Over the years, a few high-profile leaders of New Communities Inc. (NCI) have been featured in print and on film. The voices of lesser-known participants in this inspiring story have seldom been heard. An exception is a rare interview conducted by Ed Feaver in 1971, one year after New Communities had completed purchase of 5,735 acres of rural land near Albany, Georgia. Eight people who were then organizing on NCI’s behalf, serving on NCI’s board, farming NCI’s land, or waiting in line for a chance to live on NCI’s land expressed their personal hopes for the journey ahead.
Mother Earth News interviewed Ralph Borsodi in 1974 after he had retired as executive director of the International Independence Institute, the organization he had founded in 1967. He was 88 years old at the time of this interview, looking back on a long life of considerable achievement as a writer, homesteader, and social philosopher. Inspired by the ideas of Henry George, he had founded an intentional community in 1936 called the School of Living, where the buildings were owned by individuals and the land was owned by a nonprofit organization. He was the first to call this arrangement a “land trust.” He later spent five years in India, studying the Gramdan Movement. Returning to the United States in 1967, he founded the International Independence Institute (renamed the Institute for Community Economics in 1972) to promote land trusts, local currency, food security, and decentralist economics – youthful ideas he was still espousing and refining in his 88th year.
