion and relationship-building.

But it’s reached a point where I can’t sustainably do it on my own anymore.

There’s too much footage, too much learning, and too much responsibility to do it well for me to carry it alone.

I already have a values-aligned and experienced team — passionate and immersed in the movement — ready to join the project.

The project is no longer an idea. The footage has been captured, the stories are emerging, and the foundation is already in place. What comes next depends on our ability to carry it forward.

And we need your help...

🎥 What this campaign will unlock

This campaign is raising $25,000 to fund the next critical phase of Liberation Learning.

Specifically, these funds will unlock:

• Professional editing of the pilot episode and series trailer

• Additional filming and documentation with communities already participating in the project.

• Production support, community research and relations support, cinematography, and post-production assistance through identified team members: Bastien Laure and Fernando Manzanares.

• Organization, transcription, and preservation of hundreds of hours of footage already collected

• The infrastructure needed for larger grants and major donor support (website, fiscal sponsorship, distribution strategy)

This campaign does not fund the entire project. For full budget specs, see pitch deck.

Liberation Learning is a multi-year documentary and educational initiative that will require additional funding through grants, major donors, partnerships, and aligned organizations.

This campaign is designed to fund the next phase and create the foundation needed to pursue those larger opportunities.

🌱 Why this matters to me

More and more people are looking toward intentional communities and ecovillages in search of another way to live.

But the question that keeps me up at night is:

What are we inviting people into?

Are we building something that can actually hold us?
Or something that’s quietly falling apart?

And if it’s the latter… What do we do about it?

I don’t think we get to perfect this in our lifetime...

But I do think we’re part of something important — a kind of cultural experiment in how humans relate to each other and the planet.

What matters to me is strengthening the health of intentional communities — and the web between them.

I care deeply about the integrity and longevity of individual communities and the movement as a whole.

Documenting stories of shared challenge and shared learning is my way of helping to strengthen that future.

Not just for us…
but for the beautiful beings who come long after us.

I often wonder whether our descendants — seven generations from now — will understand how much effort we put into learning how to live cooperatively.

Whether they will have the opportunity to learn from our lessons instead of repeating them.

At its core, this project is about preserving the story of how we are trying to learn our liberation together.

🤝 Closing

There are so many stories still waiting to be told.

And I feel deeply committed to telling them.

But I can’t do it alone.

I’ve put everything I can into this project already. This is the moment where it either grows… or buckles.

Supporting this isn’t just about funding a film.

It’s about helping document the growing movement of cooperative living. A movement that is already happening — quietly, imperfectly, and with a lot of care.

Then learning from it — together.

If this resonates with you, I’d really love your support.

THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART!!

**Liberation Learning campaign and marketing materials were created in collaboration with AI tools. This project would not exist at the stage it does now without this support.

Liberation Learning Docuseries

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