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An intentional community is a planned residential community designed from the start to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision and often follow an alternative lifestyle. They typically share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, communes, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, ashrams, and housing cooperatives. New members of an intentional community are generally selected by the community's existing membership, rather than by real-estate agents or land owners (if the land is not owned collectively by the community).

Characteristics
The purposes of intentional communities vary in different communities. They may include sharing resources, creating family-oriented neighborhoods, and living ecologically sustainable lifestyles, such as in ecovillages.

Veteran communities
The Bastion Community of Resilience is a veterans community located in New Orleans. It entered its second phase, where it added 20 more residential homes. It received a grant from the NFL-Bob Woodruff Foundation to provide rehabilitation services to veterans.

LGBTQIA+ communities
In upstate New York, an intentional community called Mawuni (the Lenape Indian word for collectively) is planned for April 2019. It is hoping to offer support for LGBTQIA+ people ages 18-24 who are homeless or aged out of institutionalized care to learn vocational skills, farm, the arts, and wellness.

Communities for transgender people exist for varying reasons.

Multiple elderly LGBTQIA+ senior communities exist, including one in Atlanta, Georgia. The rise of these types of communities is in response to a combination in both discrimination that seniors in the community face from staff and fellow residents and the relative newness of being open about gender and sexuality.

Some communities are secular while others have a spiritual basis. One common practice, particularly in spiritual communities, is communal meals. Typically, there is a focus on egalitarian values. Other themes are voluntary simplicity, interpersonal growth, and self-sufficiency.

Some communities provide services to disadvantaged populations. These include, but are not limited to, war refugees, homeless people, or people with developmental disabilities. Some communities operate learning and/or health centers. Other communities, such as Castanea of Nashville, Tennessee, offer a safe neighborhood for those exiting rehab programs to live in. Some communities also act as a mixed-income neighborhood to alleviate the damages of one demographic assigned to one area. Many intentional communities attempt to alleviate social injustices that are being practiced within the area of residence. Some intentional communities are also micronations, such as Freetown Christiania.

Homeless communities
An intentional community called BeLoved Asheville exists to offer services for marginalized groups, including homeless people. A self-identified intentional community called First They Came for the Homeless established on the campus of Berkeley won class status after a Judge determined that the plaintiffs may have had their possessions illegally disposed of by campus security. An intentional community in Portland, Oregon called the Tiny Village was established to offer protections for homeless people.

Differently abled communities
Some intentional communities have been formed for the purpose of providing aide to those who are differently abled, both mentally and physically. These communities may offer both care for those who need it as well as social support for those such as people with autism. One such example is Lansing Intentional Communities, whose mission statement is to create intentional communities to allow adults with developmental disabilities to live with one another.

Types of memberships
Many communities have different types or levels of membership. Typically, intentional communities have a selection process which starts with someone interested in the community coming for a visit. Often prospective community members are interviewed by a selection committee of the community or in some cases by everyone in the community. Many communities have a "provisional membership" period. After a visitor has been accepted, a new member is "provisional" until they have stayed for some period (often six months or a year) and then the community re-evaluates their membership. Generally, after the provisional member has been accepted, they become a full member. In many communities, the voting privileges or community benefits for provisional members are less than those for full members.

Christian intentional communities are usually composed of those wanting to emulate the practices of the earliest believers. Using the biblical book of Acts (and, often, the Sermon on the Mount) as a model, members of these communities strive for a practical working out of their individual faith in a corporate context. These Christian intentional communities try to live out the teachings of the New Testament and practice lives of compassion and hospitality. Communities such as the Simple Way, the Bruderhof and Rutba House would fall into this category. These communities, despite strict membership criteria, are open to visitors and not reclusive in the way that certain intentional communities are.

A survey in the 1995 edition of the "Communities Directory", published by Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), reported that 54 percent of the communities choosing to list themselves were rural, 28 percent were urban, 10 percent had both rural and urban sites, and 8 percent did not specify.

Type of governance
The most common form of governance in intentional communities is democratic (64 percent), with decisions made by some form of consensus decision-making or voting. A hierarchical or authoritarian structure governs 9 percent of communities, 11 percent are a combination of democratic and hierarchical structure, and 16 percent do not specify. Many communities which were initially led by an individual or small group have changed in recent years to a more democratic form of governance.

Issues and criticism
Some intentional communities face issues with respect to housing and zoning regulations. Multiple Minneapolis intentional community houses faced eviction for having too many unrelated occupants under one roof. In Vermont, an intentional community was blocked by the Vermont House of Representatives due to its potential impact to the environment of Vermont. An electricity-free commune in California opted to implement Internet connectivity following an incident where an alleged kidnapper had stayed at the commune with his 15-year-old captive under assumed names.

An article by Jessica Ravitz detailed the intentional community of Twin Oaks, where she talks about how despite being seen as idyllic, it often has a lot of the same issues as normal society.

An intentional homeless community in Portland, Oregon received criticism, with critics noting that the idea was good, but the placement between a preschool and a retirement home was not and was unprecedented for such a thing.

Writer David Solway criticized the concept of intentional communities, commenting that intentional communities often fail and that new communities contradict the old values of intentional communities by gaining revenue through sale and government grants.

The Bhula Bhula Intentional Community was forced to shut down following a court order from the NSW Land and Environmental Court, leaving investors and residents with significant financial issues.

Writer and former intentional community member Akash Kapur wrote that the intentional communities of today often stood as a contrast to older intentional communities. He commented that the idea of 'utopia' had become more idyllic in more recent years despite a period where it was similarly negative to its counterpart dystopia. He commented that intentional communities would benefit to learn from the intentional communities of the 19th century.

In popular media
Intentional communities have been featured as a setting or plot point in multiple works of fiction.


 * The graphic novel Come Again follows an intentional community called Haven Station, which both represents a "long-gone era" and the "symbol of [the intentional community's] demise."
 * A USA Network murder mystery The Sinner, features an intentional community called Mosswood Grove, where a pair of murders occur. The mystery follows whether the leader may have covered up a crime by one of its members.