Venture Communists: Building Karass
For many months during the last year and a half, I have been going to the Point A events we have been organizing in NYC. This last September, we overshot and went up to the latest exciting development in the expanding egalitarian community movement: The Karass Inn.
For those of you who have forgotten your Vonnegut:
A karass is group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial links are not evident, that actually gets stuff done—as Vonnegut describes it, “a team that do[es] God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.”
It is a wildly appropriate name for the members of this project (Amanda, Angie, Jac, and Milo) who connected through unpredictable links and are good at getting things done. While not God-focused, the team is certainly working to expand the communities movement and explore non-traditional investments.
deadly circumstance, beautiful prose
The Karass Inn in Chester, Vermont, and is tentatively opening on Dec 16th. In September we took a minivan filled with people to Chester. We took organizers and artists and just plain hard workers. And in a handful of days, we cleaned up and painted a huge area of this inn under renovation.
Paxus builds (paints?) the revolution
Karass marks a new type of community start-up model. It is the venture communist model. Someone who has access to resources, instead of investing to maximize profit, invests to maximize social good. In this case, the investor purchased the building and provided start-up capital, and the communities movement is staffing it and will ultimately pay the investor back.
Not all investors look the same.
This is not what you do when you are trying to achieve the most money you can make personally. But we have plenty of data on what happens when everyone is trying to do that.
What we do get is another income sharing community in the FEC galaxy and a new type of cottage industry for us, hospitality.
6 responses to “Venture Communists: Building Karass”
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- - December 15, 2017
- - June 3, 2019
your passport to complaining 
Almost awesome. I’m a fan of the venture communist idea, but hospitality seems to be a poor industry to choose. With innovations like airbnb and couch surfing, I find it hard to believe that anyone wanting to stay on a commune would be willing or able to pay good money.
I wonder if they talked to Dancing Rabbit? Since they have a similar thing.
And we get a vacation destination you can LEX at.
Indeed
Not sure we connected through “unpredictable links,” did we, Pax? 😉 I will resist my impulse to get into a discussion of “exes.”
It is interesting that reading this is how I discovered Milo’s last name.
In response to devmqf: your point may be valid however that’s not how the project came about. We were not sitting around discussing what would be the best industry to choose; we (I) stumbled across a ridiculously cheap piece of real estate that had been an inn, and having just heard about 3B from Pax, wondered if a similar model might not be applicable to a skiing/leaf peeping/summer activities area. So we’ll see! So far it is looking good!
Thanks for the write-up, Pax; it is sometimes easy to forget that you’re doing something for a greater good 😉