Common Fire consists of a large network of people that includes the people in the Common Fire Housing Co-op in Tivoli, NY, and the members of both communities in formation, one in Beacon/Newburgh, NY, and the other in California's Bay Area.

The Common Fire Foundation is 100% volunteer-run by our Board of Directors and our Executive Committee (a subset of the Board that has made an even more significant commitment to the organization).

How We Operate

We aspire to do this work in ways that are consistent at their very core with our mission and our core principles. We believe we must build an organization -- and the people involved must do the work and build the relationships -- that reflect the kind of values and spirit we wish to nurture in the larger world.

We invested over a year of exclusively focusing on questions of governance to help us create a model that reflects this spirit. Some of the key features that emerged include:

  • First, we give tremendous importance to the integrity of our relationships with each other. Our meetings are not just about “business” and tasks, they are a sacred grounding for each of us in our lives and in our relationships with each other, and in our service of the mission of Common Fire. We always start our meetings with “check-ins” or modified check-ins about how we are each doing and what is going on in our lives. And we always stop the conversation to address any points of tension or triggers for people that come up.

  • Second, we operate by consensus, specifically a modification of formal consensus.

  • Third, the EC has the ability to make decisions if the Board is ever unable to come to consensus and the EC feels it's necessary to move forward. Board members also do not have blocking power until they have been on the Board for a year. All Board members are selected for their resonance with Common Fire's philosophy and their commitment to our work. But members of the EC have been involved in the organization longer, have made a greater commitment to Common Fire, and invest significantly in their relationships with each other. By investing greater power in the EC and limiting the power of new Board members, we are very intentionally reinforcing the highest purpose of our governing bodies -- to protect and further our mission.

Who We Are

Common Fire was founded by Kavitha Rao and Jeff Golden, who both serve on Common Fire's Executive Committee.

  • Kavitha Rao Kavitha Rao is a member of the Board of Directors of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest and oldest interfaith nonviolence organization in the world, and is the lead facilitator for FOR's Nonviolent Youth Collective, leading workshops and week-long anti-oppression and nonviolence trainings for young adults. Through the years she has worked as a facilitator or consultant with several organizations including Be Present, the Center for Whole Communities, and the Circle of Life Foundation.

    Kavitha is a yoga teacher, thrilled to share with others this practice that has fueled and sustained her own activism, helping her to ground her work from a place of love and creative action rather than merely anger and reaction.

    After working on environmental justice issues in the Bay Area, Kavitha became an International Correspondent for the Odyssey's World Trek for Service and Education, traveling for 2 years to over 30 countries, reporting on history, culture, and contemporary issues of countries overlooked in most American textbooks for the Odyssey's free educational website that was used by over 5,000 teachers and 60,000 K-12 students. She has worked with grassroots organizations around the world and is humbled by the immense commitment and vision she has witnessed from people unwilling to accept that the violence, injustice, and poverty that may surround them is the only way things have to be.

  • Jeff Golden harkens from the Rocky Mountains of Idaho but has lived and traveled extensively around the world, most significantly in Latin America, including a year on a Fulbright in Venezuela, and notably as an Earthwatch Educational Fellow with the Spanish Dolphins Program.

    He came to the Hudson Valley by way of San Francisco. There he was Founder and Executive Director of Odyssey Internet Treks for Service and Education, a non-profit creating progressive online content on culture and politics worldwide (worldtrek.org & ustrek.org). That work earned him the State Department's Millenium International Volunteer Award in 2000 and an Ashoka Fellowship Nomination in the field of Education. Prior to that he taught high school in San Francisco's Mission district, primarily teaching about the political history of Latin America as part of the Spanish bilingual program.

    He came to upstate New York in 2001 to serve for three years as the Executive Director of the Jonas Foundation, a 75-year old non-profit that runs Camp Rising Sun, one of the world's foremost international youth service programs. He has been dedicated full-time to Common Fire since then, though rumor has it that there have been sightings of him playing guitar, writing, dancing joyfully into the wee hours of the morning, and playing chess with his grandmother.

There are two other members of Common Fire's Executive Committee:

  • Maryrose Dolezal is a cultural worker focused on transforming injustice through healing arts and non-violent action. She is training as a bodywork practitioner with Green River Dance for Global Somatics in Minneapolis, MN, where she is aunt and godmother to four beautiful children. Maryrose chairs the Board of Directors of the Common Fire Foundation, a national organization supporting visionary intentional community building as a means of cultural transformation, and SmartMeme, a progressive national strategy and training organization using narrative power analysis to advance and connect struggles for democracy, peace, justice, and ecological sanity.

    From 2001-2009 she directed youth and nonviolence training programs with the US Fellowship of Reconciliation, an organization working to end racism, poverty and war through building beloved community. She has taught courses in conflict studies, women’s studies, and anthropology as an adjunct faculty at Hamline University, where she completed her MA in Nonprofit Management in 2007 with a thesis on Critical Multicultural Change in Nonprofit Organizations.

  • Esther Campos joined the Board in mid-2008. Esther was half jokingly/half seriously declared the Queen of Common Fire at the Common Fire community planning retreat at the Omega Institute in May, 2008, due to her life long example of demonstrating her truth and compassion in all aspects of her life – as a mother, an activist, a caretaker of children, and more. She is also a Board member of Be Present.

All members of the Executive Committee also serve on Common Fire's Board of Directors. The other members of the Board are:

  • Sean Ritchey joined the Board in February of 2009. Sean is a passionate social/environmental entrepreneur and an inspired life-long learner. He is the Co-Founder/Co-Director of a non-profit journalism and education venture called The Learnalism Project, which seeks to give a voice to, celebrate, and learn from the inspiring steps that humans are taking towards a just and healthy world. Until early 2010, Sean was a managing partner of a green home design and general contracting company that he co-founded in early 2007. He participated in a 12 month Be Present Institute in 2008/2009 and was a resident of the Tivoli Co-op for two year.

  • Jade Netanya Ullman also joined the Board in March of 2009. Jade is the Executive Director of Romemu, a Jewish Renewal Congregation in NYC. She has a long-time interest in intentional communities and has been blessed to experience a good number of them. She has participated in several Be Present trainings and has been active with the Threshold Foundation and Resource Generation.

  • Julie Pennington also joined the Board in March of 2009. Julie is the Development Coordinator at YES!. She’s been engaged in the world of intentional communities for over a decade: she lived in the House of Commons Co-op in Austin, TX; she served on the boards of both the Inter-Cooperative Council and North American Students of Cooperation; and she has been a co-editor of Communities magazine. She’s currently in a Be Present training.

  • Erika Thorne joined the Board in the spring of 2010. Erika is a Partner in Future Now Training and is a Training for Change Associate. She was involved for many years in the Movement for a New Society, a network of social activists committed to the principles of nonviolence, with housing co-ops and intentional communities nationwide She has worked with an incredible array of organizations and causes. She participated in the Common Fire community-planning retreat in 2008.

  • Adrienne Maree Brown is the executive director of The Ruckus Society, which brings nonviolent direct action training and action support to communities impacted by economic, environmental and social oppression. She is also a National Coordinator for the 2010 US Social Forum. She sits on the board of Allied Media Projects. Adrienne facilitates the development of organizations throughout the movement (most recently Young Women’s Empowerment Project, New Orleans Parents Organizing Network, ColorofChange.org and Detroit Summer). A co-founder of the League of Pissed Off/Young Voters and graduate of the Somatics and Social Justice, Art of Leadership and Art of Change yearlong trainings, Adrienne is obsessed with learning and developing models for action, community strength, movement building and transformation.

  • Anasa Troutman joined the Board in the spring of 2010. She's a Senior Fellow at the Movement Strategy Center exploring the intersections of art + culture + transformation. Anasa’s work has been vast and varied, working with organizations like; The National Hip Hop Political Convention, Institute for Policy Studies, Dennis Kucinich for President, The Young People’s Project, Progressive Majority, The Campaign for America’s Future and the historic Highlander Center. She began her career as a producer for visionary artists like India.Arie, Jiva and Donnie.

  • NeEddra James joined the Board in the spring of 2010. She is a member of the Common Fire West group striving to create a Common Fire community in california's Bay Area. She is a trainer for Challenge Day and also serves on the Board of the Oakland Food Policy Council. She is the principal at Semaphore Creative, providing nonprofits and socially progressive businesses copywriting, research and design support, and maintains a blog that explores contemporary politics and culture from the perspective of Buddhist theories of interconnectedness.

 

Special thanks to Matthew Powell who did the flash on the home page for us! We highly recommend him! mpow540@gmail.com