How to Write Community Agreements (& Actually Use Them)

+ a template for writing your own agreements

When I lived in and worked for a large scale ecovillage in Costa Rica, one of the leaders would talk often about “The Community Glue”. This was mostly because they wanted to emphasize its importance and the fact that the community members had not yet created it.

Community glue: the values and agreements shared by community members and deemed fundamental to upholding the community vision.

“Glue” is such an apropro word given that when you don't respect these, things start to fall apart.

Community agreements are absolutely essential to culture and cohesion. You cannot run your community without them.

credit Global Ecovillage Network

How to Write Them

I recommend that you as an individual sit down and rough out a few agreements you would expect from your would-be neighbors.

If you're building a community you want others to join, write standards you will hold yourself to.

If you're co-building community with others, spend early time on governance and laying out case scenarios of how you will handle issues as they arise.

If you are by yourself and looking for co-founders, introduce only one new person at a time, to ensure everyone understands and agrees to the agreements.

What to include

• Rules

• Expected Behaviors

• Financial Agreements

• Labor contributions

• (Zero) Tolerance policies

• DEAI initiatives

• Individual and group agreements

Something to include either with the agreements or separately, are the expected repercussions for violating the community agreements.

At the end of the article I include a template for paid subscribers to write their own community agreements.

How to Use Them

The founder of my current community put into practice reading the community agreements out loud at every single monthly meeting.

While it may sound tedious to go over something you already know, it's wild how people who have been there for months finally speak up with a question, or how we have to make modifications to the agreements based on new circumstances.

As a ritual, this works really well to:

• Onboard new members

• Reinforce everyone's agreement to (and awareness of) these rules

• Allow revisions to these agreements

This only works for a relatively short list of core agreements (I'm not recommending you read through your bylaws like the Torah).

Some communities require new members to read the rules and sign their agreement to them, and you can have members renew their commitments to agreements as they get updated.

Other ways of keeping agreements alive include

• display physical copies of the agreements on display

• renew agreements after a certain time

• include a review of agreements when new member trial periods are expiring

• have short catchphrases to make the rule/agreement easy to remember and repeat. For example, for our main kitchen, which is used by residents and also for big events, we adopted the phrase “no mess in the morning” as an easy way to remember that everyone should leave the main kitchen mess free by the morning time, even after a big event).

Now it’s time to write your own agreements!

For my paid subscribers, I’ve included resources that guide you in writing agreements, examples of agreements from real communities, and a template to write your own agreements.