Community Seekers’ Fairs

Community Seekers' Fairs are Community Seekers' Fairs are low-cost evening events, sponsored and hosted by forming or existing communities or regional community networks, to help community seekers meet local and regional communities (both existing and newly forming) and vice-versa.

Everyone benefits: it’s a lively win-win evening for local communities seeking new members or co-founders, and for people who want to join a communityor start their own, or who are simply interested in learning more. It also community members a chance to meet each other and network and catch up on how they’re all doing. It’s also a chance for the sponsoring organization to promote their vision, goals, and services. Diana receives a small percentage of the fees for the evening; most of the profit goes to the sponsoring organization. To set up a Community Seekers’ Fair in your area, contact Diana at

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Here’s how it works. Members of existing and forming communities — local ecovillages, cohousing neighborhoods, urban group households, and every kind of community — set up tables around the room with exhibit boards, flyers, and sometimes PowerPoint presentations on a laptop. Some bring cookies and refreshments to offer visitors to their exhibit.

Diana, as author of Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community, kicks off the evening with a lively 45-minute talk. She offers tips about how to research communities online (including how to tell the “wheat from the chaff” in community listings and websites). How to tell which communities might best meet your needs for location, values, mission and purpose, lifestyle, whether you can afford to join, and how (and whether) you could make a living there. Planning community visits and getting the most out of your visits. Evaluating the communities you’re considering after visiting, including an “insider’s guide” for things to look for and questions to ask. How community membership processes work. How to join your chosen community gracefully (including pitfalls to avoid).

The talk includes lots of humor, including how what to do — and not do — when visiting a community, “The Community Visitor Hall of Fame,” what communitarians really mean when they tell you things about their community, debunking common misconceptions about community, how to join “like a wolf joining a wolf pack,” and the stages of joining: The Honeymoon, The Honeymoon’s Over!, and the “Oh, I Get It” Stage.

After the talk people visit the community exhibits around the room, talk with community members, pick up brochures, watch the power point slide shows, and have cookies and refreshments. It’s a lot of fun!

The sponsoring organization (or local independent bookstore) usually sets up a book table for Diana’s books and other books and publications on ecovillages, cohousing, and other kinds of intentional community.

Recent Community Seekers’ Fairs have been in Seattle (October 2007), sponsored by NICA (Northwest Intentional Communities Association), and in the San Francisco Bay Area (November 2007), sponsored by Northern California Cohousing Association. Another Community Seekers’ Fair is scheduled for Portland, Oregon on July 25, 2008, as part of NICA’s Annual Communities Gathering.

For information about setting up a Community Seekers’ Fair in your area, contact Diana at

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