We are looking for new members at the Emma Goldman Finishing School (an egalitarian housing community in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle). We are, like a lot of people all over the place, trying to figure out how to have different relationships with each other and the world. We think the world is burning and the time to collaborate and try and struggle and work is now. We would love for a group of 2-5 people who know and love each other to move in, as this has worked well in the past and we have a number of openings. Individual members would be great, too.

Our community started fourteen years ago when a bunch of radicals pooled their resources together and bought a funky old twelve-bedroom house. They turned it into an egalitarian commune where people lived together and experimented with different economic and political models. For example: we save up money every month in the hopes of seeding other radical and egalitarian communities in Seattle, and have a time-based micro-economy where everyone's time is valued the same as everyone else's. Core to our project is that people need a strong home-base to be effective and healthy activists, organizers, and humans, and that we should try to live with each other in more egalitarian and humane ways. To that end, everyone who lives here has healthy food, transportation, health care, and a safe and cozy place to call home.

We are just one strategy amongst many social justice projects in this town, this country, and this world. We don't have all the answers. We don't even know all the questions. We are messed up and problematic in interesting and specific ways, and could write tell-all books about the missteps and heartaches of life at Emma's. Another way of saying this is that we are a human project made up of humans. At the very least, we are an excellent training ground in direct democracy, and all the messiness that horizontal structures bring. And on our good days, we're a lot more than that.

Happy spring from Emma’s! And it is starting to feel like spring here in Seattle. Yesterday the sun was out in full force, people were walking the streets in shirtsleeves, and the cherry trees and daffodils have bloomed. The warmer air (and rain ?) are a welcome change from what was a winter of abnormal snow. In December and January we had snow that shut down the city! At first the urban winter wonderland was a fun change that had us all inside crafting, cooking, eating, relaxing with our friends and fellow communards. But after a few weeks, that got old.

So now we’re busy planning our garden for the summer, cover-cropping, composting, starting seedlings. Along with a group of other urban farmers that calls itself Food Not Lawns, Marc built a greenhouse at a collective house a short walk away, so now we have a place to nurture our baby plants. In addition, our neighbor is letting us use part of his yard as garden space, so we’re looking forward to an even bigger garden this year. We’re also still participating in the collective farm Shoulder to Shoulder, growing some of our produce on Vashon Island.

This winter we also were able to host many great guests, including family and friends of our members, past Emmunards, friends in the wider communities movement in the region, and activists from the arts education collective The Beehive who were in town on their national tour. You can check out their work at www.beehivecollective.org.

The last couple of months have felt empty at Emma’s with Johanna, Sheldon, and their daughter Ruby on leave in Vermont. After the passing of Sheldon’s mother, they decided to spend a few months with their family on the East Coast, connecting with loved ones there and having a break from life-as-usual in Seattle. We’ll be happy to have them back home in May.

This past year has been one full of changes. The biggest being the birth of our first baby, Ruby, who is the daughter of Johanna and Sheldon. As a community, we’ve been learning how to support new parents, how to do baby sign language, and how to relate with this little one. It has been a challenging and rewarding learning opportunity for us. Now, Ruby is walking/tottering and that is bringing with it a whole new set of fun and challenging things.

Also, we have seen some dramatic membership flux. After taking on two new adult members and two children in the fall of 2007, in the summer of 2008 one of our adult couples, and our new member and her two children moved on. So there was that. But we also had the blessing of bringing on our newest member Wilson. That brings us to our current membership of 7 adults (Sheldon, Johanna, Addy, Monica, Marc, Patience, Wilson) and 1 Ruby, which means we have 5 rooms available.

We decided to open up two of the rooms for non-membership-seeking subletters, and have Marc’s partner Tamara filling one room, and our past member Thea (also of Sandhill) in the other for the winter months. We’re excited to have their upbeat energy and great skills around Emma’s.

Each year, we are expanding our own food production, and this year we joined a collective farm on Vashon Island, which is just a ferry ride away. We have 1 out of 8 shares, where we put in $400 upfront, do 6 hours of a labor a week, and get our share of the harvest. That in addition to what we grow in our own garden has made it so that we have a pretty decent produce supply in the summer months. We’re planning on continuing this next year.