A Glimpse Into the Emergence of My Work and the Shape of My Current Life

Time-sensitive through March 18, 2026. See “IF YOU’RE QUICK”, below.

Dear friends,

Many of you know that I participated in the 1986 Great Peace March across the US – and you know that that watershed experience ended up launching my life’s work with co-intelligence and wise democracy. However, most of you don’t know that since 2001 I’ve lived in a co-op house in Eugene, Oregon that only came about because of the Great Peace March 14 years earlier.

Last November I wrote an article about those experiences and the hidden links between them. It was recently published in Communities magazine, the leading US journal about intentional community. Intentional community living is a fascinating and complex topic – whose many lessons for communards and the societies around them are covered with great nuance and sensitivity by Communities magazine. If you are interested, I encourage you to subscribe.

You can read my article – “How One Community Led to Another” – for free in this post. But if you’d like to read it in the magazine – which I recommend because you’ll see a lot of very remarkable pictures, especially of the peace march – you have two options:

1. IF YOU’RE QUICK: Through March 18, 2026, you can use this special link to access the whole issue free, as a personal gift to me and you from the editor, Chris Roth. Click on the beehive cover to open it.
2. AFTER MARCH 18 you can download a digital copy for $5 (and get a hard copy for an additional $5) here.

This article gives you a rare and gritty glimpse of life in the march’s self-organizing mobile community of 400-500 people with no one in charge. After it fell apart and was reborn in the Mojave Desert, it was constantly getting its act together, over and over, for all 9 months of its ever-changing journey across the US. And its lessons of self-organization – which provided the seed for all my work since then – now dance with me and my housemates in Walnut Street Coop. Check it out!

Coheartedly,

Tom

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How One Community Led to Another

By Tom Atlee

I’d like to share with you how my experience with the mobile community of the Great Peace March across America in 1986 led to and informed the emergence of Walnut Street Co-op’s urban intentional community in 2001. That slow accident unfolded through the broader evolution of my life’s work with co-intelligence and wise democracy.

To zoom back to Los Angeles, March 1, 1986: The nonprofit ProPeace was launching its giant Great Peace March with about 1200 people (including me), along with support vehicles (including trailers for personal belongings and porta potties and a mobile kitchen), colorful two-person dome tents donated by The North Face, and four imposing circus tents to serve as mobile community centers, all color-coded to create “neighborhoods” in our mobile “Peace City.” The March had been ambitiously planned for 5000 marchers but didn’t quite achieve that population. However, I think it was still the largest cross-country political march in US history—a multiplex 3600-mile, eight-month journey.

In a mix of blessing and misfortune, the March “fell apart” after only two weeks of stumbling progress. We’d heard rumors but were surprised when ProPeace suddenly went bankrupt and dissolved. Its visionary founder, David Mixner, helicoptered in to our Mojave Desert encampment the day after a major storm sent several tents tumbling away across the sandy flats and downed several marchers with serious hypothermia (saved by full naked body contact in sleeping bags). Mixner warned us to go home, adding that the repo men would come soon to repossess all our support vehicles. It was a biblical, archetypal, totally chaotic scene in the middle of the desert.

As 800 marchers went home, we 400 deserted peaceniks who remained found ourselves confused yet determined to continue…somehow. As if on soap boxes, several of us stood on overturned milk crates preaching this or that solution to our predicament. A big meeting in one of the community tents began with someone saying, “We need a girl to take notes,” triggering grumblings that “it’s gonna be a l-o-n-g march.”  

An MX track in nearby Barstow let us hole up for two more weeks of intense dialogue, argument, organizing, and efforts to prepare and get support. Although we were not all truly ready and aligned, a group of several dozen impatient marchers, sick of “all talk and no action,” decided to get going again. The rest of us scrambled to join them.

And so began the watershed event of my life: 400-500 volunteer marchers (only a few of whom were experienced activists) began making their way across the US with no one in charge. Unbelievably, we successfully addressed our massive logistical challenges (after all, where DO we put 400 people every night for eight months?) and intense conflicts (“If we’re going to walk stretched out in a thin line of hippies instead of all together in a respectable MARCH, I’m outta here!!”). Success shouldn’t have been possible.

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I didn’t know the term “self-organization” back then, but I was seeing it in operation every day. When exhausted kitchen workers put bread and peanut butter out with signs like “You can have something else to eat when we have enough people to make meals and clean up without wiping ourselves out”—they doubled or tripled their team within hours. I was surprised to watch the anarchist contingent, from whom I’d ignorantly expected negativity, behaving as the most cooperative and organized group on the March. Marchers made lists of what needed to be done and other marchers simply did them. When something needed to be attended to, someone almost always attended to it, because it was clearly needed and we all wanted to get to DC. Several of us published newsletters for supporters. People laughed and complained and walked and stowed supplies and found campsites and we kept moving. But no one was following anyone else’s orders and we didn’t allow anyone to throw anyone else off the march.

I’ll give you a humorous example of all this: the Peace City Mayor. As we marched through various communities, police would stop by our encampment and ask to speak to whoever was in charge. It didn’t take long for us to realize how nervous the cops got when we told them, proudly, “Oh, there’s no one in charge here, officer.” Soon a friendly, smart middle-aged marcher declared herself the Mayor of Peace City, with no special powers or unusual roles IN the march. But when cops or other officials showed up, we called upon her to talk with them, and she often scheduled events or arranged to plant “peace poles” in their community and everyone left smiling. She came up with a volunteer role for herself that served everyone.

Our one Native American marcher taught us how to do talking stick circles and the practice spread, becoming our major mode of group dialogue and deliberation. Our little elected “policy board” used it over the objections of our eldest board member, who felt it was too woo-woo compared to traditional majority rules debates. Anyone could attend those meetings, including a fellow who claimed to be Christ and hauled a cross with him during the day, followed by mostly tongue-in-cheek supporters. At one meeting I recall, he declared that his “Father” had abolished our board and we had no power. We acknowledged him and proceeded with our work.

Whenever we walked through a town, some townspeople would join us for a few hours or a day—and some even hung on for a few weeks, amazed at the effective self-organizing spirit of our community, which we called “the magic of the March.” Sometimes they joined in our circles. For a great story about that, search for “circles and dress codes” on co-intelligence.org. Our circle-based dialogue culture also helped us resolve the most bitter conflict we faced (which became the prologue to my 2003 book The Tao of Democracy): again, search on the co-intelligence.org site for “It All Began in a Fertilizer Factory.”

Well, to make a very long and convoluted story short, on November 15, 1986, our ragtag mobile community finally marched into Washington, DC with 1200 people, having talked with thousands of people along the way—and STILL with no one in charge.

That experience changed my life in profound and enduring ways. I’d never seen or been part of anything like it. It was neither a lucrative top-down corporate machine nor an inspired activist group beset with irresolvable clashes over values. It was a vibrant goal-oriented mess that implausibly got things done with passionate, creative ordinary people who cared for each other and the cause that brought them together. There were hundreds of us, all wildly diverse. Somehow it worked.

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Over the next three decades I felt intensely called to explore different ideas and practices for “appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole”—a phrase I now use to describe what I saw on the March. This life project has led me into generative group processes, equitable self-managed companies, vibrant communities, permaculture gardeners, transpartisan political activists, leaderful networks, and more. 

I dubbed this new field of study and practice “co-intelligence”—a term for embracing all forms of intelligence through which we can work together wisely with each other and with Life. I tackled theories and practices relating to wholeness, story, participation, politics, wisdom, evolution, power, diversity, inquiry, leadership, co-creativity, spirituality, systems thinking, regenerativity, and much more—all of which have been evolving from year to year.

My two biggest experiences of intentional community—the Great Peace March and the Walnut Street Co-op—are tightly connected to each other through this co-intelligence work.  The key link in the chain: 13 years of co-intelligence explorations led me to Jim Rough’s five-day Dynamic Facilitation (DF) training in Port Townsend, Washington in November 1999. I happened to attend it during the same week that the rowdy, self-organizing and fairly successful November 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization dramatically unfolded in the streets of Seattle, right across Puget Sound from my DF training. What I was learning about DF so impressed me that I longed to introduce it to all those street activists I was reading about each day. I had moved to Eugene, Oregon several months before, so I recruited about eight Eugene activists I barely knew to take Jim’s next DF training in March 2000.

During that training, my new friends fell in love with DF, which I still consider the most potent method for transmuting intense conflict into collaborative shared understanding and action. Then, through a variety of twists and turns, two of those folks ended up catalyzing the formation of Walnut Street Co-op later in 2000. My partner Karen Mercer and I joined the new co-op in 2001 and, with Kavana Tree Bressen and her then partner, we incorporated the co-op officially in 2003. I’ve lived at the co-op now for 24 years.

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As the members of our community have turned over year after year, the original concentrated energy, experience, and practice of Dynamic Facilitation in the co-op has dissipated. However, several key underlying principles of DF and the Great Peace March have evolved into vital aspects of Walnut Street Co-op’s culture which I, in particular, like to promote:

1. Jim Rough and I came up with the idea of “co-sensing” as an orientation beyond consensus. More than “making agreements,” co-sensing involves feeling our way together in ever-changing environments. Ideally, it happens quietly all the time as something we just do in response to the changing conditions in and around our community. But sometimes a consensus deliberation pulls it all together formally into an agreement. Yet, if we notice that we’re not following that agreement, we may decide to review the issue together from a more co-leaderful/co-sensing place, rather than trying to just enforce it because “we all agreed to do X.” In this approach, agreements become instances of apparent shared understanding which, when not followed, suggest the shared understanding is not so shared anymore, and should be reviewed as we feel our way together.

2. At Walnut Street we mostly (but not always) use a concerns-centric form of consensus, which involves seriously asking if there are ANY concerns and addressing them until there are no more, which indicates consensus even if we don’t “vote.” One of the beautiful Aikido-like moves in DF involves handling passionate disruption by asking the person for their concern, and then addressing that (and so much else) by deep reflective listening—and then asking them something like “If you were Queen of the world, what would you DO about that?,” and recording their answers on chart pads for later review. In a fascinating shift, their disruptive energy disperses as the feeling of being heard and taken seriously blossoms. Space gets made for the participatory creativity that naturally emerges later on (in DF). While this full process unfolds often at Walnut Street, just as often we default to unanimous voting (which runs the risk of steamrolling those with quiet concerns).

3. Walnut Street Co-op was founded in Eugene 15 years after the Great Peace March (GPM). Although I’d learned circle process on the March, it had spread quite far in alternative groups and networks by the turn of the century, and early on became central to our co-op’s group process culture. Still, it is often just used as a convenient way to have everyone take turns sharing their views on a topic, rather than as a process for tuning into and generating group wisdom. It’s one aspect of the GPM’s power that I’d love to see more widely explored in intentional community settings.

4. At our co-op we have stopped using chore charts or mandatory committee assignments (admittedly easier with 10 people than in communities with 100 members, although the GPM had 400 and had no such non-voluntary structures either).  To different degrees but fundamentally, we at the co-op all care about each other and the house, an orientation sustained over the years by checking to what extent new housemate prospects share it during our recruitment process. That underlying sensibility sets the stage for lots of self-organizing activity to help make the house work, as well as providing readily available mutual aid and friendship. I used to talk about the GPM as “leaderless,” since there was no one in charge, but now I speak of it as “leaderful,” because most marchers voluntarily took on roles when they saw or heard about something that was missing. I find this also happens at Walnut Street Co-op, often manifesting in unofficial leadership roles taken on due to situational inspiration or perhaps frustration.

5. A couple of years ago I began thinking that community chores were a subset of a larger category of “contributions.” I noticed that chores almost always involve physical and administrative tasks, and occasionally “process roles” like facilitation or mediation. Such forms of contribution were needed in both the GPM and the co-op. But I also observed other forms. Some people spend a lot of time listening to, acknowledging, or engaging with housemates…or laughing and bringing humor into situations…or voicing appreciation for people and conditions that keep our spirits up and inspire our gratitude…or doing “emotional work” managing their own reactivity and passions…or making sure that cookies or snacks are available in common spaces for all…or even voicing cogent but non-judgmental critiques of proposals that are moving too fast…and so on. These behaviors all fall far outside normal understandings of “chores” and “leadership,” but they’re all fabulous examples of contributions to the well-being of the community, definitely worth acknowledging and nurturing collectively. They were ubiquitous on the GPM.

6. Communication systems constitute a big part of any collective’s capacity to self-organize, to lead itself collectively. In the GPM’s mobile community I helped establish “Infocom,” a sky-blue trailer with typewriters, primitive copying tech, and one or two early desktop computers inside, with outside space for posting announcements. We also used the inside surface of porta potty doors to post notes to each other, since virtually everyone looked at those surfaces at least once each day. At Walnut Street Co-op we have almost a dozen Signal chat groups and a few GoogleGroup email groups, as well as white boards and refrigerator magnet systems to help us co-sense what’s going on and what’s needed.  And as the GPM also did, the co-op uses newsletters to weave our support networks into our community’s activities and welfare. 

7. And then there’s the Taoistic form of leadership that almost invisibly creates conditions, asks questions, or truly listens in ways that make good things happen more often without any pushing. As Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, “When the leader leads well, the people say they did it themselves.”

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We never know what kinds of impact will arise from what we do. But we can stay aligned with the life-serving bias of the biosphere and feel our way together into a different kind of future. I have both the GPM and the Walnut Street Co-op to thank for that lesson still being learned…

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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