4 Families Come Together to Share and Live Simply in Community!

This is the Grain and Sens Eco Community.

We are a collective of eleven adults and

four kids that came together
with a common goal.

We bought a property together - Levenant.

It's 20 hectares, 15 of forest
and 5 of prairie.

What we're trying to do here is to
live more connected with ourselves,

with others and with the environment and

doing all of that with the big
open doors for whoever

wants to come in and share
that experience with us.

In the shared house, a
community kitchen where

we have all of the food that
we buy together,

there's the dining room and
the living room,

and then the other shared spaces
include a library

where we've put all of our
books together,

wood workshop, where we put all
of our tools together,

and an office where we've put
all of our office junk together.

Here in our community, each family
has a small, private space,

so Thomas, Séva and I, we live in a yurt.

Raph, Kim and Jonah, they live in a
Eco lodge,

which is like a tiny house on wheels.

Astrid, Ed, Will and Elio are living in
a small house that was on the property.

Because we have so many shared spaces,

we're very comfortable living in
our small spaces

and they actually become like
small cocoons and family units.

So already we're able to put
four families onto a property

where there was just one family living.

So instead of two people, now you have
14 people living on the same land.

When there's something to get done,
you can call the community

to come and help you and you're
going to make a garden bed in an hour

with something that would have
taken you three or four hours

just because you have many hands
and people can come and help.

The shared responsibility is
really liberating.

We work so well together

and it's so complimentary that
somebody is going to do

the thing that you don't
really want to do

because chances are like they
do want to do it.

So each person is doing their part,
which makes it work.

Each role is really, really important.

I think we have a lot of trust that,
you know,

when it's somebody turn to do the

finances part that they're going
to stay on it

and then they're going to keep us
informed and are going to have meetings

to know where we're at to try and
make everybody feel at peace.

Living in community is having
a huge support network.

I know that I have people around
me that I can go to and ask for help.

A lot of support for the kids here,
because there's so many adults

and luckily also adults that don't
have kids yet,

so they also take the pleasure to
spend time with the kids

that live in the community. And as a
parent, it's really appreciated.

And it's really a rich experience,
I think, for the kids.

They have so many adults around
them to learn all the time.

My daughter, she appreciates that,
and she'll come back

and tell me about what she's done

or what she's learned with
somebody else.

It feels nice. There's a lot of
things that we see

ourselves learning now, living in
community, that our kids

are learning, at the same time.

So it's reassuring to think that
they might grow up

with a better concept of how to
communicate than we started off with.

Big advantage in our community
is the way that we organize cooking.

Pretty much you sign up to
cook once a week.

You have to cook for anywhere
between 15 and 20 people

because we have a lot of visitors
here, but

then that's it for the week. And what's
really good about that

is everybody gives it their all when
they cook once a week.

So we eat really good all the time.

When we created this project, we
defined in the beginning

that it wasn't just going to be
a place for us to live.

It was really important for us to
be able to host people

and to share this experience with
other people, which is why

our reason of being is
un lieu de vie et de partage.

That means a place of living and sharing.

The reason that it's important to
us to share the project

is just to give the idea to say like,
“Oh, it is possible.

That's another way of living.”

And if people can come here and see

that we can do it and then maybe
they can heal themselves too.

When we started the project, we
started with visiting

other communities. We needed to see
what they were doing,

how did they get there? We realized
there's actually

quite a lot and no two communities
are the same, and

that's what's really beautiful about it.

I think there are a lot of
beautiful projects

based on sharing all around the world

and taking it to the level of living
together is just the next step.