Eugene has a rich history of community building in many different capacities. Intentional communities, also known as cooperative living situations, are historically one of the most proactive and primary ways. It’s easy to limit the scope of what we view as cooperative living situations at the University to the Campbell Club or Lorax Manner, but the depth and breadth of Eugene and the state of Oregon’s communal living situations run much further than that. 
Dumá was founded in 1990 by eight former members of the University co-ops. What was once an apartment complex for “wayward girls” of the Eugene Bible School has been converted into a home, usually occupied by eight or so residents, where community, relationships and values are put on the front burner. Allen Hancock happens to be the only remaining founding member of the house still residing there.
“I was introduced to cooperative living in the student cooperatives, and I really liked it a lot,” Hancock said. “But there were also some things about it that I also could see weren’t sustainable personally: I wasn’t going to be a student forever, and I didn’t really like the idea of living with 20 people.”
At Dumá, keeping things manageable and under control is a high priority. The inside of the house is immaculate, with vibrantly painted walls and the smell of incense lingering in the air. The garden in the front yard obscures the sight of the house from the street with its foliage and is filled with edible plants and shrubs.
“There’s actually quite a bit of edible plants in the front yard, some of which you probably wouldn’t recognize because we’re trying to push the boundaries a little bit about what’s commonly edible,” Hancock said.
Hancock makes a natural soda from elderberry flowers and uses other uncommon plants, such as sedum, in salads and for other medicinal purposes. The plant chaos of the front yard, the buzzing of the insects, perhaps even a random tenant attending to a plant or two is contrasted by the calm of Alder Street in front of the house, the solace of the inside. 
Coordinating diets and food situations for eight, and maybe even more people, can be difficult at times. House residents eat dinner together five nights a week and buy all their groceries together. For the most part, Dumá residents stick to vegetarianism, but there are the omnivores, the vegans, the gluten-frees, and the list goes on.
“Folks are pretty accommodating about trying to come up with menus that work for everyone, and it’s challenging when you have three or four different restrictions,” Hancock said. 
However difficult it may be, residents are still able to get creative about things, dishing up fantastic concoctions that appeal to all types of diets. Also, like the alternative array of plants and shrubs in the front garden would suggest, Dumá tenants maintain a progressive mindset about food, nutrition, and their diets in general.
“There’s a lot of things that people don’t think of as edible, and they’re not going to provide us our nutrition by any stretch of the imagination,” Hancock said. “But it’s just part of our forward thinking from the beginning, which is that we’re not confined to our thinking about what living is like, what food production is like, and so forth.” 
That forward thinking is also an aspect that Robert Bolman, founder of Maitreya EcoVillage in West Eugene, has found to play a critical role in his community. Maitreya, a community of usually 25 to 30 individuals, was built with the future in mind. Bolman’s focus on sustainability and sustainable lifestyles in the architecture of his nine-dwelling EcoVillage is unparalleled. Many of the dwellings use straw bale insulation and require little to no external form of heating or cooling. Bolman’s community house, a dwelling used for communal events and rental by residents for personal use, makes extensive use of natural building materials, including straw bale insulation, earthen floors and other naturally derived components and materials.
“The idea with natural building is that you can take natural materials and build a building out of them and they would return back into natural materials again,” Bolman said. 
But using sustainable, earth-friendly materials and methods of building isn’t the only thing Bolman factors in. Aesthetics play a huge role, as well.
“Beauty is a major part of sustainability,” Boleman said. “The more beautiful a building is, the more people will love it and care for it, and it will last for generations instead of decades.”
Bolman wants change, radical change. Like others who have see the financial, environmental and cultural state of the nation as grave, Bolman’s only conclusion and suggestion is a full top-to-bottom restructuring of human civilization. Minimalism, using less and only what one needs instead of capricious, careless consumption, is something that he feels needs to characterize the change in culture.
“I just feel that we should try and consume fewer things with the hopes that more people elsewhere in the world can have health care and education,” Bolman said.
Bolman views cooperative living as a much-preferred alternative to the consumer culture he believes holds individuals back from living as dignified members of society.
“Another way to look at is that you’re on the Titanic and it’s going down and you’re standing there on the deck and all the sudden this other ocean liner comes up,” Bolman said. “And this ocean liner is solar- and wind-powered, made with natural, non-toxic materials, and there’s this fun dance party on the deck and there’s all this delicious organic food.
Everyone looks vibrant and alive. You’re not going to have to be told that the Titanic sucks; you’re going to dive overboard. So the idea is to try and make it fun and really community is fun — knowing your neighbors is fun.”
Though Bolman’s vision for Maitreya and for a revitalized America may seem unattainable in the current political cimate, active community members such as Bolman and Hancock have taken the initiative and are helping to objectify what they see as a sustainable, beautiful future.

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