Looking at an ugly Senate map in 2026, surprisingly Texas is among the small handful of states that could realistically flip. James Talarico just decisively won his primary against the rising star Jasmin Crockett and is currently polling 5% higher or more than both Republicans candidates.  This combined with every Federal and state congressional race contested by Democrats for the first time since 1994,  which will  drive up statewide Democratic participation further increasing their chances.

Trump famously, and likely illegally redistricted 5 US congressional districts, in an effort to pad the already thin MAGA majority in the House of Representatives.  The foundational assumption in this gerrymander is Trump’s 55% Latino vote in 2024 will hold for 2026.  It probably won’t for 3 reasons: Texas floods, tariff costs, and mass deportations.  

Floods: On July 4, 2025 a serious flood swept through the Guadalupe River basin in central Texas.  Over 100 people died and many more went missing.  The FEMA response was delayed and under-staffed and the blame for this fell on the Trump staff.  Similarly, the poor response to the late March of 2025 historic flooding  of the Rio Grande area that destroyed thousands of Latinos homes and killed crops and killed livestock have soured many on the Republicans.

Tariffs: Due to Texas proximity to Mexico, the auto industries cross border integration and the state’s role as a logistics hub, it is estimated that Texas will lose between 100K and 370K jobs because of the Trump tariffs.  These job losses fall disproportionately on Hispanics.    The US Hispanic Business Council polled its members just before the 2024 election and 70% believed Trump was the best candidate to fix the economy. By Nov 2025 it had dropped to 40%

Deportations: Trump’s campaign promise was to deport the “worst of the worst” but these criminals have been much harder to find than day laborers in the Home Depot parking lot.  Masked ICE agents without badges or warrants have been making high profile arrests of both immigrants and Hispanic citizens across Texas.   Tactics like workplace raids have disrupted construction and hospitality, hitting legal Hispanic workers and communities especially hard.

And there are other reasons to be optimistic. The culturally tone deaf insults disparaging Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance have also helped put Texas in play both for the contested US Senate seat and several new house seats.  

Here is some confirming data:  

• In the January 31, 2026 runoff for the Texas state Senate district 9, the Democrat won roughly 57% to 43%, a 14‑point margin, despite being heavily outspent and facing a Trump‑endorsed GOP opponent backed by top Texas Republicans.  This represents a 31 point swing away from the Republicans since Trump’s 2024 victory.  With 4 out of 5 Hispanics in the race voting Democratic.
• The March primary races, with hotly contested top of the ticket US Senate races for both parties, of 100K people voted for the Democrats, this is quite rare in Texas.
• For the first time since 1970 there is a full Democratic slate in all state and federal race.  With every race contested.  This ensures that there is a GOTV effort for down ballot races, which boasts the profile of State wide candidates and increasing the chances for the Democrats to take statewide offices like the US Senate.  
• In all 5 of the newly created US House districts in Texas there were more votes for Democrats than Republicans in the early March Primaries.  
• In a 2026 primary poll, 26% of Trump-supporting Latino voters said they’d switch if 2024 were re-held today, signaling volatility ahead of midterms.  If everything else remains the same as the 2024 presidential election, except this Latino swing, the Democrats would pick up the US Senate seat.

But before you get too excited it is important to remember Texas has been at the cutting edge of voter suppression efforts in the country.  Criminalizing classical voter outreach techniques, raids on Latino voting-voting rights organizations and running over the voters rights act through redistricting.   Texas also disproportionately disqualifies a statistically significant number of voters of colors ballots

Flip in Texas in 2026?

The Flip Project has been involved in key state wide elections with national significance since we campaigned for felon voting rights in Florida in 2018.  We do both work within the state and from outside with online organizing.  While i will be out of the country, many of the experienced Flip staff are willing and planning to work on these important midterms.

You can support our work by volunteering or donating here.  This is one of the most economically effective ways to flip control of both the US House and Senate.  Thanks for consider helping this effort.

Spiderman has the answers and has helped us pinpoint where small crews of volunteers can be maximally effective. He is coming to Bushwick to present on Feb 15th. This is the Partiful invitation and this is Facebook. Or you can just RSVP to [email protected] for precise directions, it is near the Myrtle Broadway subway station

Using AI to Flip the Script: 2026 Midterms

Ready to flip the script on conventional campaigning? Join The Flip Project and our GIS and AI guru, ‘Spiderman,’ for a face-to-face meeting to strategize how artificial intelligence and political mapping are being used as ‘asymmetric warfare’ to drive key demographic voter registration and turnout in swing races for progressive candidates. 

Learn about the innovative techniques that are winning against better-funded opponents—from multilingual campaigning to free rides to the polls—and discuss how we can expand these efforts across the nation. Mark your calendar: Feb 15th at 2 PM in Brooklyn near the Myrtle Broadway subway station. Partiful invitation and Facebook event.

AI for the midterm elections

It has become a common refrain that the upcoming election is the most important one ever.  And as we look at the excesses of the Trump administration’s attacks on communities across the nation, this again seems true.  But what can be done?

All kinds of things!  The Flip Project has used human intelligence augmented by AI analysis to drive registration and GOTV efforts in the most hotly contested elections in the country.  Most recently with the 2025 Mamdani primary in NYC and previously in the 2020 and 2022 US Senate elections in Georgia.

Come meet with political mapping experts to discuss how AI can be used to support expanded registration and improve voter turn out in key races across the nation.  

Learn about academic studies that are showing how alternative campaigning can outperform conventional campaigning.   All over the world inspirational movements are increasing community political involvement – especially in typically underserved communities.  

The US is slowly here and there expanding multilingual campaigning beyond English and Spanish.  We are creating a comprehensive  library and clearing house of materials to encourage such efforts.

Studies show that free rides to the polls can dramatically increase voter turnout for the millions of Americans who don’t own a car.

‘Spiderman’, our GIS and AI guru, is creating maps for every state and urban area that guide our and our partners’ parallel and sometimes overlapping multilingual and freeride efforts.  We are determining where the needs are greatest and where filling those needs is most likely to flip races to progressive candidates.  

Some of the candidates we have worked with have likened our efforts to asymmetric warfare – we use unconventional techniques to win against much better funded opponents.

This face to face meeting is in Brooklyn near the Myrtle Broadway subway station Feb 15th at 2 PM.  

Harmony is burning

Here is the “official report”

FIRE DISASTER, ANOTHER ONE. Today, a bitterly cold winter day, a fire of unknown origin severely damaged Harmony, one of our large residences. No one was injured. Volunteer fire crews are still at the scene. Some of our members tried to put out the fire with extinguishers and our fire hose.

The fire has been extinguished, the fire trucks have left, leaving their inspection staff behind.  Most of the building’s windows were broken by fire fighters and the burned items were dumped out from the upstairs after the fire was quelled.  All of the second floor of Harmony (which had two bedrooms and the collective clothes library) was fire damaged.  The first floor (where 10 bedrooms are) faired better.  The fire fighters’ quick work prevented much greater loss.

For me, despite being away from Twin Oaks, this is an especially sad loss. I think Commie Clothes is one of our most important institutions, in part because it is an accessible idea which has significant advantages over personal wardrobes. I ranted about it on the BBC special on Utopias.

In the middle 1980s i lived in an anarchist collective house in the Castro district of San Francisco. Included in the collective were two medical students, so we called the place “pair of docs” or “Paradox”.  After a few years and a couple of graduations, the med students moved on and we called the place “Paradox Lost”.

Raoul Hausmann, 1920, “A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement.” 

The first AI prompt i ever made (asked? posed? crafted? inquired?) was something like, “List ten top AI experts, their organizational affiliation and their most recent publication on the dangers and possibilities of artificial intelligence.”  It was one of those sloppy “lets see if this thing actually works” prompts and the results were initially impressive.  Almost instantly, ten experts and all their academic and corporate affiliations and the name of their allegedly most recent on topic publications appeared on my screen.

You are already guessing the result, in part because i hinted with “allegedly” and likely in part because you are developing your detector for hallucinations.  Several of the named publications did not exist, the AI just made them up.  AI does not promise the truth, it is going to tell you a compelling story, and determining truth value is still the job for humans.  

With AI presence in our life likely significantly increasing, this hallucination thing is going to be a key problem.  But the counterbalancing point is the same question asked today of Perplexity generates 10 actual publications – the tech is getting better all the time.  The hallucinations are still out there, they are just less obvious and thus more insidious.  

AI requires new types of organizations which have not previously existed.  Some to regulate it, some to test it, some to forecast unseen problems and evaluate them, some to blunt the worst negative impacts.  I find that worthwhile quests start with assumption checking.  And the paradoxical assumption i am going to advance first is – you don’t really have a hope of controlling and guiding AI, without the help of AI.  

There will be those who object to this assumption.  Lots of smart people i know are embargoing AI and refusing to interact with it as much as they can.  And while i understand this choice, i don’t think personally boycotting AI is going to mitigate the critical problems this tech engenders.  But i definitely get how it feels in violation of  Audre Lorde’s wise axiom “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

So let’s start a new Paradox collective, working to decode this vexing AI problem. We can use the additional capacity it provides while recognizing that maintaining human connection is the best way to stay grounded in who we are serving with this work.  So let’s meet in personSaturday Feb 14th @ 2 PM  in Brooklyn NY, near the Myrtle-Broadway subway stop.  You can write for the specifics.  [email protected] or RSVP via Partiful or RSVP via MeetUp

And i am late to this work, my dear friend Crystal (aka Chris Hables Gray if you want to search for his academic work or find his website) has already developed with his colleague from Spain, Ángel Gordo, a compelling set of 10 illusions which need to be dispelled if we are to democratically control AI. It is part of their forthcoming book: AI and Power: Prefiguring Algorithmic Intelligence (Intellect 2027). For a deeply sad visit to what AI is doing now, see Crystal’s open access (free) book AI, Sacred Violence, and War: The Case of Gaza (Palgrave/Pivot 2025).

From “Chapter One: Ten Illusions About AI That Stand in the Way of Controlling It”

1. It is artificial intelligence. No, it is Algorithmic Intelligence. Artificial, in opposition to natural, is a categorical dodge. Anything humans do is natural; to claim otherwise is to deny evolution. Besides, “algorithmic” captures the essence, and limits, of machine intelligence as opposed to its biological forms.

2) There is just one type of AI. Recent successes of Large Language Models (LLMs) do not mean they will improve exponentially all the way to an autonomous  GPI (General Purpose Intelligence) or even super intelligent machine system. That is profoundly unlikely. Rather it is the symbiosis of different AI approaches, especially when embodied in robotics, that will produce even more extraordinary phenomena than we have yet seen.

3) Autonomous AI is the greatest danger AI poses to humanity. Actually, Human-AI systems are more powerful, therefore dangerous, than autonomous AI. So-called autonomous systems are just an AI Alibi at this point. Fully integrated AI-human systems (cyborgs) pose a special danger — the degradation of human nature and eventually the full immersion and submission to the machinic.  

4) Alignment is a good framework for creating ethical AI. Judging AI by how well it “aligns” with human values became the standard approach because it is so malleable (one could almost say meaningless). Tech Lords such as Musk and Altman, and their vested minions quite like it. This alone should disqualify it.

5) Creating powerful AI is the next logical step for humanity to take. There is nothing logical about it. It is unreasonable to make AI the dominant industry in terms of investment and valuation when it has produced little profit, great social disruption, and a worsening of most aspects of today’s polycrisis, from climate change to military operations including genocide.

     The forces trying to produce general purpose AI and super intelligence are multiple and almost all irrational, even fantastical, with outright fantasies such as Lord of the Rings playing an important role. The most rational of these forces is the hunger for wealth and power, considered sacred by capitalist true believers, for even if AIs never wins a war or produce real value, they will make money and shape societies. Rational? barely. Reasonable? Not at all. Barking mad, actually. 

6) AI will solve all the problems created by earlier technologies, including the horrific environmental and social costs of AI development now. This is the mutilation-prosthesis cycle that has justified humanity’s head first rush into the wall of the Earth’s ecological limits by doubling down on technology to deal with every new technological dilemma. But hey, maybe it will all work out this time…same approach but different results?

7) Military AI can win battles and wars. Most wars are not won by the side with the best technology, it is almost always the side that has the appropriate technology, tactics, strategy and logistics for the war they are waging. 

     Military research and applications are central to AI’s current and future development. The military is drawn to it not because it leads to victory in battle, but because it mimics the bureaucratic logic of postmodern armies. Nation-states, militaries, the super rich, and most forms of AI share a deep affinity for managerial control based on instrumentalist intelligence. They are natural allies, when not competing.

8) We need to accelerate the development of AI today because of —China? Profits? The Climate Crisis? Living Forever?— Whatever, we should worry about what it is doing to us now, later. Speculating on the distant future of AI is a waste of time when the politics of AI today are prefiguring that very future. Accelerating AI’s development is the worst course we could choose.

9) AI can be controlled with our current governing systems. Why anyone thinks that the various types of government now can deal with AI when they have failed to even slow climate change, control war, prevent genocides (Gaza, Sudan) or create any kind of fair economic system is hard to understand. Liberal, neoliberal, conservative, neoconservative and all flavors of authoritarian regimes (military and individual dictatorships, kleptocracies, oligarchies, empires) have all failed to control social media and the impacts of the AI systems we have today. There is no reason to think this will change in the future.

10) There is no hope of controlling AI. If government W forbids it, government Z will fund it; if corporation Y doesn’t create it, corporation X will. 

     Only fundamental social change (aka revolution) which allows for the public control of existential technologies can possibly keep AI from worsening every aspect of today’s polycrisis: increasing wealth disparities, gifting authoritarians new forms of power, raising the chances of war, accelerating the climate crisis, and eventually making the grim prediction—If anyone builds it, everyone dies—come true.

The only hope for AI to be created and controlled democratically is through the insurrection of subjugated knowledges, deploying concepts and values from the margins of human society—indigenous, working class, the global south, female, gay, trans, horizontals and so on, now being united today in frameworks such as generative justice and sustainable permaculture.

2) There is just one type of AI. Recent successes of Large Language Models (LLMs) do not mean they will improve exponentially all the way to an autonomous  GPI (General Purpose Intelligence) or even super intelligent machine system. That is profoundly unlikely. Rather it is the symbiosis of different AI approaches, especially when embodied in robotics, that will produce even more extraordinary phenomena than we have yet seen.

3) Autonomous AI is the greatest danger AI poses to humanity. Actually, Human-AI systems are more powerful, therefore dangerous, than autonomous AI. So-called autonomous systems are just an AI Alibi at this point. Fully integrated AI-human systems (cyborgs) pose a special danger — the degradation of human nature and eventually the full immersion and submission to the machinic.  

4) Alignment is a good framework for creating ethical AI. Judging AI by how well it “aligns” with human values became the standard approach because it is so malleable (one could almost say meaningless). Tech Lords such as Musk and Altman, and their vested minions quite like it. This alone should disqualify it.

5) Creating powerful AI is the next logical step for humanity to take. There is nothing logical about it. It is unreasonable to make AI the dominant industry in terms of investment and valuation when it has produced little profit, great social disruption, and a worsening of most aspects of today’s polycrisis, from climate change to military operations including genocide.

     The forces trying to produce general purpose AI and super intelligence are multiple and almost all irrational, even fantastical, with outright fantasies such as Lord of the Rings playing an important role. The most rational of these forces is the hunger for wealth and power, considered sacred by capitalist true believers, for even if AIs never wins a war or produce real value, they will make money and shape societies. Rational? barely. Reasonable? Not at all. Barking mad, actually. 

6) AI will solve all the problems created by earlier technologies, including the horrific environmental and social costs of AI development now. This is the mutilation-prosthesis cycle that has justified humanity’s head first rush into the wall of the Earth’s ecological limits by doubling down on technology to deal with every new technological dilemma. But hey, maybe it will all work out this time…same approach but different results?

7) Military AI can win battles and wars. Most wars are not won by the side with the best technology, it is almost always the side the the appropriate technology, tactics, strategy and logistics for the war they are waging. 

     Military research and applications are central to AI’s current and future development. The military is drawn to it not because it leads to victory in battle, but because it mimics the bureaucratic logic of postmodern armies. Nation-states, militaries, the super rich, and most forms of AI share a deep affinity for managerial control based on instrumentalist intelligence. They are natural allies, when not competing.

8) We need to accelerate the development of AI today because of —China? Profits? The Climate Crisis? Living Forever?— Whatever, we should worry about what it is doing to us now, later. Speculating on the distant future of AI is a waste of time when the politics of AI today are prefiguring that very future. Accelerating AI’s development is the worst course we could choose.

9) AI can be controlled with our current governing systems. Why anyone thinks that the various types of government now can deal with AI when they have failed to even slow climate change, control war, prevent genocides (Gaza, Sudan) or create any kind of fair economic system is hard to understand. Liberal, neoliberal, conservative, neoconservative and all flavors of authoritarian regimes (military and individual dictatorships, kleptocracies, oligarchies, empires) have all failed to control social media and the impacts of the AI systems we have today. There is no reason to think this will change in the future.

10) There is no hope of controlling AI. If government W forbids it, government Z will fund it; if corporation Y doesn’t create it, corporation X will. 

     Only fundamental social change (aka revolution) which allows for the public control of existential technologies can possibly keep AI from worsening every aspect of today’s polycrisis: increasing wealth disparities, gifting authoritarians new forms of power, raising the chances of war, accelerating the climate crisis, and eventually making the grim prediction—If anyone builds it, everyone dies—come true.

The only hope for AI to be created and controlled democratically is through the insurrection of subjugated knowledges, deploying concepts and values from the margins of human society—indigenous, working class, the global south, female, gay, trans, horizontals and so on, now being united today in frameworks such as generative justice and sustainable permaculture.

I am a match maker.  Not a romantic one, but a collective one.  I try to help people find intentional communities which will work for them.  I love this work, it is complex and messy and can have a huge personal impact.  That is where i want to be.  To this end, i have organized several of Twin Oaks Communities Conferences and i moderate several IC pages on Reddit and Facebook.

Some years ago an older woman came to an event i had organized and asked me to take over a small Facebook group called simply “Intentional Communities.” It had about a thousand members.  She found it frustrating and it felt picky to her to moderate – she asked me if i would take it over.  I agreed and did not think much about it, it was not very active and it would fit into my desire to promote more communities conferences and other IC adjacent events. 

I was already moderating an active Facebook group called “Intentional Communities Discussion Group”.  Which at that time was an active and diverse group including preppers (some of whom are para military folks who are building and stocking compounds in preparation for a societal breakdown) to your commune style hippie and everything in between.  This FB group was tightly moderated, and because of that there were quite some interesting conversations between people who did not often talk.  There was an agreement to stay away from party politics, which was instrumental in the group functioning.  With time the group grew into the thousands but the preppers seemed to disappear.

But then a funny thing happened on the new smaller page, which i chalk up to some Facebook Vice President saying “we need to up engagement, send people suggestions for things they did not ask for but might like.”  And apparently “intentional community” was something that fit Facebook’s understanding of what we are.  Membership inquiries started pouring in.  For a while, hundreds a day.  Maintaining the moderation of our standard became harder and i asked several people who were active in online IC spaces to help.  I got lucky and Onna came on and fixed a bunch of the outward facing aspects of the page as well as put in filtering procedures to avoid spam and drive bys.  Later Ardell became a moderator who was the driving force behind the icmatch.org which offers all manner of resources and options for folks seeking community.

This group has two filtering questions 

• Do you agree with the rules of the group?
• What is Rule 4?

Rule 4 states that posts need to be relevant to intentional communities.  This is not a free form group, this is a moderated discussion.  Conversation has to be civil, you have to agree to the rules of the group and you have to be on topic.  Excluding attempts at advertising, the most common reason for a post to get deleted by moderators is that it is off topic.  

There are 113K members in this group near the start of 2026.  A popular post can garner 1000 likes and hundreds of comments in just a few days.  This makes us a very popular place to post.  If you think your slap dash, poorly-formulated, mostly off-topic post will be read by lots of people then why wouldn’t you post it?  Part of the moderators job is to delete these posts, or better still stop them before they go up.

I take out the trash.  If you fail either or both of the above questions and you have a comment or a post you would like to make, i get to check it out before it gets deleted automatically.  And as you would suspect, there is lots of great stuff in the trash: people with really helpful suggestions, people who look like they are a good fit for the community, people who just missed the rules, because the post mysteriously showed up in their feed and they really want to comment on it because it is aligned with their interest.

And of course there is a lot of trash in the trash as well.  I am blowing away comments on how attractive someone is. There are lots of “if i were younger/without kids i would come join you”.   All the airbnb and principally commercial postings get banned, 1 strike you are out of the group.  All the poetry (tho poetry postings have all but abated these days).  There are posts in languages i can’t read. There are all emoji posts which i am not willing to decode. Lots of the trash is uncivil speech – which just gets banned.  You swear with critical intent and i am going to ban you.  If “civil conversation” is rule number one and you come in swearing, you missed too many of the rules for a second chance.  There are lots of other IC forums – some larger and more active than ours, many of them are barely moderated – there are lots of other pages to go to and attack or criticize people.  

There are a number of moderators for this group besides myself. They all have somewhat different styles, and the approving burden for me has dropped significantly, since there is more help in the mix. But a common misperception is we review everything, i barely get thru the trash and posts which users report. Pretty much all the primary posts get reviewed, but hundreds of comments can go by unchecked.

Don’t get me wrong, i think censors are quite problematic generally.  But good moderation is something else.  And while FB is responsible for growing this group, I think this style of moderation has helped keep it healthy and active.  Numerous people have told me they have found important connections through it.  For me one of the important qualifiers for determining if you are in the right community is how do the rules and norms of behavior fit with your personality.  My dear friend Olivia (who has worked on the Flip Project at the Communities Conference), is a professional moderator and she feels like she is putting on her super hero cape to protect her communities

Facebook, whether we like it or not, is a place where connections happen that were once made in physical real world spaces.  Just as a belligerent drunk would get thrown out of a restaurant or meeting, i, with so many others, try to be the bouncer that keeps a group space kind, engaged, and safe.  So for now, on my pages, moderation will be the default.

[It is worth pointing out that Reddit does not have the same problems with moderation as Facebook. Reddit has a reputation system called Karma. When you posts get down voted it gets remembered and there are lots of places where trolls (defined as people with negative total karma scores in this case) are blocked from posting entirely. Trolls need to keep creating new accounts, which means you can’t store your history easily and few people trust your account. It is relatively easy to have lots of friends and incendiary comments on Facebook without much reputational damage.

The main r/intentionalcommunities subreddit (with 66K members) can go a week without deleting a comment. The Facebook intentional communities page i moderate (with 113K members) deletes scores of comments and posts and bans dozens of users every day.]

Today i am confidently predicting Zohran Mamdani will be elected the next major of NYC.  And i will call November of 2025 Mamdani Wins

Source: Al Jazeera – Aggregate polls NYC mayor 2025

The Flip Project looks for close races where a small number of innovative activists could hope to influence the outcome.  We broke our own rules to go to NYC for the Mamdani campaign, polls had this unknown candidate down by 10 points.  But after the depressing results from all our general election work in Florida in 2024, we needed a win, and there was tremendous hope and momentum in this campaign, so we took a chance.  And Mamdani delivered, winning the Democratic primary handily over the better financed Cuomo.  

Final Results of July Democratic Primary (not the general election)

We worked hard before the primary with several inspiring locals to bring out especially non-native speakers to the polls.  But after the decisive win in the primary, we basically backed off the campaign, figuring we could coast to victory in the general election.  Until Amanda showed up. 

Harlem Mural w/ me on the far right – Photo Credit Amanda Nash 

From a canvassers perspective going door to door for Mamdani is pretty lovely.  Most people you talk to know him, most people you talk with are voting for him or already have.  And in this giant apartment complex in Harlem that Amanda and i spent most of the night in basically, everyone who was undecided about Mamdani, was clear on one thing – Cuomo is terrible.

It is especially satisfying that the Elon Musk endorsement of Cuomo and Trump’s threats will have no measurable impact on this election. And hopefully this election can export hope to the rest of the nation.

“You say you want a logo, but you really want a screen printing” They observed. I will spare you the more critical portion of their rant. We gathered artists, photographers and screen printers to design new printing patterns and test the latest design. We are starting up the production line for the communities conference. Bring your favorite t-shirt or night gowns (ironable only please) and we will print on it for free and donations accepted. Everyone seemed pretty happy with how it turned out.

These first shirts were given to the folks who were working at the build camp. This is Sara who has been a huge help at build camp, seen here both modeling the latest screen print art and painting a picnic table.

‘Sankofa’ the BIPOC Dream Seed Sanctuary is a rugged altar of a gathering space hosted by Dragon Rose HeArt and Miles Rose. This sanctuary tends the dreams of those who have carried the weight of oppression and colonization, yet continue to birth visions of belonging, liberation, and beauty. Here we seed pathways of dignity, collective well-being, a movement from survival into thrival, and a return to indigeneity. Each tribe standing tall and proud in its own colors while still sounding into the rainbow whole. Visitors are invited to write their longings for the world and their communities into the collective dream jar. These will be read aloud, offered to a ritual fire, and gifted to the earth as fertilizer for our shared dream futures.’ 

We called for workshops, got amazing submissions, had some hard choices and came up with this roster of workshops (not quite yet a schedule) and we have some amazing speakers including activist and organizer Aaron Johnson. All the workshops mentioned below are described in length with presenter bios and links in this immediately previous link

• Update 3 has details on the following topics
• Announcing our first accepted workshops for the 2025 Twin Oaks Communities Conference
  • Crystal Byrd Farmer will be presenting “Liberation in Practice: Embodied Authentic Relating for Community Transformation”
  • Selene Aswell will be presenting “Integrating Liberation into All We Do: How to not Recreate What We Are Resisting”
  • Anne & Tom Pigman will be presenting “White Privilege and Intentional Communities – Calling White Folks to Explore This Together”
• Work Exchange Ticket Reminder

• Update 4 has details on the following topics
• Join the Build Camp August 15-17, or the pre-event dumpster dive in DC August 27th
• Online ticket sales for the TOCC & CIC end at noon on Aug 28, you can still buy tickets on site
• Announcing Sunday Evening’s Black Culture Celebration
• Erin Gideon Limón from Acorn will be presenting “A Living Network of Communities in Resistance”
• Anna Jordan will be presenting “Community Death Care”
• Rideshare forms and mass transit pickup requests
• The auction is back in 2025!

We will again be hosting Meet the Communities where communities with vacancies present themselves to folks seeking community.

Bring clothes for us to screen print logos (like the one above) for free.

 It is important to have great content [w/s link].  We certainly have that at this year’s Communities Conference .  It is important to have built up the infrastructure, and we have been playing catch up since the March 2024 fire wiped out our conference site.  But this year we have fully bounced back (less the pavilion).

But there is still work to do, especially on the site.  Keenan, the conference site manager, has a long punch list of things which should get finished before our first event in late August.  But there is an even more impressive list of completed tasks, from rebuilding the outdoor kitchen, to disassembling a nearby building for parts, to building all manner of new showers and sheds and swings and play structures.

And we are putting out the big call for the Build Up Camp on August 15 thru 17.  If you have carpentry or landscaping skills that is great, we have some things to build.  But even just hands willing to clear brush or wash dishes makes you more than welcome.  If you are interested in supporting this year’s build camp send an email to [email protected] – we will be taming the mud pit, testing and playing some new group games and having our own talent show.  It’s not all work, bring your fiddle.

But if you prefer a rugged urban approach you can join us for the late Wednesday night Aug 27th DC Dumpster dive.  Why would you go to DC when Richmond and Cville are so close?  The reason is we have an amazing Dumpster coordinator in Peaches.  Historically we have been able to get several cars and at least one bike posse to go out starting at midnight and not finishing til 4 or 5 in the morning.  

Some of our most critical volunteers never touch a dumpster.  Instead they are part of the sorting/packing/processing team which receives food into the very early morning hours.  This is the triage team which decides what gets composted, what gets processed or saved. 

There are lots of different styles of dumpster diving.  Personally, I am a hit and run kind of guy.  Do a quick grab of the things which look good and get out before anyone complains about my presence.  But lots of more experienced folks know that the chances of bumping into someone who cares after midnight is very low and sometimes the best things are hiding at the bottom of the dumpster.    Both of these styles mean there is a critical clean up job immediately after the dive. 

This also means cleanup and sorting is a big job.  The retail value of the food we recovered last year might have been $1000.  We label it clearly and it definitely adds to the spread of food at the event.  If you are on Facebook you can select the event or to get more information you can also write [email protected]

I also follow Raines on social media as he follows me. And when i put up a recent Reddit message about the Communities Conference being in the last five days of workshop presenter submission, Raines pointed out that they are not really presenters.

Raines is right, we are not giving lectures, for that loses the wisdom that is in the room. We are looking for people who can draw the collective intelligence and convene an interactive adventure which looks like a workshop.

If that is you and you can make it to the Communties Conference (Aug 29 thru Sept 1) and your topic has to do directly with intentional communities.

Then you have just 5 more days to get your workshop description in. Relevant links:

1. Description of Themes and good convener practices
2. Curated Workshop Convenor Submission form (due July 15, 2025)
3. Open Space alternatives (on any topic, no deadline)