Giving Thanks

As we come up on Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday, we at Sustaining Life Intentional Communities want to thank you for coming along this journey with us of a small nonprofit with big dreams and high hopes. We're only about a year and a half from SLIC's inception, and so excited about where we've come and what we have in store!

Here are some of the things we are aiming for in 2024:

• Complete the solar-powered cabin and begin to have visitors to the land stay here and experience what little it takes to build a sustainable (and also luxurious) space for 1-2 people with the help of community

• Extend the garden from 400 sq ft to 1 full acre

• Continue to work on irrigation ditching around the entire 640 acres so that all parcels have connected water supplies

• Develop an advisory board

• Build a mobile chicken coop and acquire chickens to continue our efforts in being self-sustaining

• Plan for infrastructure and building of a community building on the community land. Start fundraising for this beast of a project

• Create Gail's Way (road bisecting all of the parcels and connecting them to the community land)

• Develop more educational tools for our guide to building more communities like this elsewhere

• Make a solar-powered hot spring from the well on the community land

• Schedule community work weekends and members weekends more regularly during the warmer months

The SLIC board and community members have been discussing our soon-to-be membership guidelines and we are well on our way to completing them. Our membership vision is not a tiered system of you give us X amount of $ and then you get Y benefit. We want to build this nonprofit on abundance, not scarcity. We want everyone with any means to be able to build a sustainable community from our experiences. We want everyone with any means to feel what it's like to be in community, to grow in community. No one is more or less deserving of these experiences and these dreams.

One of the things we've landed on in these discussions is a recurring monthly membership donation of $20 minimum (or an equivalent commitment of time or energy to SLIC) to begin to cover our expenses beyond the seed money of the founders. Nonprofits are a labor of love and SLIC is no different.

If you've felt the love from being at community weekends, reading our blog posts, or overhearing the excitement of anyone you're connected with that brought you to our organization, please consider either a tax-deductible one-time donation or beginning your $20/month donation for membership early. We will begin monthly memberships officially in January 2024. We also still have SLIC shirts available for buying anytime!

Wishing you and yours renewing, joyful, and abundant holidays from your grateful SLIC peeps in the San Luis Valley