Village Storehouse
A living reference for the ideas, precedents, and real-world examples that inform what we're building. Each entry connects to the projects and chapters where it matters most.
Type
Topic
Project
10 entries total
A friend's honest account of the cycle families face when mental illness and substance use intersect — arrest as accidental treatment access, inadequate programs, release without notification, and repeat.
Why completing a trust teaches a parent the habit of deliberate choice — and how that same rhythm extends into investing and housing cooperative ownership.
Rose van Wier Hein's farmstead in Agoura Hills, inspired by a Netherlands Camphill-tradition farm — a real, lived instance of the same replication instinct this whole project depends on.
How the very first Bahá'í House of Worship was built: a school in 1896, a temple cornerstone in 1902 — dependencies and community life years before any monumental building.
A separate, non-trust entity where families grow shared capital — modeled on Mercy Corps' real Community Investment Trust, distinct from the pooled trust it works alongside.
A different kind of respite: real rest for a family, combined with structured, hands-on learning across housing, benefits, employment, and financial planning — including completing a special needs trust at an unhurried pace.
A real, operating post-secondary program for young adults with learning differences, built around real routines, real responsibility, and a garden-to-café pipeline connecting agriculture directly to daily life — a genuine model for how a rural, farmstead-style community could integrate learning and land.
A town that has taken people with mental illness into ordinary family homes for roughly 700 years — the oldest, longest-running proof that dispersed, family-based community care can work at real scale, without a single founder or a formal institution driving it.
The Camp Fire destroyed Paradise in roughly six hours in November 2018. The money to rebuild existed — $13.5 billion in settlement funds, billions more in insurance and federal aid. The coordination didn't. Rising insurance costs priced out the very families who built the town. A real, sobering case for why organizing a community before disaster strikes matters more than any amount of money after.
Trust between neighbors rarely starts with a shared vision — it starts with a shared, concrete problem everyone already agrees matters. Fire safety is that problem in rural California, almost everywhere. A Neighborhood Association organized first around fire control gives a community a real, practical reason to build the governing structure it will eventually need for much more.