Once the sale of the Tivoli Housing Co-op was complete in 2014, the Common Fire Foundation shifted its focus dramatically, limiting itself to providing basic support for the Beacon Co-Housing community. The Foundation previously had a much more expansive vision of helping to support the creation of numerous intentional communities nationwide that shared our values related to communities as a foundation for personal and collective transformation. The information on this page represents our PREVIOUS more expansive vision and is provided here in the hopes that it may help to support or inspire other people’s efforts in this field.
Common Fire is a young organization and our capacity to provide support is limited. We’ve made long-term commitments to our Tivoli community in New York and to the Common Fire communities in development in Beacon/Newburgh, NY and California’s Bay Area. For the short-term, we are limiting ourselves to focus on these three communities to help ensure their success and to maximize our own learning and growing.
We plan to work with far more communities in the coming years, but in the meanwhile we still want to provide support to other aspiring communities. It is our priority to work with communities that are aligned with our core vision. We invite you to learn about that vision by reading about the “Four Essential Characteristics” of Common Fire communities, watching our short video, and reading our vision document.
Collectively they provide information about our perspective on what’s happening in the world, the critical role communities must play, and the four essential characteristics of Common Fire partner communities.
If you find the video and vision document inspiring and feel they are aligned with your own vision for community, please contact us. We would like to know about you and think with you about how we can be supportive of your efforts.
All of that said, whether you feel aligned with our core vision or not, we want to help you be successful in creating community. So we are in the process of moving a lot of information onto our website in the Community Resources section. Our aim is to get our best thinking, our most significant learnings, and our key documents on the website for anyone to access and make use of. So definitely check that out.
And please do feel free to contact us with questions or suggestions and we’ll do our best to respond.
Thank you, and we wish you the best in your journey!
Who We Work With