Editor’s note: This article was first published in the book Ecovillage Living Restoring the Earth and Her People, published in 2002 by Green Books in association with Gaia Trust and edited by Hildur Jackson and Karen Svensson.

A person’s engagement in community, a functional social network, is a central aspect of health. Many scientific studies have shown that being part of a community improves an individual’s abilities to face challenges in life – for example, cancer survival rates are higher in those with a supportive network. At Findhom we coined the slogan “A loving community improves your immunity”.

Healthcare
When people in mainstream society talk about healthcare, they are actually referring to medical care. That “healthcare” is delivered within a hierarchy of experts (doctors) and recipients (patients). It consists largely of ‘fixing’ symptoms with a drug or a surgical procedure. The huge limitations of this system are widely acknowledged, by both patients and doctors alike. It is often stated that many things have contributed to improved health and longevity in the developed world – including housing, education, and water sanitation. Medicine hasn’t played a significant role in that. Despite the exorbitant sums of money invested in healthcare worldwide, the orthodox medical system hasn’t been able to address the large-scale health problems in modem society. In certain ways it actually contributes to these problems (e.g. pharmaceuticals contributing to pollution of the environment, the medical system disempowering people). On the other hand, the importance of medicine in saving individual lives is undisputed. Anyone who has been rushed into hospital and had their life saved by emergency interventions can attest to the significance of that service. Within the given ethos of our world today, no one suggests removing this service of saving individual lives. Instead, we strive to expand the access to this service to people in those areas who don’t have the ‘privilege’ yet.

This is the area where the ecovillage movement and complementary therapies can contribute significantly to healthcare. In a healthcare system where those elements are fully integrated, medical solutions would only be sought when really necessary, ideally as a last resort.

Ecovillage Living - Cornelia Featherstone with her husband Alan and their son. Photo: courtesy Alan Featherstone.

Cornelia Featherstone with her husband Alan and their son. Photo: courtesy Alan Featherstone.

Most ecovillages are not large enough to provide their own medical services. Therefore, a good relationship to the local medical care providers is helpful to ensure that integrated and congruent care is available when required. However, it is important for an ecovillage to provide two main elements of healthcare:

1. Natural healing
methods, which encourage balance, prevent disease and give support when dealing with long-term illness. As natural healing is an integral part of daily life – how we eat, work, play, relax, celebrate, and care for ourselves – it is important that there are local resources to support individuals in finding their own way of creating balance in their life. Complementary or alternative healing practices also provide significant opportunities for sustainable employment within an ecovillage.

2. Neighborhood help – Care in the community when individuals need additional care. Neighborhood help is that aspect which makes community so attractive to many of us – that sense of belonging, of caring and being cared for. And the magic in it all is that care in the community not only supports individuals but is actually a powerful community-building gift.

Ina May Gaskin, from The Farm (USA), once said at a conference at Findhom: “Only once a community has reclaimed birth and death can it realize the potential of self-determination and sovereignty.” Care in the community is an essential step in allowing birth and death to be integrated into the fabric of community life. Once a community can provide the care needed for individuals, it gains the confidence that it can also provide for the big transitions in life – birth and death. When the circle is complete then a community is a truly safe place for life.

How to do it?
1. Volunteering is an important aspect of care in the community. Being a volunteer will ideally nourish the volunteer as much as the person they are there to help, only then is such a service sustainable.

2. Considering care in the community as community service, as much as washing the dishes, doing the rotas or any other communal tasks. Care in the community could become a recognized work shift. This would allow busy community members to serve in that way without wearing themselves out.

3. Having complementary health practitioners as entrepreneurs in the community – setting up their practice as an income earning business that earns them a living.

4. Utilizing the services of practitioners from outside the community, either visiting ones or those from the local area.

Most ecovillages will find that a combination of all of these options may well serve them best in providing for their needs in community care.

Care in the community strengthens the heart of a community. It builds relationships, fosters a sense of safety and allows joyful service where the nurturing is tangible to all involved.

by Cornelia Featherstone, M.D.

Cornelia Featherstone lives in Findhorn, Scotland, where she practises complementary medicine. She is the author of ‘Medical Marriage – Partnership between Orthodox and Complementary Medicine , 1997.

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Our gratitude to Gaia Trust for their kind permission to reproduce this chapter here.