We have seen a tremendous change in communities over the last seventy - five years. Back then, my grandparents were ensconced in a centuries - old Quaker community in Lincoln, Virginia, that had survived since the 1730s. In my parents' generation the influences of this century (cars, telephones, corporate agribusiness, employer - driven relocations, even sending one's children away to college) caused each one of my mother's siblings to leave that community and spread to the far ends of the nation, to Washington State, Kansas, Maryland, New York and Washington, D.C. In my generation, it is common to hear people talk about how they don't know their neighbors and feel like isolated atoms in a sea of anonymity. There is now a sense of what we have lost in this huge shift from tight - knit neighborhood communities to isolated individuals. It's a very vivid loss to me when I look back through my mother's eyes to her youth little more than sixty years ago.

My mother vividly remembered her childhood in a small, close Quaker farming community. She began to write her memoirs and talk to me about it in her late 70s and I realized what an evanescent, unique thing it was. As vulnerable as any indigenous tribe, it was virtually gone by the time she died. The farm lands are still there, though no longer active. Development is flooding in around Dulles Airport. My brother tells me it is being called the Silicon Valley of the East. The farm lands from which my grandfather milked Guernsey cows and shipped milk to Washington D.C. may be gone in another ten years, maybe even five.

For how many other people is this scenario repeated? Is this what we want for our children? Community is no longer part of the air we breathe. In an age when we're being torn apart by cultural trends, we have to fight for community. In an age when climbing the status ladder and leaving our neighbors behind has been perfected to a fine art, if we want something different, we have to make it happen. If we want to chose relationships over "progress," we have to do it ourselves. This is the challenge for our generation.

Just as claiming the "wilderness" and striking it rich has been the mythology of this country for the past 200 years, maybe the new frontier for us is really claiming our relationships, fighting for our communities and handing that over to our children.

Ellen Becker

When I think back over the evolution of this issue of the Journal, I remember conversations. Our conversations often seem to start around Frank and Connie's kitchen table, where we hold our 7:30 a.m. editorial meetings. (Well, we call them meetings, but they are almost always more than that - an opening prayer, reconnecting, processing, information sharing, reflecting.)

The first conversation about this issue of the Journal was about how to make it something more than the Free School community's take on family and community. We started talking about other communities and about the amazing variety of powerful and interesting people we knew who live in them. It was then that I began to feel that we were on to something.

The next conversation took place in Frank and Connie's living room, a dozen of us circled around a battery of microphones and even a video camera (a bit too much technology for us - it expired about half way through). We called this a "community forum," but later realized that we had gone a long way towards creating an instant community. There was a deep sense of sharing, intention and purposefulness even though almost none of the participants knew each other previously. We had exchanged ideas beforehand about what the forum would cover, but agreed that people were free to bring up whatever they thought was important. And obviously, they did, in a way that respected the diversity of viewpoints and experiences.

By an odd set of circumstances, as we talked some members of our Free School community were visiting an alternative high school only five miles from Columbine High School. The tragedy at Littleton only days before was on everybody's mind. We began to realize that when you try to talk about families and communities, you also must talk about the schools that shape our children's lives. As editors and as parents, we felt there needed to be another conversation, this one with our own children - one that revealed the depth of understanding that children and young adults possess.

If it seems a little unusual to be telling you the story of an issue in this fashion, understand that it reflects one of our central preoccupations - what we are about as a community and how community happens. We knew that in order to explore the relationship of family and community, we had to attract a broader community to be our collaborators. In this spirit, we plunged in, and let one thing lead to another.

So you'll find this issue divided into two parts. The first deals with community life. We dedicate the second part of this issue to the community of schools, Littleton and youth. And interspersed throughout are contributions from such diverse thinkers as Patch Adams, John Taylor Gatto and Michael Meade, and from other communities and cultures. Enjoy!

Tom McPheeters