Twin Oaks Community
Twin Oaks Community is an ecovillage and intentional community of about one hundred people living on 450-acre (1.8 km2) in Louisa County, Virginia. It is a member of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. Founded in 1967, it is one of the longest-enduring and largest secular intentional communities in North America. The community's basic values are cooperation, egalitarianism, non-violence, sustainability, and income sharing. About 100 adults and 17 children live in the community.
The community was founded on a 123-acre (0.50 km2) tobacco farm in 1967 by a group of eight individuals with no farming experience that included Kat Kinkade, who wrote two books about the community. The community's initial inspiration was B. F. Skinner's novel Walden Two, which describes a fictional behaviorist utopia. However, Skinner's vision quickly faded from prominence at Twin Oaks, as behaviorist principles were abandoned in favor of egalitarian principles. The community struggled greatly during its first few years, as member turnover was high and the community members didn't earn much income. According to Kinkade, the community avoided the problems stereotypically associated with communes (particularly laziness, freeloading, and excessive lack of structure) by adopting a structured, yet flexible, labor system.
Modified versions of the community's initial organizational structure and labor credit system survive to this day. As in Skinner's novel, the original labor credit system utilized "variable" credit hours. Certain jobs were worth more credit hours than others in order to make each job desirable. What the community found once the population reached about 40 is that there was neither universally desirable work, nor undesirable work and the variable credit hour system created distortions in which work was getting done. The modified version of this plan in place today uses "standardized" credits; each job in the community is valued the same in terms of credit hours.
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