During the past months our experiences of living and working together at Ängsbacka have transcended and showed us new flavors and forms, showed us how we can leave certain draining patterns behind and lean into more functional ways of creating living communities. One of the structural frameworks which can form a more NURTURING SELF-ORGANIZING SELF-REVITALIZING LIVING COMMUNITY at Ängsbacka we call The Community Circles. We are now creating these community circles to give our new experiences and Ängsbacka a new structure to ground and thrive within.
To establish new qualities in our community, we would like to incorporate and incarnate new systemic structures to support an energetic shift. Basicly the functioning foundation of our old structures will be kept, inspired and shifted into SUPPORTING OUR LONGING TO LIVE AND LOVE OUT OF LUST. This shift seems to be a necessary and natural step forward. We welcome you to bring it forward into reality with us!
The community circle would give you a platform to create Ängsbacka-related and private projects with others, naturally creating a synergy where your creativity can thrive. The community circles can be catalysts for your gifts to manifest and transcend your everyday life. The community circles can be a home base of companionship and family.
The community circles will be teams of people working together managing a work area together and creating their own way of cooperating, meeting IRL and connecting online to plan the all-year-round practicalities for this work area. The community circle have a practical task, but more fundamentally they have a social spiritual task in creating a community in which they want to be, where you give and receive what brings you most alive. Ängsbacka will provide the group with a place to meet and create something together. You join whatever circle you are interested in and you invite who ever you want to work with your circle. Given the practical tasks at hand you are free to be creative and focus on that which turns your spirit on. You are welcome to come live at Ängsbacka to practice your skills during the course season and meet up with all the community circles at regular ÄLI and membership gatherings at Ängsbacka in the future.
Community circles can be formed in any work area that interest and inspire you. For example kitchen, café, garden, site team/handy, sound & light, marketing, volunteer management, äli, safety, economy, etc. Let us paint you a picture with an example. The kitchen circle could happen something like this:
Form a group of people managing the festival kitchen organization. You would need some professional chefs, some people with kitchen experience, some people with big networks within the kitchen worlds to gather and headhunt chefs and chef assistants to the summer festival kitchens, some people who are enthusiastic and nice to be around to synergize and create a work atmosphere and work community you thrive from. Some of you people will be the base group and some of you will just join for particular festivals. You get a practical task mission from Ängsbacka and as much support from the management as you need to work it out in your team. You would do inventories of the kitchen and storages, plan and place orders of ecologically and financially sustainable foods, arrange working hours for the people in your team, synchronize your work shifts and work routines with the supportive kitchen volunteer crew, etc.
The community circle is the base crew in the working area. You know the work tasks, you know each other and you how you want to live and work together. You welcome the regular volunteers into your circle when they come for shorter periods. You are the practical and energetic base, supporting everyone to receive and contribute in ways which makes each individual and your circles at large thrive in a healthy organic way. You are devoted to this cause and will do what ever you need to do to create the nourishing living community circle you long to be part of. You want to contribute to this and hold space for others to step into this. In the big picture the community circles will naturally hold all working areas and nourish the whole atmosphere at Ängsbacka more and more both practically and energeticly, as we in the community circles create a reality where we are nurtured, revitalized and inspired to be together, work together and live together.
To be part of a circle is to be part of something you want to be part of, something that continuously unfolds a ‘yes’ within you, something you contribute to so that it gives you what you and your community needs in order to “wanna be around”. The community circles exist all year round and creates a synchronized web connecting the different festivals seasons and course seasons to each other. New people are welcome to join the circle and some leave for other life missions, but the circle is intact and can PASS ON PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE, ENERGETIC INTEGRITY AND HEARTFUL COMPANIONSHIP. The circles will grow and multiply in their own pace as they serve people with an attractive way of living and take on their own life. How many people will join, when the circles will form and which part of the previous Ängsbacka organization structures that will be kept and which will be renewed, all this we will organically discover together.
Every community circle will have one/a few people in charge for the practical and social well-being of the group. This leader or ‘focalizer’ is a facilitator and a contact channel for Ängsbacka management and others to communicate with the circle. The whole circle is responsible for the actual practical and social reality in the group. The focalizers of different community circles create a foundation at Ängsbacka. They preferably live there or come there regularly so they can meet continuously and work off the synergy of being together in a circle. They express the needs of their community circle: what people, tasks, practicalities etc. they need and settle all the details and everything needed together with management. They cooperate with the ÄLI coordinators related to their work area and is part of the overall recruit of people to the community circles and the short term volunteer teams. They are like all-year-around staff key people influencing the decisions and directions of Ängsbacka as a whole. They can stay at Ängsbacka, join events and/or receive a percentage of Ängsbacka’s income as financial compensation.
The group of the community circle focalizers is a central circle which is very closely linked to Ängsbacka in their private and professional lives. All community circles connect and grow out of this central circle.
THE ÄNGSBACKA ORGANISATION. THE ÄNGSBACKA VILLAGE.
YOUR PRIVATE LIFE. THE WORLD AROUND US & BEYOND!
The community circles are not just established to carry out Ängsbacka tasks. But rather to create dynamics which will support the whole Ängsbacka organizational dynamics and your private life dynamics. The community circles will prioritize what it prioritizes. The circles will be one of the BASIC LIFE-GIVING SOURCES OF ÄNGSBACKA AND WHAT THEY DECIDE TO FOCUS ON WILL GROW AND THRIVE. This goes beyond the ideas and plans which are formulated by the Ängsbacka management. The circles are invited to make up their own direction and manifest their own projects. This can be anything like using the Ängsbacka hygienically approved facilities to produce their own products and the Ängsbacka village network to create sales, trades, projects and an overall growing village community, sharing all of life in friendship and family, in wisdom and in work, in conscious clarity and confusion, in fear and fun, in REVOLUTION AND RELAXATION.
By creating the community circles we can create a new perspective and a new experience of the real resources at play. Instead of having fixed separated circles of participants, volunteers, staff, workshop leaders, guests, producers etc. we can be one circle distributing its needs and resources evenly and organically. If we work and live in circles we can thrive from its natural way of creating an eco-system where the different parts are connected to each other and can spread the resources and satisfy the needs present, instead of working and living in separate compartments with stress of being insufficient and unsuccessful in our tasks and without the tools of balancing it out. Instead this way of living and working together in organic circles can give rise to more spontaneous and NATURAL CREATIVE ENERGY: TRUE COCREATION, COMPANIONSHIP AND SELF-SUPPORTIVE SUSTAINABLE LOCAL PROJECTS CONNECTED TO OUR REALITY AND LIVING COMMUNITY. If our fellow neighbors, friends and acquaintances are part of our lives as community circles, how will we relate to and connect to each other then? Lets find out!
You can find more ideas around this in Pyret’s Ängsbacka Village Manifest blog post.
The goal is to form a SELF-ORGANIZING SELF-ENERGIZING work system that grows out of principles that makes us thrive and naturally grow together and LIKE BEING TOGETHER. This instead of having a controlled regular management and organization system that can drain our spontaneous inspiration and companionship. We shall see what ingredients and what time we need to shift out of old structures and grow in this direction. We have created amazing spaces at Ängsbacka so far over the past decades and now we believe our organization need to find a more organic structure, making it into a LIVING ORGANISM which creates more natural CONNECTIONS between the actual people involved and between the different work groups, festival coordinators, course season coordinators, participants and workshop leaders. It will be more natural to create an organization which PROMOTES SUSTAINABLE HUMAN AND FINANCIAL SYSTEMS AND RESOURCES, cause we who organize it actually want to create something we want to and can live within. Exactly where it will go, what it will look like and how fast it will go we discover together in the weeks, months and years to come!
To be continued.
Looking forward to share our inspiration and future possibilities in real life!
Welcome to contact us as soon as possible so we can get a picture of your interest and start up some circles!
