It’s been a while since our last post… but we’ve been busy!

Last week we enjoyed hosting our third open house, welcoming visitors from across the Sacred Valley and creating a space for sharing and exchange. As well as offering pizza, kombucha, bread, and handmade soap, we organised workshops on natural cosmetics, yoga, and boundaries and consent.

We’ve seen a bit of turnover of residents in the past few weeks, and we’ve been thinking about the value that comes from sharing daily life with people of different countries, cultures, and ways of seeing the world. We recently bid a fond farewell to collaborators Max and Sara, while we welcomed Jae (Argentinian yoga teacher) and Sergio (a Brazilian artist who transforms recycled materials into ornaments and furniture). As we post this blog, we’ve just been joined by Phoebe, a Twin Oaks community member and keen gardener from the United States. It’s always interesting to see how each person’s presence changes the dynamic in the house.

Last week we hosted our friends Diego and Yesica, and their son Dante, from Colombia. Their visit was a nice link back to our time in El Juego Community, where we first met Diego, and it was great to reconnect with him and his family.

At times, we’ve had residents from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and the United Kingdom all sitting at the same table and laughing together… even when we don’t all quite understand why. Despite the muddle of languages, accents, and expressions, what we all have in common is the wish to share and work together. These gatherings remind us that our wider network is continuing to grow 🙂

Since our last post, we’ve added several entries to our collaborator blog. We’re still very much in search of new collaborators (join here), and we’ve just launched a weekly social media schedule to help us get the word out. (We’re not the best at this sort of thing, but we’re learning… slowly!) You can help us by following us on Instagram and Facebook and sharing our posts with anyone you think might like our project.

Meanwhile, our cosmetics business continues to grow. Thanks to Max and Sara, we’ve developed fresh branding and new recipes for several different soaps with different scents and properties. This month, we hope to start taking our soaps, facial creams, toothpaste, and other products to local markets and fairs around Cusco and the Sacred Valley.

At the start of June, some of us went to the Sinkara valley to spend a day at Qoyllurit’i, one of the most important Andean festivals — a centuries-old event combining catholic imagery and indigenous costumes with four days of non-stop dancing and music. At 4,600 meters altitude, the climate is punishingly cold, and we found ourselves shivering despite about 17 layers of blankets. Even so, it was well worth the pain to be part of such a unique celebration.

The trip got us thinking about our connections with the local culture here in Peru and how we want to relate to it. Most of our residents, so far, have come from abroad, and we’re seeking new ways to connect with locals, like the town radio station, community assemblies, and other gatherings.

We’ve also been struck by the role of ceremony and public celebration in daily life in the highlands. In Calca, traditional dances and religious processions pass through the town square almost every week. Living here, we hope not just to witness them but also to participate respectfully and learn from those who keep these traditions alive. Claudia has joined Calca’s local sikuri group, and we went out recently to see them perform music with Andean drums and panpipes.

Many of the intentional communities we’ve stayed in host their own annual celebrations drawing on the local culture, such as solstice gatherings and May Day dances, and some have created unique traditions, like Twin Oaks’ Validation Day. Someday soon we look forward to having a similar calendar of events here at El Pilote. 🎉

Lastly, we want to remind our readers about two upcoming events. 🙂

If you’re in the UK or Europe, we invite you to be part of the UK Communities Conference at Braziers Park (9-12 July), an important gathering in the intentional communities movement. This year, we’re organising an online international panel with participants from El Juego (Colombia) and Huehuecoyotl (Mexico).

If you’re in Peru, we’d love to see you at Oñets Awathotheñ (“ancestral river” in the Yanesha language), on the 12th and 13th of September. This is the latest edition of ENIS (Encuentro Nacional de Iniciativas Sostenibles), a recently-announced gathering of intentional communities and sustainable projects in the Gramazú Valley near Oxapampa. As well as helping out with organising this event, we’re looking forward to being there and talking about El Pilote in person. Let us know if you’ll be there and we can chat and get to know each other.

That’s about it from us this month… we hope to have more updates for you soon. And once again, here’s the link to join us!

Alongside Rowan, Emma, Ian, and Claudia, we’re joined by:

• Miguel, from Ica on the Peruvian coast

• Frankie, from Washington DC in the United States

• Sara and Max, from Murcia in Spain

Rowan and Emma decided to stay with us for an extra month, and we’re excited to be (belatedly) publishing their first contribution to our volunteer blog. As the group grows, the energy here is building, and we’ve spent many evenings getting to know each other, playing card games, cooking, and making music. 🙂 A few days ago we went on a group walk to the waterfalls of Arin, where we met some other hikers and invited them round for tea.

We’ve enjoyed discovering the various talents of our new collaborators — Frankie’s legendary baking, Miguel’s business management knowledge, Sara’s artistic skills, and Max’s amazing ability to make friends with all of the neighbours. With new people have come new discoveries and challenges, which we’re excited to be sharing here as a small update on our journey towards community life.

Our First Open House

On 19th April we welcomed about 15 visitors to learn more about the project and see the space. This led to a two-hour group discussion about intentional community, with participants from Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, the US, and Australia sharing their experiences and questions. We also sold home-made kombucha, kefír, and pizza, testing out what we hope will become our new community businesses. We’re grateful for the support of Jae, who helped us to prepare the night before and offered a yoga class in the morning.

All in all, the event felt like a great success. We’re looking forward to doing it again in a few weeks!

Our First Transformation Meeting

On April 21 we had our first transformation meeting, a Sensory meeting (inspired by our experiences at Braziers Park). In Sensory, everybody is able to share their perspectives on topics important to the group, but no decisions are made. We discussed:

• Languages, and how to balance being a Spanish-speaking community with including residents who are still learning the language.

• Planning and organisation, including how to organise work, how to make money, and how not to lose touch with our values in doing so.

• Social conditioning, including habits and attitudes that reinforce inequality and how to address these.

We’re hoping to try out other meeting formats soon, and we’ll report back on our experiences in another month or so 🙂

Getting Our Act Together

One of the most important tasks this month has been getting better organised. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been having a short meeting each morning, where everyone shares how they’re feeling and we plan the day. We’re also having a weekly meeting to take bigger decisions and coordinate long-term projects. We’ve put together a monthly budget that almost looks like it makes sense. And we’ve started to assign managers for specific areas, such as maintenance and business planning.

…well, kind of. Actually, we’re avoiding the word “manager”. A visitor at our open house suggested we use words that are less likely to encourage hierarchy. So we now have a “kitchen chicken”, an “admin chicken”, and so on 🍳🔧🐓. (In Latin America, “pollito” is often used to refer to small children… and it’s hard to stay angry with a little chicken!) We hope this won’t lead to too much confusion if someday we get actual chickens.

One of the roles of the various chickens will be to help us stick to our community principles. For example, our kitchen chicken will think about buying locally and reducing plastic waste (regeneration) as well as taking care of everyone’s dietary needs (abundance).

Under the new system, the community has taken a step towards more self-governance, and things now seem to be working without Ian and Claudia having to be in every meeting. These are just the first steps on a long road, but we’re enjoying seeing our collaborators step into more positions of responsibility.

Borrowing from Twin Oaks, since last week we’ve also started recording our hours on labour sheets. The hope is that this will create more transparency, helping us to keep track of what everyone is doing and plan our time sensibly. More importantly, we hope it will support our principle of social equality—our desire for work to be shared out fairly and based on conscious choice, rather than reproducing unconscious patterns based on gender, race, class, and so on. After we’ve tested this out a bit, we’ll ask everyone what their experiences have been and see how we might improve this system.

Getting the Word Out

With massive thanks to Rowan, we’ve registered the domain elpilote.pe and we’ve nearly finished designing our website, which we hope will go live in the next few weeks. We’ve drafted an FIC listing (coming soon) and created a new facebook page, alongside our existing Instagram. And we’ve just passed 70 subscribers to this blog. (If you’re an influencer you might not find these numbers very impressive… we would welcome your help with publicity!)

We’ve also been meeting with Casa Perú (the Peruvian affiliate of GEN), and we hope to help organise their Peruvian communities gathering near Oxapampa later this year. If you’d like to contribute, please get in touch.

Difficulties in the First Month

Not everything has been easy and rosy in this first month. Some difficulties have included making sure meals and meetings start promptly, aligning expectations around work hours and days off, and sticking to environmental agreements (like reusing bags and bottles when we shop at Calca market). We’ve started to address this by writing a short induction about community norms, which we recently tested out on Max and Sara. And we’ve confronted one of the greatest challenges facing any community: managing the washing up. It’s been hard to keep on top of all the different activities as there are still (so far) only a few of us involved.

Another big challenge has been Claudia’s absence over the past few weeks, as she’s mostly been working in Cusco to support the project financially. We recently decided it would make more sense for her to work in El Pilote full time, and we’re looking forward to having more of her presence and coordinating energy in a couple of weeks.

The Road Ahead

We’ve come a long way in one month, but there’s still lots to do. One of our top priorities is developing our community businesses and finding markets for our products in the Sacred Valley. We’re planning to start out with kombucha and kefír, then slowly broaden our range to products like jams, chilli sauce, soaps, and candles. Other jobs on the to-do list include finishing off the website, applying for grants, and (finally) getting hold of a washing machine. And, with the help of our new garden and construction chickens, we’re making plans for a composting loo and an outdoor shower.

We look forward to reporting back on our progress in another month or so. Meanwhile, if you’d like to be a part of the project, click here!

A month or so ago we arrived in Cusco,1 where we’ve been getting everything ready to receive new residents and collaborators (join us). After many hours spent clambering up and down the city’s staircases, talking to locals, and visiting houses all over the region, we’re thrilled to have secured a lease on a place that feels perfect for the pilot – a large country house in the town of Calca, an hour north of Cusco in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. It’s got two floors, bedroom space for about 12, and a large communal area, with spectacular views of Pitusiray and a beautiful garden with avocado, pear, and lemon trees. It even has a clay oven, perfect for making pizzas and fresh bread.

We’re also excited to welcome Rowan and Emma of Twin Oaks from the United States, who are extending a visit to Latin America to help us get started — and we’re grateful to the mystery donor who covered the cost of rescheduling their flights, allowing them to stay for almost a month rather than a few days as they had originally planned. They’ve provided a much-needed injection of fresh energy, helping us with the move and with getting everything ready to receive new joiners, as well as cooking some fantastic dinners. They’ve also offered to keep a daily journal with photos, documenting life during the first days of El Pilote.

In our last couple of blog posts we’ve set out our ideas and where we’re coming from. Several people have been in touch to share their excitement, but a few of you wanted more practical information before committing to join us. There are lots of things we still don’t know, but here’s what we think life at El Pilote might look like.

Ways to be Here

There are a few ways to stay at El Pilote:

• Residents are committed to the project over the long term. Residents participate in our income-sharing system and work 35 hours per week for the community. In return, they receive food, accommodation, and a monthly allowance. All residents have an equal voice in decision-making.

• Joiners are community members who are new to the project. Joiners can apply to be residents after eight weeks, and must do so after three months. Joiners contribute 35 hours of work per week, participate in income-sharing, and receive a monthly allowance. They can participate in decision-making meetings (see below) but cannot block or delay proposals.

• Collaborators bring skills, contacts, or experience to support the project for a limited time. This might mean (e.g.) an expert on bioconstruction, a documentary maker, a specialist in group process, or a knowledgeable long-term member of another community. Collaborators receive food and accommodation in exchange for 35 hours of work per week. Collaborators that feel financially comfortable are invited to pay S/10 per day towards food costs.

• Guests are friends and family invited by residents or joiners, normally for less than a week as space will be limited during the pilot. Guests pay S/10 per day towards community food.

• Besides these groups, in the short term we’ll probably put some spare rooms on Airbnb. Airbnb guests get accommodation in exchange for money. There might be opportunities to hang out socially with the community, but this is not guaranteed.

Arrangements will be informal for the next few months and there could be some changes, until El Pilote has a legal structure in Peru.

Perhaps you’re reading this and you’d love to come, but there’s some sort of obstacle (lack of funds, not being a resident of Peru, family or work commitments, health issues, language barrier, etc.). If that’s the case, we specifically encourage you to apply. We can’t guarantee that we’ll find an answer, but we want to talk with you about it and see what the options are.

Expectations for Residents, Joiners, and Collaborators

35 hours of work per week.

This is based on a five-day workweek of seven hours per day, but we hope everyone will be free to set their own schedule. The work could be in a few different areas. Some of us will probably take paid jobs outside the community. Others might spend their time making products for community businesses, cooking, decorating, building a composting loo, promoting the project, helping out with admin, planning events, or supporting any number of other activities. We’ll collaborate and try to make sure everyone has work they are happy with.

Food included.

We’ll provide all of the essentials, and we hope to eat together as a group at least once per day. As part of seeking a regenerative culture, one proposal (to be discussed by the group) is that communal food will be vegetarian or vegan. Another possibility is that we raise animals in a sustainable way (e.g., feeding chickens on leftovers). Collaborators who feel financially comfortable can offer to cover their own food costs at S/10 per day, but this is not a requirement.

Accommodation included.

Everyone will have a bed in our beautiful shared house 🙃. In the long run, we’d like to build a community where everyone has their own room. During the pilot, space will be tighter, and we expect to be living two to a room once we’re at full capacity. We still have plenty of spaces for people who want to join.

Equal spending money.

We want everyone in the community to have an equal standard of living. For this reason, we ask that residents, joiners, and collaborators limit their personal spending to a monthly average of S/100 (taking into account that food and accommodation are provided). We might adjust this amount later, once we’ve tested it out a bit. The community will pay this to residents and joiners as an allowance.

Community businesses.

Since we’ll need cash to run the community, and since we want everyone who joins us to have something useful to do, one of our first steps will be setting up sustainable businesses. We have a few ideas, but we’ll probably start with things that don’t require much capital or technical ability, like running events or making jam. If you have a business idea you’d like to try out, get in touch and maybe we can work on it together.

Democratic decision-making.

While we’re still a small group, we’ll take decisions in a weekly community meeting:

• We’ll seek the consent of all residents and joiners for each decision.

• Proposals that don’t get the consent of all residents can be delayed.

• No decision will be taken without the consent of at least two thirds of residents.

• Joiners and collaborators will be part of the conversation but cannot delay or block decisions.2

The decision-making meeting will establish a set of community agreements, which everyone who comes to El Pilote must accept.

Transformation meetings.

We’ll have one meeting each week dedicated to our principle of transformation. The transformation meeting will be experimental; we want to try out different processes and see what works for us. Personally, we’re interested in performative techniques like forum and family constellations, sharing circles, transformative games, dance and movement, and building a culture of transparency. We hope that future members of the community will bring new techniques and perspectives to expand our toolbox.

Everyone who lives in El Pilote should attend the transformation meeting at least twice per month.

We’re figuring it out together.

Although we’ve set out some of the principles that motivate us, each person that joins will bring new ideas and possibilities. This means it’s hard to predict exactly how things will be. We’re a democratic project, so the details might change at any time! It also means we’re probably missing a few things. If you have a question that’s not answered here, let us know in the comments and we’ll update this list.

And as always, if you want to join us, please fill in our form!

A closing reflection from Claudia

This new adventure is stirring something in me that I don’t know how to explain, making me reflect on my origins, my grandmothers, and my family stories. It’s as if I were under a spell, imagining lives that are not mine. It may be Qosqo (as the city is called in Quechua) and its magic, because for me the land is a portal that takes you to different places. Somehow, I find myself among questions and memories that don’t belong to me... that are perhaps inherited.

My paternal grandmother was born in Cusco — almost by chance, as her family was from Arequipa, and she returned to Arequipa herself at an early age. As for many Peruvians, the centralisation of opportunities led her to move on to the capital, where my father (and later I) were born.

My grandmother passed away a little over a year ago, around the time that Ian and I were deciding to make the journey to Peru to start this community. We didn’t know where, and to start with we were thinking about the jungle, but life brought us to Cusco instead. Shortly before we set out from Lima, my dad told me that he had kept some of my grandmother’s belongings, which he thought might help me with the cold of the highlands.

Now I find myself among these hills, wearing her socks, trousers and coats, and wondering what my life would have been like growing up in these streets surrounded by mountains. I wonder which town or neighbourhood she was born in, and whether her mother (whom she hardly remembered, because she passed away when my grandmother was still a baby) spoke Quechua.

My two sisters and I, for different reasons, have each lived in Cusco at different moments in our lives, and these days I hear a phrase echoing in my head: “the land reclaims its granddaughters.”

I wish I could come back with Mamita Luisa to this land, and I wish I had asked her more questions. As I wear her clothes and walk through the streets of Cusco with my hands behind my back, just like she used to do, I feel her a little closer. As my mum often says, when I look back, I can see how some of life’s dots are connected.

Haga clic aquí para ver esta publicación en Español.

Folks… we’re getting excited! We’ve only just started promoting and we’ve already heard from a few people keen to join us. As a reminder, if you want to get involved, the first step is to fill out this form.

On the last part of our journey we made two new friends, Gerther and Hélène, from the permaculture project La Casa del Protector. This February they’ve been away travelling, and they kindly offered to share their home with us in their absence – a secluded house in the intentional community and ecovillage Tierra de Bosques, on the northern edge of the Oxapampa Valley in the Pasco region.1

We’ve been taking advantage of the peace and quiet to prepare for the final launch of El Pilote in March. One thing we’ve been reflecting on is the principles we’d like to live by. Drawing on the FEC values for egalitarian communities, as well as our own experiences, we’ve put together the following list, which we hope to revise and improve with the help of our friends, readers, and future members.

1. Material Equality. We hold land and buildings in common. Any income a member receives while living in the community is owned by the community. Members give labour time to the community equally, or per their ability. Members receive resources from the community equally, or per their needs. There will never be a fee to join.

2. Social Equality. We are working to establish the equality of all people and do not permit discrimination on the basis of race, role, class, education, language or style of communication, appearance, creed, ethnic origin, age, ability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other characteristic.

3. Shared Agreements. We have clear, written agreements setting out community processes, including membership decisions, conflict management, governance, labour organisation, and finance. All members can participate in creating and improving these agreements.

4. Secularism. We are not collectively committed to any spirituality or religion, and we value diversity of thought. Members may follow any belief system they wish to, or none.

5. Abundance. We aim to live healthy and fulfilled lives, meeting as many of our physical and nonphysical needs as possible with minimal environmental impact. We work to achieve this beyond a materialist culture, including by seeking diversity. We try to keep our per-person expenditure (excluding investment) below the Peruvian minimum wage.

6. Regenerative ecology. We seek to live in a way that restores the health and diversity of ecosystems, conserves or replenishes natural resources for future generations, and promotes a regenerative culture.

7. Growth. We invest time and resources in building a wider movement for communal and sustainable living.

8. Transformation. We work to free ourselves from harmful social conditioning at the individual and collective levels, unlearning destructive patterns in our relationships with each other and with our world. As part of this, we cultivate direct and transparent communication.

9. Culture of Peace. We avoid the use of violence, and we cultivate other methods to manage conflict.

For each principle, we’ll share our thoughts on what it means to us and how it fits into our vision.

Material Equality

We hold land and buildings in common. Any income a member receives while living in the community is owned by the community. Members give labour time to the community equally, or per their ability. Members receive resources from the community equally, or per their needs. There will never be a fee to join.

Here, we’re inspired by Twin Oaks (the first intentional community Ian ever visited, way back in 2011). We had an opportunity to spend three months in Twin Oaks in early 2025 and learn more about the details of their egalitarian model. One of its fundamental principles is that an hour of work is worth an hour of work. Everyone who can do so works the same number of hours each week. It doesn’t matter whether you’re washing the dishes or negotiating large contracts for a community business, each person’s contribution is valued the same.

As an international couple, economic inequality has been a concrete reality for us. Starting in March, each of us will be working to bring in money for the project, but one of us will earn in three days what the other earns in a month. This doesn’t reflect a difference in talent, effort, or commitment, only our different circumstances and opportunities. Our access to education, our networks of contacts, our native languages, our countries of origin (and the strength of their currencies), and the context of our upbringing – all this has a profound impact on our economic power. Under capitalism, each of us has a different starting point: the market rewards privilege and social position as much as effort and virtue.

We think this is contrary to social justice, and we aim to create an economy in which everyone’s needs are met equally, regardless of their earning power – a culture that values human wellbeing over the accumulation of individual wealth. Following Twin Oaks, our labour system will recognise types of work that are socially vital but rarely economically rewarded: cooking, cleaning, caring for children and the elderly, inner work, activism, making art, and planning parties.

Since we don’t want to scare everyone away, we should probably add that we don’t plan to share everything, as in the stereotype of the 1960s commune. We don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a few personal possessions, and nobody is going to communalize your toothbrush. Anything you can fit in your room is yours. What’s important to us is that all of our members have a similar quality of life. This means we’ll share resources with the potential to create large inequalities (e.g., cars).

Social Equality

We are working to establish the equality of all people and do not permit discrimination on the basis of race, role, class, education, language or style of communication, appearance, creed, ethnic origin, age, ability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other characteristic.

Our paths through the world are influenced by how we are seen – by how the societies we live in interpret and categorise us. This is clear globally, in the many countries where differences in race, gender, religion, and nationality have exploded into horrific violence. We’ve also seen the same dynamics unfold at a personal level. Claudia’s experience, as a brown-skinned Peruvian woman who has also been a migrant and a single mother, has been marked by the need to adapt in spaces where she has been viewed as an outsider, or judged before being understood. These dynamics are difficult to untangle using words, and we often prefer to approach them through other means.

Reflecting on our own experiences and those of the people we love, we don’t think the challenges come from an individual’s origin, skin color, gender identity, or accent. They come from social frameworks that classify and rank people without getting to know them – from how expectations are assigned, invisible limits imposed, and justifications demanded. We have often observed, with sadness, the racism that can be involved when one person sees another as “culturally different”: often, this means lower expectations and doubts about their competence, or surprise when they turn out to be well prepared. Attitudes are communicated through gestures, silences, and assumptions. As Toni Morrison put it: “[racism] keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do.”

In building an egalitarian community, we want to learn to recognize these patterns; to make them visible, lovingly and with care; and gradually dismantle them. We know this will be a long road, and perhaps an endless one. It means challenging deeply ingrained attitudes and beliefs, questioning behaviors that many parts of society consider normal, and recognising the limits of our understanding of the experiences of others.

Two of our other principles will be crucial for this work. Our commitment to shared agreements means creating processes that are the same for everyone, regardless of who they are. Meanwhile, our commitment to transformation means working on the patterns and assumptions that live within us, often without us knowing it. By taking these steps, we hope to create a space that honours diversity, where children can grow up feeling equally valued, and where no-one has to make an extra effort to prove that they belong.

Shared Agreements

We have clear, written agreements setting out community processes, including membership decisions, conflict management, governance, labour organisation, and finance. All members can participate in creating and improving these agreements.

Here, we’re inspired by the book Creating a Life Together by Diana Leafe Christian. Christian notes that many communities fail, despite the best of intentions, due to the absence of clear structures from the beginning. Setting expectations in advance can’t prevent all of the difficult moments, but it can make the toughest decisions easier and kinder. As our friend Keenan, a Twin Oaker since the 1980s, noted, sometimes a community member is no longer a good fit – it would be better both for them and for the community if they moved on. Without a fair procedure for asking them to leave, a damaging situation can continue for years. Or, frustrated by the lack of options, other members might turn to coldness or bullying to push them out.

While we were living at Braziers Park, we saw how conflicts can be worsened when a community lacks a well-designed conflict process in which everyone can feel heard. One of the things Ian worked on at Braziers Park was revising the community’s conflict management policy to give those in conflict space to listen to each other, seek ways to live together more easily, and manage the impact of the conflicts on the wider group.

In our experience, agreements are a form of mutual care and a tool for equality: processes for joining, taking on responsibilities, and, if necessary, leaving, must be transparent and fair, regardless of each person’s background. We’re also aware that agreements alone are not enough to sustain a peaceful and egalitarian community. They can provide a foundation, but we also believe in an ongoing commitment to personal and collective transformation.

Secularism

We are not collectively committed to any spirituality or religion, and we value diversity of thought. Members may follow any belief system they wish to, or none.

One of the insights we take from both Braziers Park and Tamera is that no one person can see the whole truth. The deepest understanding is carried by the group as a whole, revealed as our individual points of view interact with and challenge each other. We think a community is at its strongest when it consciously creates space for this (through processes like Tamera’s Forum and Braziers Park’s weekly Sensory meeting).2 For this reason, we never want to become a cult, where everyone is forced to share the same views or follow those of the leader. Even our basic principles will always be up for discussion and revision.

For us, being a secular community means welcoming people with all spiritual perspectives and recognising a variety of sources of knowledge. This includes treating indigenous beliefs and practices with respect, and we will be careful about borrowing from them without a clear understanding of their meaning.

Abundance

We aim to live healthy and fulfilled lives, meeting as many of our physical and nonphysical needs as possible with minimal environmental impact. We work to achieve this beyond a materialist culture, including by seeking diversity. We try to keep our per-person expenditure (excluding investment) below the Peruvian minimum wage.

In nonviolent communication, needs are “the conditions human beings require in order to thrive”, and are viewed as universal. Although there are other ways of thinking about thriving,3 we feel this definition helps to distinguish things that are truly vital for us from things we may happen to desire. The Centre for Nonviolent Communication gives many examples of needs, including:

• Food

• Water

• Movement

• Touch

• Beauty

• Growth

• Appreciation

• Purpose

• Belonging

• Contribution

• Humour

• Sexual expression

• Creativity

• Integrity

• Love

In defining abundance, we start from this needs-based picture of the human being. Meeting most of our needs requires community and connectedness, and it’s hard to read this list without feeling sadness about the priorities of materialistic societies. While some needs do require physical resources, we’re also focused on abundance for needs that can only be fulfilled by relationships.

For us, this implies a commitment to diversity, in a sense closely related to our perspective on ecology. The more different kinds of people we have living together, the more possibilities we have to learn from each other, challenge each other, support each other, work together, and celebrate together. We think that an abundant life is a joyful life, and we’re suspicious of work that cannot be done joyfully, which might suggest that our culture is becoming disconnected from needs.

We’re suggesting a spending limit as part of this principle for three reasons: we want to pursue abundance sustainably, we want to live in a way that is accessible to most people, and we want to live in economic solidarity with the majority of Peruvians.4 For the pilot project, this will be a guideline rather than a strict commitment. This doesn’t mean we don’t care about money. We’d love to get rich (if you fancy donating please write to us 😛), but mainly so we can invest in growing the communities movement, pursuing social transformation, and regenerating our environment.

Regenerative Ecology

We seek to live in a way that restores the health and diversity of ecosystems, conserves or replenishes natural resources for future generations, and promotes a regenerative culture.

At the end of 2025, we spent two months at the Chaikuni Institute and participated in a dynamic agroforestry workshop led by Fortunato Velázquez, where we learned how permaculture principles and agroforestry can support the regeneration of the Peruvian Amazon. While many communities around the world use slash-and-burn farming methods that destroy local ecosystems and rapidly reduce the fertility of the land, regenerative agroforestry takes a very long-term view, seeking to maximise density and diversity. This involves planting a mixture of species that flourish at different levels and for different periods of time, an approach that recreates the natural dynamics of the forest, replacing an extractive system with a life-sustaining one. While many of these species can be harvested by humans, this whole-systems approach also recognises the value of facilitator species that nourish the soil and protect and support primary crops. Over time, diversity and cooperation make the system more resilient, fertile, and abundant.

We think something similar happens with human beings. Just as the forest needs distinct species that can complement each other, human communities flourish when they contain a diversity of talents, rhythms, and sensibilities. Unfortunately, our society is often oriented towards homogeneity – following the logic of the monoculture, where everyone is expected to work and produce in similar ways. We know that such monocultures, sooner or later, degrade the soil that sustains us. In seeking an abundant culture, perhaps we are simply recovering the diversity that has always been part of our nature.

While we don’t yet know what kind of land we’ll be building our community on, we hope to adopt this perspective for our land management, recognising that we are not separate from nature and that our interventions can regenerate ecosystems if we design our lives with that in mind. For this reason, we’re considering founding the community on previously degraded land.

Growth

We invest time and resources in building a wider movement for communal and sustainable living.

We think that many, many people would be happier living in community, and that the natural world would be better preserved if more people chose this way of life. Sadly, it is rarely considered as a real option. Many people have not heard of it at all. Others think of it as something that ended in the 1960s, or have a picture in their mind that has little to do with reality.

We believe there are many reasons to think again, especially sustainability and efficiency. In the city, twenty families might own thirty cars between them. A community of the same size might share eight, and never feel the need for more. The same applies to washing machines, blenders, drills, hoovers, and all kinds of other things that we only use occasionally. Co-operating in this way saves energy and resources. It also saves work: instead of twenty people cooking alone each day, a group of two or three might cook for everyone, freeing up time for other things.

Besides appliances, living in community means sharing the sources of happiness. With more hands to help, and more minds to bring knowledge, skills, and ideas, the possibilities expand enormously. There will be more opportunities for art, music, dance, theatre, film clubs, board games, trips out, exercising together… we could carry on all day. There will be opportunities to do things you might never have considered, like cultivating mushrooms, designing musical instruments, or choreographing a dance for a community play. Or, if you have skills to share, your support might be the push someone else needs in order to create.

One comment we hear regularly, especially in the West, is “I couldn’t live without privacy.” In reality, in most of the communities we have visited, each member or couple has their own room, and rural communities also offer the solitude of nature. We’ve even been in communities where every member has their own house! Another stereotype is that communities are full of social dropouts that refuse to work, possibly using lots of drugs and alcohol. Such groups might exist, but they rarely last. Most communities that survive over the long term have cultures that encourage accountability and challenge harmful behaviours.

To us, what the communities movement needs most right now is positive but realistic publicity, bringing communal living back into mainstream consciousness while challenging the stereotypes. We’ve contributed to this in the UK by creating the UK Communities Conference, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary this year. We’d love to participate in South American communities events like Call of The Mountain, and perhaps eventually organise our own. As our community expands, we also dream of growing the movement through books, podcasts, articles, and documentaries, as well as an active social media presence.

If communal living does become more visible, we expect to see more people wanting to live in community. This means there will need to be more communities! We will invest our spare resources to help create these, and support others who are doing so.

Transformation

We work to free ourselves from harmful social conditioning at the individual and collective levels, unlearning destructive patterns in our relationships with each other and with our world. As part of this, we cultivate direct and transparent communication.

Here, we’re inspired by Tamera’s work to model a new culture. The insight of its founders, including Dieter Duhm and Sabine Lichtenfels, is that our struggles are never just about us. If you look deeply enough into any personal problem, you will see that it has been created within a wider social field that affects us all; our individual wounds are inseparable from our collective history. One person’s jealousy might reveal patriarchal structures in society, while another might struggle to express themself because they have repressed their playfulness to function better in a competitive system. A third might feel uncomfortable speaking publicly in their native language or accent because racist attitudes in their society assign this language less value.

This means healing is a political act, and necessarily collective. Tamera approaches this by creating a culture of radical transparency. By being as open as possible about your feelings and the reactions other people trigger in you, you reveal the wider patterns that are living through you and take the first step towards changing them. One of the community slogans Ian heard at Tamera was, “In a broken society, the longing for healing is a revolutionary force.” This can also be described as living with an open heart, since hiding what we feel is one of our main defences against change. In order to stay comfortable with our established values, judgements, patterns, and ways of life, we must blind ourselves to the harm we do to each other and the wider world.

Tamera and its sister community, ZEGG, have developed various practices for opening the heart and encouraging transparency, of which the best known is Forum – a space where participants perform their experiences to a group, who then share their observations or “mirrors”. One of the things processes like this reveal is that our social conditioning goes beyond our minds and our abstract belief systems. It is ingrained into our bodies, the ways we move and speak, and how we perceive the world. Recognising this, Tamera has developed tools based on art, dance and theatre to explore transformative experiences (traumatic, liberating, shameful, joyful, etc.) without getting stuck in fixed interpretations (e.g., identifying solely as the victim).

We learned some of these techniques on Tamera’s 2024 SD⁴Arts course,5 and we’ve also explored other tools for transformation. In October last year, we participated in a two-week camp at El Juego, a community that has developed various games and other processes focused on the resolution of conflict, starting from the question “what is the worst in me?” These approaches can lead to intense conversations and emotional honesty that might, in other situations, seem excessive, allowing us to reconsider our deeply held beliefs and recognise the shadows in us. We hope to use the techniques we’ve learned on our travels, as well as practices offered by other participants, to create a transformative culture in El Pilote.

These approaches can be intense, emotionally demanding, and uncomfortable, and for many they might feel a step too far. Since we want to create a community where anyone can feel at home, we’re also interested in more accessible spaces of transformation. This could include sharing circles, Sensory meetings, and smaller discussion groups, in which everyone can participate and advance at their own pace.

Culture of Peace

We avoid the use of violence, and we cultivate other methods to manage conflict.

Every nation’s culture has been shaped by its experience of violence. In living memory, attempts to change Peruvian society have been linked to horrendous atrocities and human rights violations. In 2005, as part of a student group reflecting on Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation process, Claudia traveled to Ayacucho, the region most affected by terrorism, to interview residents about abuses committed by terrorist groups and the state. Hearing their stories, about the profound impact of violence on them and their communities, has cemented our commitment to a different path.

This reality is not limited to Peru. Globally, the use of violence continues to have painful consequences. Wars undertaken in the name of democracy or national security are causing mass displacement and immeasurable suffering. In the past few years, the war in Ukraine and the Israel–Palestine conflict have led to tens of thousands of deaths and generations marked by fear and resentment. In many countries, including the United States, the criminalization and persecution of migrants has shattered families and entrenched social divisions.

History shows that reconciliation after violence is a monumental challenge, but it is a path that many countries have managed to walk, almost always through democratic processes involving all parties to the conflict. In our experience, conflicts in intentional communities follow similar dynamics on a smaller scale: by developing processes for reconciliation and co-existence, they can serve as a model for a wider culture of peace.6 For this reason, nonviolence is closely linked to the principles of transformation and shared agreements.

Maintaining a stance of nonviolence doesn’t mean diminishing the historic struggles of people, including indigenous communities, who have resorted to violence to protect themselves, their families, or their livelihoods. Nor does it mean remaining passive in the face of injustices and indignities. It is a commitment to denounce, accompany victims and perpetrators, and transform, without reproducing the same culture of aggression. In today’s world, this choice can be perceived as a privilege, since not everyone can act nonviolently without risk. Our wish is that it ceases to be a privilege and becomes a real and accessible right for all people.

We will work for this to be a collective guarantee within the community by refraining from all physical violence, except in cases of immediate self defence. We also believe in minimizing the pain caused by our words, although not at the cost of directness and transparency.

Closing Thoughts

Putting together this list hasn’t been easy. We argued, edited, re-edited, argued again, and edited some more. At times, talking about and researching these topics brought us close to tears. And so far it’s still just the two of us! 🙃

If you feel resonance with what we’ve shared, here’s the link to join us. Or… perhaps you violently disagree. Either way, we’d love to hear from you so that we can make these principles better. Please write to us or let us know what you think in the comments.

Since our last post, a few people have been in touch with questions. Mainly, you wanted to know more about the work, the living arrangements, and the finances. We’ll try to provide a bit more detail in our next post, so watch this space!

For those who don’t know, Diggers and Dreamers is a nonprofit publishing collective who’ve been at the centre of the UK communities movement since 1989. If you want to learn more about intentional community in Britain, their website and books are the place to begin.

We chatted with Kirsten about our recent journey from Twin Oaks in the USA to Peru, the Latin American communities movement, and various projects that have inspired us, including:

Braziers Park

Tierra Langla

Twin Oaks

Twin Oaks Communities Conference

Cambia Community

Acorn Community

BIPOC Farmers and Intentional Communities Conference

Living Energy Farm

Huehuecoyotl

Llamado de la Montaña

El Juego

Aldea Feliz

Chambalabamba

Instituto Chaikuni

Join El Pilote

We also owe an apology to the Foundation for Intentional Community, whose name none of us managed to remember correctly!

If you’d prefer to read the interview, you can find our transcription here:

Transcript in English (original)

314KB ∙ PDF file

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Welcome to the El Pilote blog.

Our dream is to create an egalitarian intentional community of 100–150 people in Peru, inspired by Twin Oaks in the USA and Tamera in Portugal. In this blog, we’ll share our plans and what we’re learning, inviting others to join us in our search for a different way of life.

We’ll work to minimise inequalities between our members (e.g., based on economy, class, race, age, and gender) and create a space for personal and collective transformation, cultivating healthier, more intimate, and more honest relationships. We’ll start from our shared needs and potential as human beings, building a regenerative culture in which we can live more fully while protecting our environment.

What is an intentional community?

Roughly, an intentional community is a group of people who choose to live together sharing values and resources. There are many types of communities, including ecovillages, housing co-ops, religious communities, and indigenous groups. Here in Latin America, there are also many neighborhoods where people live communally out of necessity. Communities can be found all over the world, from rural farmland to busy city centres, and use a range of structures, including nonprofit associations, workers’ cooperatives, and charitable trusts.

We’re inspired by many of these projects, in which people have come together to imagine a more fulfilling and sustainable future:

Braziers Park (UK) is home to around 30 people, sharing a large gothic mansion in rural Oxfordshire, England. Set up in 1950 after the Second World War as an experiment in more harmonious relationships, Braziers Park hosts events and courses in music, activism, permaculture, art, and spirituality, as well as the UK Communities Conference. Since its founding, it has maintained the tradition of a weekly “sensory meeting”, where residents gather to reflect on topics in the community and in wider society, without taking decisions.

El Juego (Colombia), meaning “The Game” in English, is an international community of Columbians and foreigners – around 25 adults and 10 children living in the mountains near San Rafael, Antioquia. For the past ten years, its residents have facilitated processes of personal and collective transformation using specially designed games inspired by spiritual traditions and psychotherapeutic techniques. These are shared with visitors through camps and longer-term residencies, and in collaboration with other communities around the world.

Tamera (Portugal) is home to over 150 people working for a new nonviolent culture, with a focus on peace, love and sexuality. Every year, it welcomes more than 500 participants for courses on community-building, renewable energy, cooperation with animals, sacred activism, and the healing of love. It is known for emphasizing radical interpersonal transparency, including the use of Forum to reveal and transform conflict.

Twin Oaks (USA) is one of the largest and longest-running egalitarian communities in North America. Founded in 1967 and located in central Virginia, Twin Oaks has 100 residents (85 adults and 15 children) committed to cooperation, income sharing, nonviolence, and environmental sustainability. At Twin Oaks, everyone works a quota of hours each week, and through this work the community can meet the needs of all of its members. Twin Oaks hosts three of the most important events in the North American communities movement, the Twin Oaks Communities Conference, the Women’s Gathering, and the Queer Gathering.

Tierra Langla (Peru) does not describe itself as an intentional community, but is a strongly communitarian space promoting similar values to many communities. Located to the south of Lima, a few minutes from Lunahuana, for the past 15 years it has offered workshops on Sumak Kawsay (good living), topics such as permaculture and nonviolent communication, and encounters with nature.

What is it like living in community?

In our experience, living in community can mean harvesting food together, playing together in a community theater or dance group, swimming together on a hot afternoon, or singing by the fire on a frosty evening. It can mean building your own house, handling a large budget for a communal business, or planning an event for 150 people.

Over time, it means watching children growing up together and feeling that, in some way, everyone is part of your family. It means sharing grief and supporting each when a member passes on, a couple separates, or a project fails. It means giving energy to the dreams of others and receiving their energy in return, understanding that the richest lives only become possible through relationships.

While often a beautiful experience, living in community is also demanding, requiring the ability to manage conflict, compromise, and take collective decisions with sensitivity to the needs of others. Sometimes, it can be enormously frustrating, and at moments of conflict you might feel more alone than you would if you were living by yourself. Passing through these challenges with openness and care can bring members closer together, and can also be a way to work on wider social issues. An argument about who does the dishes or how to look after the children might raise questions about gender, class, and different communication styles or health needs, providing an opportunity to reflect on how we can live in closer alignment with our values.

We know that these experiences can be found outside intentional communities; in many societies, including here in Latin America, such connections often come through the family. But our world sometimes seems to be pushing us away from each other, gradually dissolving the social bonds that connect us. When we were young, our grandparents would have known where their neighbours came from, what they did, and who their children were, and were ready to help them out when they needed it. Now, many of us don’t even know their names.

Choosing to live in intentional community means turning away from the current system and seeking to recover this loss of connectedness. This means sharing our gifts and our unique perspectives, as well as the wounds and traumas we carry. It means allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, struggling together with our shadows and our differences, and experiencing the growth these challenges can bring.

What is an egalitarian intentional community?

In an egalitarian community, land, buildings, and resources are shared equally between all members, or based on need. This includes income sharing – any income earned by any member is fully shared by everyone. Except for children, the retired, and sickness or disability, all members work the same number of hours each week (on average, over time). In return, the community provides food, accommodation, education and training, and healthcare.

All members of an egalitarian community have equal rights to participate in decision-making, but some may have specific responsibilities (e.g., the kitchen manager or the construction manager). These are chosen democratically by the community, using transparent processes. We’ll probably use sociocracy, or something like Twin Oaks’ planner–manager system (more details to follow in future posts).

Besides ensuring formal equality through community agreements, we aim to reveal and transform destructive social conditioning that we may have grown up with (e.g., patriarchy and individualism). This could mean using techniques like Forum and other types of group spaces or games to create a culture of radical transparency.

Who are you, and why are you doing this?

So far there are just two of us, Claudia (from Peru) and Ian (from the UK), but we’re hoping our group will grow quickly. We both have big dreams (some might call us utopians), but we know you need more than a dream to build community. Over the past five years, we’ve visited dozens of communities to learn everything we can about decision making, conflict management, budgeting, architecture, legal structures, permaculture, sustainable business, group process, and more. There’s still a lot we don’t know, and we’re excited to learn from those who join us in the coming months.

Are you a religious community?

No, we are a secular community open to people of all faiths and beliefs, or none.

Why is it called “El Pilote”?

We don’t have a permanent name yet – we’re waiting for more people to join us before we choose the name, and probably until we find land. “El Pilote” is what we’re calling our pilot project. In Spanish, pilote means “pile” (a post driven into the ground, serving as the foundation for a building) and can also be a gender-neutral alternative to “pilot”.

What will happen in the pilot project?

Starting in March 2026, we’ll be living and working together in a small group (join us), figuring out our processes in more detail, developing our legal structure, trying out different ways to generate income, searching for land, and building a network of collaborators. We’ll also be getting to know each other, working on our personal processes, and having fun together 🙂. At the same time, we’re hoping to co-organise a conference for intentional communities in and around Peru. We hope this will get more people excited about living communally, either with us or elsewhere.

We expect the pilot to last between six months and a year.

Why Peru?

Well… partly, because Claudia is from Peru 🙂

Originally, we considered joining communities in the UK, the USA, and Portugal, but immigration laws in these countries pose many problems for people dreaming of living outside the capitalist system. So far we haven’t found anyone in Peru living in the way we’d like to, so we’ve decided to create something for ourselves.

We’re not too focused on our choice of country, as we want to be part of a worldwide movement of egalitarian intentional communities–we hope to work closely with projects like Twin Oaks and Commune in the North, as well as the Federation of Egalitarian Communities.

Having said that, we think Peru is a great place to start an intentional community:

• Peru is one of the most culturally and ecologically diverse countries in the world (we aim to protect and respect its ecosystems and its pre-existing communities)

• Immigration processes here are quite welcoming to foreigners (we want to welcome members from all countries)

• Planning regulations are more flexible for sustainable structures (we plan to use sustainable architecture and traditional bio-construction practices)

• Peru has the best food in the world (although this may be controversial) 🤤

From March, we’ll be based near Cusco, where we’ll set up a group house and start income-sharing. We’re waiting until we have a larger group before we decide where in Peru the final community will be, but we’re considering the sierra–selva – the zone between the highlands and the jungle.

What are you going to write about in the blog?

Since April 2025, we’ve been travelling in the US and Latin America, visiting various communities, ecovillages, and other projects. Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing more about these experiences and our current vision. Some posts might be more like stories, others will have more facts and plans–we’ll try to separate these and organise them so you can find whatever is more interesting for you 🙂

We’ll publish each post in both English and Spanish, with Ian writing the English version and Claudia writing the Spanish version. The two versions will be similar, but not exactly the same. When others join us, we hope they’ll contribute to the blog too.

This sounds great, how can I join you?

We’re looking for like-minded people to join us as equal partners and co-owners, participating fully in decision-making and shaping the project’s vision. Ideally, we’re looking for people interested in becoming long-term members, but you’re also welcome to come just for the pilot and try it out. If what we’re doing inspires you, please fill out this form or get in touch. We’re an egalitarian project, so there will never be a fee to become a member.

The community’s main language will be Spanish. Participants that do not speak Spanish should be actively learning it.

I can’t join right now, but I’d like to support you. How can I help?

If you have skills you’d like to share (e.g., copywriting, architecture, Peruvian law, web design), please write to us at elpilote.pe@gmail.com.

Last but not least, we’re trying to get the word out to get more people involved in our project and in the movement for egalitarian community. Please share this blog with everyone you can think of 🙂

I have another question you haven’t answered here!

Let us know in the comments, we’ll try to answer it!