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 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 Musical Behaviorism: Each week at Twin Oaks these days, if we make our hammock production goals, then our work quota stays the same for the following week. If we don't make our goals, then our work quota goes up the following week. Last week we had mucho musical encouragement while working on the last night of the labor week--we were serenaded by Summer on the musical saw, Edmund on euphonium, and Catfish on accordian. Their lyrics included: "Oh we are weavers, of leisure products..." We also had the whole hammock shop sing a not-quite-on- key version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" which took about ten minutes altogether. We made our production goal by 9 pm. [Posted 11-May-2008.] AT Record Hiker here. New member Calliope's mother Nancy visited us recently. Nancy is the oldest woman to through-hike the Appalachian Trail (according to AT Club records), finishing in 2007 at age 71. They are pictured here. (Nancy on the left in photo below). [Posted 29-Apr-2008.] Forbes News Story. In it's April 10 online story about Utopias, forbes.com included Twin Oaks as one of "eight modern utopias". [Posted 15-Apr-2008.] Dance Performance. It's not "Dancing with the Stars", but we were treated to a performance by ex-member Tall Todd (Marsden) visiting with his partner Susanna L. Hardt. They perform Ballroom and Latin dancing professionally, and just were awarded best combined score in their age bracket in the US National DanceSport championships in Baltimore MD. http://www.toddandsuzie.com/ [Posted 11-apr-2008] Live Music performance: We enjoyed the tunes of Kimya Dawson, who performed live at the Oaks in January 24. Photo and bit more text here. [Posted 26-jan-2008] Cooking for 100. At the request of one our ex-members, (hi Samadhi!) we have posted several recipes that have proved popular here over the years. Be advised--they are to-scale, so invite over 100 of your closest friends, and get cooking! [Posted 15-Nov-2007] US State Department online article about Twin Oaks. An article titled "Virginia Community Practices Grassroots Participatory Democracy" was published on the US State Dept website. See just the text of the article here. [1-Oct-2007] 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 May 11, 2008

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