Consensus and community-building

The co-founder of indie record label Orange Twin Records on the challenges faced and lessons learned while developing an eco-village in rural Georgia

By JEREMIAH McNICHOLS

Laura Carter is one of the three founding members of the Orange Twin Conservation Community, a 155-acre eco-village in the making five miles outside of Athens, Georgia. The three women — Carter, Laura Glenn, and Barbara Denvir — are all participants in the Athens, Georgia independent music scene; Laura Carter began her own band, Elf Power, in 1994 with guitarist/songwriter Andrew Reiger, and the two run Orange Twin Records, an independent record label that releases a half-dozen albums a year.

Carter, Glenn and Denvir scraped together their personal savings, cashing in inherited stock at what would turn out to be the perfect time, and during a three-month window found seven more people to join them. Four years later, they have 24 members and have paid off all but around $55,000 of the more than $340,000 debt, and their tiered buy-in structure (the price to join the community has more than doubled since they began selling shares, and now stands at $25k) will have that paid off within the next three or four new members.

The group of eco-villagers and a cadre of musician friends and other community volunteers are working to clear land for gardens, planting vineyards, setting up water catchment systems and establishing recreational features. Meanwhile, a member committee is working on a petition to the local planning and zoning board to allow the group to build clustered housing on a village model, swapping the regular one-residence-per-five-acres rural development model for one that preserves 100 acres of woodlands, establishes a 40-acre organic farm and develops 15 acres along a fee simple, cooperative or condo association model.

I caught up with Laura late on a weekday evening after she had completed a long shift at the canoe- and kayak-rental business she and Andrew work at in Danielsville, twenty miles away on the Broad River. We spoke for over an hour for an article for the fall issue of DIW Magazine. Written for an audience of independent music fans, the piece focuses on personal relationships, the magnitude of what the group is accomplishing in the woods outside Athens, and the project’s connections with her band and record label.

What follows here is additional interview material that fleshes out the group's current projects and the challenges and benefits of an organization committed to a consensus-based model of decision-making. Material has been reorganized for flow, with paragraph breaks indicating that comments are taken from different points in our conversation; no thoughts or statements have been "edited together" (if they were, the traditional ellipses would be used). The questions presented here are not necessarily the exact questions asked in the interview, but are included to help organize the information presented and maintain a reader-friendly flow.

Farming for Artists: Are you an Athens native?

Carter: I grew up in Athens, since I was two. Andrew and I moved to New York in the early days of Elf Power, we thought it would be better to make music there. We were mistaken. It was cool to see all the good shows but it was expensive and hard to get around. We were there from late summer until early spring, went through five blizzards.

FFA: What inspired you to take this project on?

The front entrance, top, and a walkway at Barcelona's Park Guell, an unsuccessful commercial housing site converted into a municipal park. Photos from Wikipedia.

Carter: I hope by the end, it will look as cool, as [Antoni Gaudí's] Park Güell in Barcelona, but I’m sure that will be long after my lifetime. Mostly, I hope we can experiment with alternative ways of doing things. Hopefully we can create a balance between living in touch with nature and also in a community of people. We want both the farm life and the village life.

FFA: So you, Laura Glenn and Barbara Denvir just all saved up your money?

Carter: I actually was really, really lucky. All of us scraped together all the money we had and that's how we set the share price. Laura Glenn had an aunt who died and I have a grandfather who gave me stock — we both had stock. We were so scared when we sold it. We'd been given it as a nest egg for our old age and we were just calling them up and cashing them in. Mine was in Chrysler, and I hate Chrysler — I couldn't believe I owned stock in an oversized automobile thing. On the same day we both called up and said, "Sell!" and the guys were like, "Do you guys even know what you're doing?" and we said "We don't care, we just want the cash." I sold mine right when Chrysler merged with Mercedes-Benz so it was higher at that point than it ever was after that. This was in 2000.

FFA: Do you intend to make money on the land that will support your community members or support your development needs?

Carter: The [Orange Twin] website was originally supposed to be a little online village store that everybody could live there or was part of the community could sell their wares on, but it kind of grew before the village grew. It was a good way to do it, we definitely need the money it generates. We sell CDs by Neutral Milk Hotel, Orange Twin bands, jewelry, purses, we have a whole series of purses with Circulatory System and Elf Power and Of Montreal embroidered on them, like patchwork I guess, and quilts, paintings by Will [Cullen] Hart and Hannah Jones — we pretty much sell anything. Then that money goes to projects that we want to do. We built an amphitheater for the Bonnie "Prince" Billy show. We carved it out of the hillside with a Bobcat. We made a terracing area for the vineyards we put in in the spring. It was really cool

Right now we're selling biodiesel fuel — fuel that is processed used cooking oil, the cleaner the better, so if you get it from like a sushi place, that’s great. You warm it up and filter it and process it down, then you mix it up 50/50 with diesel to run diesel engines. One of our members, Don Young, is going to try and start converting people's cars to run pure biofuels. Right now we have three 100-gallon tanks and use it out of that. We have a biodiesel chugger which is one of those very narrow, three-wheeled, one-cycle putting engines that they use for collecting garbage in Thailand in narrow alleyways — we have one and we're running it on biodiesel. Diesel engines are so amazing. You know, when the guy who invented the diesel engine went to promote it he was mysteriously killed crossing the English Channel.

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We're also asking to have live-work opportunities, cottage industries there, possibly a little cafe, we have an assisted living center in the design, all of this stuff will probably get axed. We're just putting in everything that we would love and we'll just see what they'll put the red ink on. a lot of the ideas are just — the concepts — a lot of the inspiration for the number of houses that work around a community center and how many people should meet in an area and the sizes of things have come from A Pattern Language.

We've talked about doing childrens' summer camps and workshops, like cob-building workshops, and we've talked about having even a bed and breakfast, and then the assisted living facility, and the farm, and then all kinds of orchards and stuff, pecans and fruit trees. We already sold some chantrelles, that would be a really good business to pursue. We had a ton of rain and we didn't even pick a fifth of what was out there and they're there and gone so fast and now it hasn't rained in a week. It's spotty, it was almost a five-gallon bucket pretty full, and that was $75 from the fanciest restaurant in Athens.

FFA: What other development plans do you have for the site?

Carter: We're talking about having one house site that isn't sold at the market value but houses a farmer who sells their produce to the members of the community, to have as many food sources as possible without any transportration attached to them.

We already have a solar power station that we use for camping and can hook up power tools to. You can just set it up out in a field and charge it all day. The vending areas for the food at our last concert were run off that solar panel, it has batteries underneath it and the battery bank and an angled solar panel you can adjust... One of our members, Don Young, actually owns [and built] that solar trailer, he's the Mr. Fixit guy. He gets stuff people have that doesn't work, gets everything pretty cheap, and the label pays.

My aunt raises horses and she let me have a mare of hers and breed it and keep the baby. I'm hoping [to have him live out at the community land] eventually, we don't have fencing yet but we have grass and we're trying to bushhog it and get it established and stuff. But it's by no means ready for horses. I want to teach my horse to pull logs and pull carts but I'm letting him get a little older and more mature before I risk my life being drug behind him on a cart. He's seven.

FFA: What legal considerations have you encountered that impact how you are organized or how you set up your community?

Carter: We've sold 24 shares but by the time we get to 30 we have to [have the buy-in price] at market value, or people will lose their value. Our biggest goal is to try to get the septic approval up to code and passed through our planning and zoning office before we have too many members. We have to have assurance that we can have more people live out there or it's just worth [the base land value]* per acre, but if it's actually going to have a higher value than that, people have to see that there is a higher value in that, but if worse comes to worse we are all co-owners of this big preserve and you have something for it.

Our gears will shift as soon as we get through planning and zoning and have approval on the lot design and that will make a big difference as well, but it's just a fine balance showing that the number of members and shares is under the lowest value that the land could sell for, and in the bank's eyes that's a healthy organization. If you overextend yourself with more members than infrastructure or more than are paid for, then it's less favorable. [This, she explained, could impact a member's ability to get a home construction loan.]

FFA: How do you go about changing the zoning on a piece of land?

Carter: The process starts were you post a sign saying that you have a public hearing and that you're asking to change the zoning. The zoning is for one house every five acres, and we're asking to cluster — to take all of our lots and cluster all of those houses up and actually disturb less of the land and keep this hundred-acre preserve going. We are actually going to ask for a higher density but we probably won't get it. Probably we're just going to get it redesigned, we're going to say that with design like this you can have a higher density because you'll have things happening right there and which will engage people socially right there [to reduce pressure on local infrastructure].

FFA: So how will the group be organized in the eyes of the bank? Who will own the land when you begin building houses?

Carter: It comes out in meetings mostly because everyone is researching different stuff. I'm not actually on the membership or the legal committee, but they've done a lot of work to decide what kind of organization we should be. We have options to become a condo association or a co-op or a fee simple — four lines that are surveyed out on the ground and you own what is in between and you can basically do whatever you want on that spot. A condo association is more restrictive. There's a certain amount of rules that are good and a certain amount that would inhibit your freedom. We're trying to find that fine line.

FFA: What are the most difficult decisions you have faced since you began work?

Carter: There have definitely been tough decisions. All of them good! We've had offers of people to give us houses to move out there, but if we don't do our civil engineering and septic out there first before we move anything out there, we may put something somewhere and then want to move it. There are timing issues, it's all very exciting that people want to give us houses, but we have to not get distracted and do things in the right order.

FFA: What does it take for someone to become a part of the community? Do they just need to have the money in hand, or do you consider their skills and what they will contribute to the community?

Carter: It's not just the money, it is kind of about what they'll bring to the table. We also want a balance, we don't want everone to be poor, we want a nice mix of economic classes, but we don't want it to be just an expensive community either. We do look at what someone will bring to the table. John D'Azzo, who plays in a band called the Gerbils, is also an architect, he teaches architecture at Athens Tech. He's our architect, and we're lucky in that way, and we have two lawyers in the group, that's always handy, and Don is an engineer, we also have a book editor who is a really fine accountant, everybody definitely brings a skill and contributes.

FFA: How does the group make decisions about how to develop and pursue goals?

Carter: We work through consensus. Everyone must agree or agree to abstain, usually because the issue doesn’t apply to them for one reason or another. If anyone rejects the idea we have to talk about it until we all come to an agreement about the best course of action. Of course, it is a patience-builder.

FFA: What have you learned about consensus-building from the experience?

Carter: The real challenge is in order to work through consensus in a group you have to really keep up your relationship with everyone in that group and try really hard to keep everything at face value and not bury anything and just communicate your feelings and just keep it chilled out. We're not very good at that yet. It takes a lot of meetings and a lot of painful interactions before you start to realize how to do it. I wish we'd all learned to do it a little earlier but at least we're learning it now. It isn't why I wanted to do this. It isn't what I wanted from the beginning, I wanted to be out in the woods and gardening and not needing to have a washer and dryer in every house and also if I had kids, wanting it to just naturally work that the kids were around other kids and stimulated by life around them and not just using fillers like TV and a hectic city schedule. I haven't had kids yet but even with my friends, I like to be around families when it's in that environment but it doesn't always work real well when you're trying to eat in a restaurant, little tiny kids throwing stuff everywhere, but out in the woods it's really easy. That little "takes a village to raise a child" thing is really true, and even all of us, all the people in it, we're hoping that when we get done with this you'll just walk to go get your mail and you'll have the opportunity to be as social as you want to be and have the rural stuff without the farm isolation. I just didn't realize how hard it is to really work and achieve consensus, where the whole group is communicating together and comes into agreement that we should all go in this direction. It's not that it doesn't happen, it always happens but it takes like twenty times longer, it's just very slow.

All of the times that we get deadlocked people can’t always explain why they don't agree at the time, sometimes it becomes kind of an emotional reaction you can’t explain, but once you let the feelings die and you can hear them out they usually have a valid concern and something that doesn't reason out correctly, so it's usually a really good point that comes up. It just takes patience.

FFA: What is the most important skill you have picked up since you began this project?

Carter: I guess learning how to conduct a meeting. How to vote appropriately, so everyone has a chance to vote but also isn't pressured and has a chance to ponder the ideas without rushing the decision-making.

FFA: I thought you would say something about moving buildings or filling out your zoning papers.

Carter: That's the easy stuff. That's more of how my mind works. I don't think other people would say that's the easy stuff, but personally for me humans are far more difficult to deal with than telephone poles.