On a spring day, Chase and Frank, men in their late 20s, sit between a veg­etable gar­den and the trail­er where Chase grew up in the Hud­son Riv­er town of Sauger­ties, New York. They are dis­cussing their vision of cre­at­ing a self-sup­port­ing com­mu­ni­ty that uses min­i­mal fos­sil fuels and lit­tle mon­ey. Frank says proud­ly that they already ​“have young peo­ple who are real­ly will­ing to walk their talk, have a huge vision and have the boots on the ground to car­ry it out in incre­men­tal ways.”

‘The four of us happen all to wear size 10 shoes. So if we go to each other’s places and one of our shoes gets messed up we just step into another’s.’

Two years ago, Chase and Frank joined with oth­er local res­i­dents — mil­lenials and boomers alike — to form the Long Spoon Col­lec­tive, a loose­ly con­nect­ed net­work that is con­duct­ing an auda­cious exper­i­ment. Their goal: buck the dom­i­nant com­pet­i­tive and indi­vid­u­al­is­tic cul­ture by spread­ing the area’s nat­ur­al wealth and goodwill.

The Long Spoon Col­lec­tive ​“Overview” explains the group’s goals this way:

We are not sure what the future holds: apoc­a­lyp­tic col­lapse, a slow decline as fos­sil fuels dwin­dle or busi­ness as usu­al with a small num­ber of peo­ple using up an ever larg­er por­tion of the world’s resources at the expense of the rest of the plan­et. Whichev­er sce­nario unfolds, we are work­ing towards resilience and the par­a­digm shift we believe is urgent­ly needed.

Chase and Frank, along with two oth­er young men, are at the core of the Long Spoon Col­lec­tive. They feed them­selves on what they grow and share a bank account, sur­viv­ing on an annu­al bud­get of $15,000, which they don’t come close to spending.

This may sound sim­i­lar to the off-the-grid, back-to-the-land inten­tion­al liv­ing exper­i­ments in the 1960s and 1970s, but the Long Spoon Col­lec­tive is not a com­mune. Mem­bers do not live togeth­er; they are spread out on var­i­ous people’s land over sev­er­al miles.

Long Spoon is best thought of as an exper­i­ment to trans­form local rela­tion­ships of exchange. Long Spoon is inspired by the 19th cen­tu­ry Russ­ian anar­chist Pyotr Kropotkin, who believed that cap­i­tal­ism cre­ates pover­ty and arti­fi­cial scarci­ty; as an alter­na­tive, he advo­cat­ed an econ­o­my based on vol­un­tary coop­er­a­tion. Sim­i­lar­ly, Chase thinks that humans thrive best in a gift econ­o­my in which goods are freely giv­en. Mem­bers of a gift econ­o­my, like the Tro­briand Islanders of the South Pacif­ic, offer food and ser­vices for free, with the unstat­ed expec­ta­tion of reci­procity in the form of shared work, land or tech­ni­cal expertise.

As an exam­ple of a gift econ­o­my at work, Chase cites a neigh­bor he met last year at a cof­fee shop who was plan­ning to pay a sub­stan­tial amount to have an unused house on his prop­er­ty torn down. Chase said the Long Spoon­ers would do it for free, if they could take the wood. ​“Sure!” said the neigh­bor. The Long Spoon­ers demol­ished the house, leav­ing a clean con­crete slab. In grat­i­tude, the neigh­bor gave them the use of some fer­tile bot­tom­land to farm and a mon­e­tary dona­tion. This sum­mer, in front of the neighbor’s house the Long Spoon­ers will hold a ​“crop swap,” where peo­ple will bring har­vest­ed crops they can’t use and pick up what they want, all with no mon­ey exchanged.

The wood from the demo­li­tion site was used to car­ry out the sec­ond prong of the Long Spoon strat­e­gy: build­ing, out of reclaimed wood, tiny hous­es — less than 150 square feet — for mem­bers of the col­lec­tive. Each house has grav­i­ty-fed plumb­ing pow­ered by hand pumps and one solar pan­el. So far, the Long Spoon­ers have built or con­vert­ed sev­en such struc­tures. Five of them were lived in over this past, bone-chill­ing win­ter — all occu­pants sur­vived and learned a great deal about resilience.

Share and share alike

The Long Spoon Col­lec­tive takes its name from the para­ble of the long spoons. A man dies and is escort­ed by an angel through the after­life. In Hell, they wit­ness a feast laid out on a ban­quet table. But those at the table can’t eat because long spoons, splint­ed on both arms, pre­vent them from bring­ing food to their mouths. They moan in hunger and wal­low in mis­ery. In Heav­en, the same sce­nario is repeat­ed. Here, how­ev­er, ban­queters extend their spoons across the table and feed each oth­er. The souls are smil­ing and well nourished.

This spir­it of shar­ing is at the heart of the Long Spoon vision. Chase, Frank, and the oth­er two core mem­bers of the col­lec­tive share not only one bank account, but two cellphones.

“We are focus­ing on habits,” Frank says. ​“The four of us hap­pen all to wear size 10 shoes. So if we go to each other’s places and one of our shoes gets messed up we just step into another’s. We don’t think in terms of ​‘I.’ We think in terms of ​‘we.’”

Shoe size aside, the ques­tion becomes: Who is ​“we”? That ques­tion has vexed both Chase and Frank. When they met at Skid­more Col­lege in Sarato­ga Springs, New York, Chase was one of two white stu­dents in a cohort of 40 in his class who were part of a New York state-spon­sored pro­gram to attract low-income stu­dents. Frank was not among them, but alien­at­ed from his college’s cul­ture of upper-mid­dle-class priv­i­lege, he was drawn to the group.

After grad­u­a­tion, Chase decid­ed to pur­sue his Kropotkin-inspired dream on his home turf, and Frank joined him. In Field of Dreams fash­ion, they hoped that if their friends from Skid­more wit­nessed their idea of a mul­ti-eth­nic com­mu­ni­ty focused on chang­ing the way resources are redis­trib­uted — they would come. But they didn’t.

Cas­san­dra, Chase’s girl­friend, who is African-Amer­i­can, explains, ​“For peo­ple of col­or, there is a stig­ma attached to this way of life, liv­ing with­out mon­ey and liv­ing off the land. It is pre­cise­ly what my grand­moth­er want­ed to get away from. But there are in fact African-Amer­i­can groups migrat­ing out of the city. It’s just a ques­tion of bridg­ing the divide.”

The peo­ple who did come, ini­tial­ly, were white (pri­mar­i­ly women), in their fifties and six­ties — folks from the neigh­bor­hood who were inspired by the Long Spoon vision and had the time and resources to collaborate.

One of these women, 65-year-old Chris, first shared the long spoon para­ble around her kitchen table. ​“It’s about tak­ing back our per­son­al pow­er,” she says, ​“reclaim­ing the abil­i­ty to build our own hous­es, grow our own food, make our own enter­tain­ment, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly giv­ing back to the earth what should nev­er have been tak­en in the first place.”

The Long Spoon vision is big­ger than the Hud­son Val­ley. Says Chase, ​“We’re think­ing about how to cre­ate larg­er sys­tems to sup­port towns and com­mu­ni­ties and to expand from there.”

Long Spoon­ers recruit new com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers in an infor­mal, one-on-one man­ner. But theirs is a loose asso­ci­a­tion rather than a struc­tured orga­ni­za­tion. The group is cur­rent­ly more focused on build­ing com­mu­ni­ty and gar­den­ing col­lec­tive­ly than on end­less­ly talk­ing about their inter­nal dynamics.

They are all, how­ev­er, com­mit­ted to the idea of col­lab­o­ra­tive lead­er­ship. Jared, one of the Long Spoon’s younger mem­bers, describes the tra­jec­to­ry he envi­sions by quot­ing Ben Falk, the per­ma­cul­ture design­er and author: ​“Respect the chang­ing nature of the future. Stew­ard­ship implies domin­ion, where­as part­ner­ship implies coevolution.”

The Long Spoon­er vision is ambi­tious and engag­ing. What remains to be seen is whether the loose struc­tures they have devel­oped for part­ner­ship are strong enough to sur­vive the inevitable phys­i­cal — and psy­chic — storms ahead.