Twin Oaks Intentional Community

· 100 People Sharing Our Lives ·

Twin Oaks is an intentional community in rural central Virginia, made up of around 85 adult members and 15 children. Since the community's beginning in 1967, our way of life has reflected our values of cooperation, sharing, nonviolence, equality, and ecology. We welcome you to schedule a visit.

We do not have a group religion; our beliefs are diverse. We do not have a central leader; we govern ourselves by a form of democracy with responsibility shared among various managers, planners, and committees. We are self-supporting economically, and partly self-sufficient. We are income-sharing. Each member works 42 hours a week in the community's business and domestic areas. Each member receives housing, food, healthcare, and personal spending money from the community. Our hammocks and casual furniture business generates most of our income; indexing books and making tofu provide much of the rest. Still, less than half of our work goes into these income-producing activities; the balance goes into a variety of tasks that benefit our quality of life - including milking cows, gardening, cooking, and childcare. Most people prefer doing a variety of work, rather than the same job day in, day out. A number of us choose to be politically active in issues of peace, ecology, antiracism, and feminism. Each summer we are hosts to a Women's Gathering and a Communities Conference where we welcome both experienced communitarians, and seekers who are new to community living. The Saturday Tour: We give tours of Twin Oaks almost every Saturday afternoon from March through October, and on most alternating Saturdays from November through February. Your tour guide will tell you about the history, culture and philosophy of the community and will be available to answer any questions you may have. The tour is from 2 - 5 pm, and much of this time is spent walking around the community. Please plan to arrive at 1:45. Please dress appropriately for the weather (it's very hot in summer and there's no air-conditioning, and can be cold in winter), wear comfortable walking shoes, and let us know if you have particular mobility needs. It can be a long tour for children--please consider the limits of their attention span when considering bringing them or not. Do not bring pets. Phone (540) 894-5126 Ext. 0 during regular business hours to make reservations. Our operator will double-check that a tour is being offered on the date you want. (Sometimes we don't offer scheduled tours for various reasons.) We request a $5.00 donation per person for the tour.

Help support us: spread the word about our hammocks, soyfoods & book indexing businesses; also, please visit our donations page. What's New at Twin Oaks Halloween Happenings: We had our usual Halloween party and costume parade on October 31st. There were a lot of creative costumes and the evening also featured home-made Misfortune Cookies. Photo below: Suede as a Velvet Ant. Read more here. [Posted 4-November-2008.] Live music on Equinox. We celebrated the Autumn Equinox with our new friends, the Richmond Indigenous Gourd Orchestra. Their music features instruments made from gourds they grow themselves--as they say, they put the "culture" back in "agriculture"! More photos here. [Posted 27-September-2008.] Kat Kinkade 1930-2008: One of Twin Oaks' primary founding members, Kat Kinkade, died on July 3rd, peacefully at home at Twin Oaks. Kat was a visionary and a mover-shaker, and her life's work touched thousands of people. Obituaries here. Kat memorial website here. Burial photos here. [Posted 5-July, updated 7-August, updated 3-September-2008.] Events were held in August. The annual Twin Oaks Communities Conference Aug 15-17 and Women's Gathering Aug 22-24. [Posted in May updated September 2008.] Oz destroyed by fire! On the evening of June 14, during our 41st Anniversary dinner party, just as a huge thunderstorm was hitting us, the news came that our varnishing building was on fire. Read more here.[Posted 16-June-2008.] Recent news & photos pages. Read the most recent issue of our newsletter The Leaves.

Our 3-Week Visitor Program: The three week visit is a structured program designed to give the visitor some general education and experience in living at Twin Oaks. It is an opportunity for the visitor to consider membership and for the community to consider prospective new members, but you don't have to be interested in membership in order to participate in the program. The visit is a prerequisite to applying for membership, and visitors who are accepted for membership need to spend at least a month away from Twin Oaks after the end of their visitor period.

The fee for the three-week visit is on a sliding scale of $50-$250. This is used to pay for outreach and to offset expenses of the visitor program. We strongly encourage people with significant financial resources to pay at/towards the high end of the scale. If you can't afford to pay at the low end of the scale, we can make arrangements for a reduced fee.

The visitor program includes meetings, tours and conversations with members, through which the visitor learns about what it' s like to live at Twin Oaks, including the financial, legal, health, labor and governmental structures at Twin Oaks. Visits are arranged by letter, not over the phone. Please write to us well in advance of your proposed stay. But before you do, please read this.

Please do not drop in and expect to get a tour or be able to stay overnight. To be a guest here, a member must first agree to be your host.

Twin Oaks Community
138 Twin Oaks Road # W
Louisa, VA 23093 USA

540-894-5126
540-894-4112 Fax

Please do not send email attachments. Please send only plain text email, not HTML formatted mail. When you write, please tell us how/where you heard about Twin Oaks. If it was through another website, we'd like to know which one, and the URL if possible.

This page can be found on the web at www.twinoaks.org .
This page was last updated November 4, 2008

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