February 20, 2024

The appropriation of “intentional community”

Posted in Uncategorized tagged Autism, Disability, Disability Rights, Housing, Intentional Communities at 4:35 pm by chavisory

I’m continuing to adapt some of my Twitter threads into posts for easier archiving, access and sharing. This is adapted from a thread I wrote in 2022.

There’s a variety of housing development we’ve grown accustomed, I think, to reading articles about in the news world of autism and developmental disability. Particularly as the largest groups yet of autistic young people identified in childhood reach young adulthood and leave school in need of transition support services and housing resources. Often conceived of by groups of parents and families of autistic young adults, privately funded, frequently described as new or innovative models for providing housing and support resources in a streamlined, less onerous manner, these developments are often situated outside of metropolitan areas/in quasi-rural settings, and may or may not be located in such a way as to allow residents independent access to local communities and shopping, work, social or educational opportunities.

Autistic self-advocates, activists, and organizations often decry these arrangements as neo-institutions, based on the way they effectively segregate disabled residents from their broader communities and make service provision dependent on use of that segregated housing and vice versa. That they reconstitute, with a sanitized façade, all the risk factors for abuse of older institutions. Proponents arguing that they are not institutions and in fact should be considered eligible to receive HCBS funding—funding usually dedicated to ensuring that disabled people can receive the services necessary for them to live at home, in their own communities—and often refer to them as “intentional communities.”

Critics and self-advocates say that “intentional community” is a naked attempt to rebrand institutions as something other than what they are, that “intentional community” is a euphemism for “institution.”

I tend to fall on the side of critics of these kinds of developments, which while I believe are undoubtedly well-intentioned, also have a high potential to foster abuse, unnecessarily isolate residents, and fail to enable true autonomy.

But something I think we’ve failed to emphasize is that “intentional community” here is not simply a misleading euphemism for neo-institutions, therapeutic farms, or segregated housing developments for autistic and developmentally disabled people.

Though it is misleading, on several levels, “intentional community” is also the term for a whole entire other movement, and a variety of housing and living situations that have nothing whatsoever to do with these places, and whose terminology is being appropriated for their misrepresentation.

And I know that the people spearheading support for these developments know that “intentional community” is not an accurate term for what they’re selling, but I’m not sure how many of the critics of these places realize that.

That “intentional community” is not just a term they made up. It is a term they are co-opting from a whole other movement and loose association of communities.

Here is the website for the Foundation for Intentional Community.

Here is a profile of one of the communities registered with FIC.

How much resemblance does this bear to the kind of housing development being pushed as “intentional community” by the people like the author of this tweet?

FIC defines an intentional community as “a group of people who have chosen to live together or share resources on the basis of common values.”

Wikipedia describes an intentional community as “a voluntary residential community,” being designed to have “a high degree of social cohesion and cooperation,” of people who often share ideals, political, social, or spiritual philosophy, and who typically share “responsibilities and property.”

An intentional community, by definition, is a group of people who’ve come together of their own volition to form and maintain a certain kind of community in line with their own values. The people who live in an intentional community are, by definition, actively involved in its control, maintenance, and governance.

“Not all intentional communities are Willowbrooks” is a technically true statement because, fundamentally, zero true intentional communities are Willowbrooks. Because Willowbrook was, by any good faith definition whatsoever, not an intentional community.

It was an institution.

Now, it is also true that not all institutions are Willowbrooks. There are many ways in which the disability rights and neurodiversity movements argue that all institutions are bad, but it’s true that they’re not all Willowbrooks. Willowbrook was a particularly bad institution.

(Though I’d be remiss not to note that institution survivors I’ve known have often said that the most insidiously dehumanizing institutions they’ve encountered have not necessarily been the ones that most resembled Willowbrook, but the ones where the grounds and buildings were beautiful, the rooms were clean and bright, and the staff were superficially kind. That what makes an institution are the power dynamics and not the architecture or whether there’s a pool, or the number of other people who live there, or even whether the physical abuse and neglect are particularly overt.)

But the reason “not all intentional communities are Willowbrooks” is because Willowbrook was not an intentional community.

And what that also does not mean is that all intentional communities, in the authentic sense of the term, are good places. I’m not a member of one, I’ve never lived in one (though I’ve known people who have), but just from my experience of human communities in general, I’d be willing to bet that they range from very good arrangements for some people, to very dysfunctional.

But their defining characteristic is that they are voluntary associations of people who are choosing to live together in a certain way, with a high degree of cooperation and coordination. They are not places where you send someone to live in a certain way because they are disabled or as a shortcut to meeting their support needs in a way that would allow them to live in a more integrated way with their wider community.

That would be an institution. (Or a congregate care facility. Or a group home.)

“But what,” goes a frequent question, “if someone wants to live with all other disabled people?”

That’s cool! I think they should be allowed to. There might even be an intentional community for that.

But if someone is being placed or sent to live in a place with all other disabled people such that they don’t have control over their access to the broader community or how they live or where they don’t share in cooperative control of that community, they are not in an intentional community.

That’s a term that refers to a distinct set of movements and philosophy of living with its own entire history, which is being misappropriated by advocates of a housing model that more closely fits the description and history of an institution… or that could, I think, resemble something more like a supportive housing arrangement, if the people formulating these places had more awareness of how not to recreate an institution.

And I don’t want to drag them into it unwillingly, but I would be very curious what participants in the actual intentional community world would think of the attempt to brand neo-institutions or segregated housing developments as part of what their movement stands for.

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