Coordinación de Formación Profesional del Centro de Formación Profesional

However, there were age-related tensions, particularly in the age-rich communities. In most communities, there was limited space for the number of new households or members wanting to join, so, in some communities, there was competition between older existing members and younger potential members. In the four communities with the highest proportion of older members (6 with 70%; 8 and 9 with 30%; 6 with 15%) and interviewees explained that there had been conversations within the communities about this.

Interviewee 7, in her late 60s, thought there was more tension than simply competition for space between younger and older members. She explained she had recently received an email from 21- year-old who had asked ‘am I going to feel a bit out of it?’ given the community was mainly over 60s. She had wondered whether she ought to move out to make room for young people to move in:

I think this is really quite important and links with your whole topic because I have

thought perhaps I ought to move out so there’s room for a young person to move in then I thought ‘Fuck me, this is my home!’ (both laugh) and er [pause] but I think there’s a tension there…in trying to attract people. If I was 23 I wouldn’t move in here [pause] cos I think that most 23 year olds wouldn’t choose to live with people that are predominantly older. (Interviewee 7, Community 5)

Interviewee 8 (the youngest interviewee at aged 50, who had two children of school age) in Community 6, talked about how having older people in the community obviously reduced the space for families and how having more other families would be positive for her in terms childcare swaps and shared lifts into town, for example. But she didn’t want to see less older people in the community and she didn’t think of her fellow members as ‘old’:

they don't feel like older people in the way they think you know, if i think about [name of Interviewee 9] being a similar age to my mum, well my mum's world and life experience is, the way she lives her life, is completely different. So you know, [name of Interviewee 9] is part of U3A, she's just done volunteering at the global centre she quite often goes and visits family in Europe and she used to go to Africa a lot she's very open and very keen to stay in the world and keep her brain alive she gardens for hours, you know. So I don't feel like I'm living with older people; I feel like there's less room for families, but I don't feel like I'm living with a bunch of old people. (Interviewee 8, Community 5)

What I see in this quote is, once again, the alternative cultural capital identified in Chapters 6 and 7 manifested in another form in relation to ageing members: it is all about what you do, your

commitment to the community expressed through activities. The emphasis is on being active in this member’s positive view of her fellow communard; her age is treated as incidental.

This aspect of the habitus of these communities was becoming problematic and uncomfortable to talk about as members reached the point where such contributions could not continue to be taken for granted. There was a tension and a dissonance that had not been fully acknowledged within the communities, but was apparent in some narratives of interviewees. One area where this manifested itself was in recruitment of new members in some communities.

All of the four age-rich communities seemed to have come to a fairly explicit consensus that they should be trying to attract younger members, particularly families prioritising these groups over new potential members who were older. Most interviewees articulated this shared belief in terms of the needs of the community being more important than the needs of specific individuals:

We still are quite an ageing community. Um, but the last few houses that have become vacant, I think there’s been certainly a feeling to try and bring in new families with kids um, er, because of that. Because when we had our, whatever they’re called, the meetings when we decide who’s gonna be offered a house and we try and look at, as well as the needs of the individuals, the needs of the community and certainly, on my behalf anyway I know a couple of the others, we felt we need to bring some young blood, some young energy in.

(Interviewee14, Community 6)

This prioritisation of younger people and families in the age-rich communities signified an intergenerational tension that was hard to discuss explicitly and openly, as well as to address.

One interviewee acknowledged the discomfort being felt about these intergenerational balancing acts within his community and within the wider intentional community movement:

We are actively seeking young members we will prioritise a young family over someone who is over 60. That's purely because again, we have been accused of being ageist on that principle and um, a complaint went to ‘Diggers and Dreamers’ about that…

And I think we have to look at the larger picture, of a community with, that is going to survive on into the next 50 or 100 years, it needs to be renewed with new energy continually, um with new younger people with children growing up (Interviewee 19,

Community 8)

So this interviewee argued in support of their decision to prioritise younger new members but acknowledged it was controversial.

One interviewee made a joke about her experience of looking around at communities with a view to moving into them. As is often the case with humour, something more heartfelt and difficult was being revealed:

because when you look in Diggers and Dreamers, I quite often look to see if there's any communities that want people like me, they always say they want young people with building skills [we both laugh] and that's what this group wanted when they got me, but really they didn't need somebody with building skills they needed somebody with admin skills which is what I've got, which was quite lucky. Nobody says we want old women with admin skills! (Interviewee 22, Community 9)

This raises a key question about the tension between the kinds of values that some communities stand for, such as equal opportunities their perceptions of the practical requirements for ensuring the survival of the community in the longer term. The communities’ strategies for dealing with these difficult balancing acts and ageing seemed to be built around problematic concepts. First there was denial (not talking about it). Second there was some degree of over-simplification: youth was being automatically equated with physical ability and older age with disability in a way that didn’t fully acknowledge how work actually gets done. This failed to recognise, for example, how much community work time can be committed by older, retired members who no longer have to work outside the community. Interviewee 19 (quoted above) acknowledged this in his interview: older members tended to do more work in the community than younger ones because they didn’t have to go out to work.

So narratives swung between recruitment strategies based simply on age and denials of the need for their communities to consider and plan for old age in all its manifestations. As Andrews points out, this denial of old age risks being in and of itself a form of ageism (Andrews, 1999). There was also some negativity about the idea of senior-only communities.