The Findhorn Foundation (FF) charitable trust is a legal construct created by the Community in 1972 to enable it to accept the donation of The Park property bought by Pauline Tawse, from Captain Gibson and his wife, for the purpose of gifting it to the Community. That property gave the Community its first college building and the land to start building the Universal Hall in 1973.

Over the last 50 years this legal construct has taken on a different nature. Rather than being a tool to serve the spiritual community, it has become an organisation that eventually created a ‘special’ community within the Community. From the early 1980s Associate members settled around the FF and so the Community grew into what is today a vibrant ecovillage with over 30 organisations. The very fact of having so many different organisations has challenged our sense of cohesion, a common vision, and ability to agree on decision-making processes.

To this day there is great confusion about what is meant by ‘The Community’ – at the moment we are a community with no agreed name, no identifiable membership and with no constitution. This is highlighted poignantly in Maria Craig’s movie Firebird when the term ‘community’ sometimes refers to the Foundation and sometimes to the whole Community. The confusion was also expressed quite spectacularly, when some of the British press misrepresented the FF’s Announcement on the 26th July 2023 to mean the Ecovillage was shutting down.

Can we consider that a legal construct is just that – a tool to interact with the world of matter and society, ‘giving Caesar what is Caesar’s due’, complying with the law of the land, legal and financial probity, nothing less and nothing more?

The hammer is not the cathedral
Without it the cathedral cannot be built.
The kitchen knife is not the banquet
Without it the guests won’t eat.
The paper is not the symphony
Without it we couldn’t listen to Beethoven’s music.

A legal construct per se does not define a community. Confusing these two essential natures can lead to separation and ‘othering’. It creates the sense of ‘them-and-us’ which we have been suffering from in this CommUnity for the last 40 years. We are not alone in this suffering – and we are not alone in this yearning for creating a unified field, a sense of Us-ness. This yearning is a global one, and actually an existential need if humanity is to survive on this planet – but how are we going to get there?

We are now again looking at creating other constructs – such as the FF and the NFA SCIOs and the BenCom, and whatever else we may come up with to reconfigure the organisational landscape in the Community.

How will that be to the ‘the benefit of the community’? In my opinion this can happen most easily when we accept that legal constructs are tools and NOT identities, means not ends. They are tools implemented to serve CommUnity, never to be allowed to create Power Over scenarios which destroy that sense of Us-ness.

Featured image – Collage of the following photos from Unsplash: Cathedral Photo by Jonathan Körner, hammer Photo by Andrew George, kitchen knife Photo by wu yi, banquet Photo by engin akyurt, paper Photo by Kate Trysh, Beethoven Music Photo by Marius Masalar