Twin Oaks

Chapter 9 of Life Without Money is on the Twin Oaks intentional community in central Virginia (USA), which Kat Kinkade helped found over 40 years ago. The best place to find out all about the community is at the Twin Oaks website, the source of the following quote:

'We do not have a group religion; our beliefs are diverse. We do not have a central leader; we govern ourselves by a form of democracy with responsibility shared among various managers, planners, and committees. We are self-supporting economically, and partly self-sufficient. We are income-sharing. Each member works 42 hours a week in the community's business and domestic areas. Each member receives housing, food, healthcare, and personal spending money from the community.'

On the labour credit system that has existed there for decades:

'To as great an extent as possible, members choose their own work. People may well want to do more work than the minimum requirement, "over quota" labour credits accumulated for future leisure/vacation time.'

'It takes two people about two days to do the labour assigning each week, juggling the personal requests with the Community's varying needs for different kinds of labour. Out of this investment in clerical labour we get:
1. individual labour schedules
2. general schedules posted where everyone can find out who is scheduled for what
3. bookkeeping in which members’ surplus credits or deficits are recorded and data on all work areas is summarised and tallied.
The computer does what it is good for after the human has completed the part requiring judgement. All jobs are covered with assigned workers; all members have a fair share of the work. There are simpler ways of distributing work but none that grants a comparable degree of flexibility and personal choice. This is the main reason the basic system has survived.'

Kat Kinkade with the Twin Oaks Community, 'Labour credit — Twin Oaks community, Life Without Money, pp. 173, 174

Kat died in 2008, so the material in Chapter 9 drawn from Kat's two books has been expanded and updated with edited extracts from the Twin Oaks Labor Policy (2009) to show how the system works today.