Ma’ikwe Ludwig
Ma’ikwe is an internationally known speaker and advocate of sustainable living communities.
Her workshops draw on years of knowledge from community founders, her own 20 years of cooperative living, including four community start-ups, to lay out the most important considerations for making a new community a success. Ma’kiwe says:
“Cooperation is a key element of sustainability, and a sense of community is critical for our well-being as humans. Many people feel drawn to a particular version of community: the residential intentional community.”
Blending practical advice with opportunities for self-reflection, her workshops strive to help people set their feet on the right path for an intentional community to thrive.
Ma’ikwe Ludwig will be available for a couple 2-hour skype presentation and Q&A sessions.
Typical topics may include:
- the reasons to start a community… and not to
- understanding the breadth of work and skills involved with a start-up
- creating a good vision statement
- what successful founders have in common
- the relationship between decision-making, conflict resolution, and membership process
- 15 spectrums that help define what kind of a community you are creating
- social dynamics you need to know about
- economic choices and their implication for sustainability and group cohesion
- what you should– and shouldn’t– freak out about
- key questions for making your community a sustainable one
- balancing holding the vision with attracting new members
About Ma’ikwe
Ma’ikwe Ludwig has been an active part of the Fellowship for Intentional Community since 2003, and has served in various staff and Board roles in that time. She is the former Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable and Cooperative Culture at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, and is currently the Executive Director of Commonomics USA. Her work integrates ecological, economic, social, political and personal approaches and technologies for a strongly holistic view of what real cooperation and sustainability take. Her workshops and talks have broad appeal across the disciplines.
Ma’ikwe is a regular writer for Communities magazine and her latest book is Together Resilient: Building Community in the Age of Climate Disruption, which Bill McKibben has called “a manual for the future“.
Ma’ikwe is a dynamic, compassionate and thoughtful speaker and teacher. Her 2013 TEDx (see below) set the ball in motion for a major speaking tour in 2015, which she is reprising this year for FIC. She lives in Laramie, Wyoming where a group of fellow economic radicals are working on starting an income-sharing ecovillage in the belly of the fossil fuel beast.
Ma’ikwe, talks at “TED talk” Carleton College
Link to Board of Directors, Fellowship for Intentional Community, Communities Directory: Directory.IC.org/