Rainwater Collective

The dream of the Rainwater Collective is a regionally appropriate, regenerative lifeway that improves the soil, removes carbon from the atmosphere, puts water back in the aquifers, reconnects us with each other and the Earth and builds cooperative culture and a network of resilience among our friends and neighbors. We are deeply committed to permaculture, appropriate technology, antiracism and antioppression work, compassionate and skillful communication (including conflict transformation and restorative justice), and nonviolence. We’ll have a high level of interdependence and resource sharing- community kitchen with shared meals every day, shared community garden, barn, sauna/bath-house and small individual or family dwellings. The community is entirely off-grid, with a small solar system, and we rely on rainwater rather than a dug well. Rainwater is an aspiring “ecohamlet”- the goal is 10-15 people stewarding 17 acres, in collaboration with a network of other small communities and permaculture homesteads in the Piedmont bioregion. Founder’s statement: Rainwater occupies the ancestral land of Occaneechi, Saponi, Eno, Tutelo, and Shakori native peoples, farmed and stewarded by several subsequent generation of Black farmers whose access to land was then systematically undermined (90% loss) in the last century. My (Rachel’s) ability to originally purchase the land and access to the resources to found the community is inseparable from the many advantages conferred on me by white supremacy. As a community currently founded by two white people, we aspire to participate in multiracial, multigenerational efforts to address these traumas by engaging openly and vulnerably in conversations about race, class and power within the community, by exploring opportunities to participate in material steps towards decolonization in conversation with Occanneechi stakeholders, and by weaving a reparational lens through our relationships with the wider community. In particular, we are committed to a model in which community members who benefit from whiteness return a portion of their time and energy towards local BIPOC-led projects. Key values: ⦁ Spreading hope through lived possibility ⦁ Designing for resilience ⦁ Gratitude and gift economy ⦁ Nurturing relationships ⦁ Dismantling systems of oppression ⦁ Nonviolence and right use of power