Community as Insurance

Table of Contents

• alternative ideas of insurance

• insurance complications in intentional communities

  • policy recommendations to address this

• wrap up, housekeeping, and

  • a brief poll!

Hi friends! This week, between fighting off the flu and finally receiving health insurance enrollment confirmation after four months of paperwork — I’ve been thinking a lot about something I heard last summer.

I was sitting with Cob on the dark wooden balcony attached to his house. He wore a black button-down reminiscent of a Hawaiian print, and he sat back, clearly comfortable with being interviewed. It was late afternoon in Missouri, and under the shade of his house, the weather was mild and fresh.

This comment got me thinking about the kinds of insurance we tend to overlook.

Typical insurance plans protect an individual financially, so that in the case of disaster, they can help remediate their own situation with the money that the insurance company provides. For example:

—> you pay into housing insurance

—> a tree falls on your house

—> the insurance company pays you back so that you can hire contractors to fix the damage

But there are other kinds of insurance against risks that aren’t at all monetary.

other conceptions of insurance include

• having a support network of people

  • whom you could stay with temporarily

  • who might lend you tools and supplies

  • who can offer skills and/or their time to help you make repairs

• having a pool of shared resources you can fall back on in times of need

  • i.e. if you need a chainsaw, having a neighbor’s chainsaw you can borrow, instead of needing the money to buy your own

For readers living in intentional communities, this might seem obvious. Having the security that comes with a collaborative community is a big reason many people choose to live in an intentional community! At the same time:

ICs have their own insurance complications

• Relying on the land makes you more vulnerable when disaster strikes

  • In this case, it can be prudent to have a support network outside of your intentional community as well who you can rely on if your whole community is affected

• ICs and ecovillages which use atypical building and organizing practices struggle more to access traditional, financial insurance

  • For example, cob houses are often ineligible for housing insurance

  • Currently, this means that ecovillages are often forced to rely on ‘human powered’ rather than ‘finance powered’ insurance

Some of the key policies that could help ICs better access traditional insurance include:

1. Advocating for a new entity designation of community groups as a financial organizing option — currently, many groups have to jump through hoops to classify themselves as condominiums in order to navigate financial institutions

2. Advocating for the creation of insurance policies specified for natural building practices, or for modifications to be made to incorporate these structures into existing plans

meanwhile, mutual aid is its own kind of insurance

Creating networks of care, and the expectation that you & your community will care for each other in times of need, both improves material outcomes in hard times and improves our sense of security and stability when things are going well.

That’s all the official content for this week! Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in discussing any of this more :)

Poll! some brief housekeeping:

I’m working on configuring an option for paid subscriptions to this newsletter, while the current content will remain free. This helps me avoid ads and helps the newsletter seem more legitimate to publishers, since they can see that people want to pay to read my writing. This poll is to gauge interest, and if you have other ideas of content you’d like to see, please let me know!

Lastly, my kitten wanted to add these closing remarks: ‘ikuykj’ as well as ‘nmj.’ Can you tell where he stepped on the keyboard?

Much love,

Jasper