Culture

We seek to be community & nature interdependent.

Kotare Village is weaving a web of interconnections. Through meals, facilitated meetings, gardening, cooperative business, conflict resolution, song, parties, theater, child care, building projects, community work days and more.

We are learning that its the big just as well as the small, practical things that makes the difference:

Do we use cellphones in public spaces?
How often do we eat together? and how is it facilitated?
Where and how we do our laundry?
In which cases of trading between us we use NZ$, our own currency (Kotare Beans) or just gifting each-other?
How often we work together?
How do we build? and with what?
How do we garden?
How do we talk to each-other? and resolve conflict?

These questions (and many more similar ones) encapsulate the essence of Kotare Village – How do we bring together a new culture, a new way of life, that is a mixture of here and there, old and new, wild and structured, individual and communal, the planet and us, while upholding our values and ethics?

This is a challenging and exciting process all at once.

The culture we are creating here will depend largely on the passion and beliefs that settlers bring with them and develop here, while the legal and physical structures we have put in place are consciously designed to be fertile ground for pioneering a new culture for our planet. Not withstanding that the founders, the Koanga Institute and those established pioneers have a commitment to the following concepts.