Spare Key recently decided on new people for leadership roles, which we call czar positions. Last year, I was the Sharing Czar and I was asked to continue in this role. My main job is to find opportunities for us to share life in creative ways. This past year that has taken the form of hosting a wedding shower for Rob and Abbey, a total of five group gifts, and a four-day vacation together, among other things.

All of this sharing meant a lot of money changed hands. According to our current budget, we have shared over $1,700 in expenses in just 2016. We did this in a variety of ways, but we found two that are my favorite! Introducing Splitwise and Splitzee.

In June, six of us took a vacation to Colorado to "crash" Rob and Abbey's honeymoon and meet up with our friends Josh and Alyssa who live there. (Disclaimer - we didn't crash anything, we just happened to go at the same time so we got to hang out with them in the mountains one weekend.) This involved a rental car, a pretty sweet Air BnB in the mountains, and sharing gas expenses. Now we could have just written checks to the person who paid for everything, but with a total of 10 people sharing the cabin for different lengths of time, that sounded like a logistical nightmare. That's where Splitwise saved us! We created a group on Splitwise that allowed us to split up the expenses in a fair way to reflect when each person stayed at the cabin. Then when we rented the car, we were able to just post that expense on Splitwise. This saved us so much time and hassle because Splitwise divided up the expenses for us.

As I mentioned before, Spare Key has gotten into giving group gifts. Why don't more people do this? We were able to be so much more generous than ever before through group gifting. Our group gifts included some awesome camping gear for Rob and Abbey's wedding shower, a beautiful leather bag filled with office goodies for Tessa's graduation, a comfy rocker for the Cowen's when sweet Autumn was born, and a group care package for Abbey when lots of her things were stolen with her car. At first, we just had one person pay for the gift then everyone gave the same amount to that person. We quickly realized with all the gifts we were giving this wasn't sustainable. It also wasn't fair because one person might want to give a different amount than someone else. That is where Splitzee came into play. This wonderful tool allows you to create a "fund" for whatever you want and whoever wants to participate can give however much they like to the fund. That's how we ended up doing the group gifts and it worked like a dream. You can connect it to your Paypal account and just give the amount you are comfortable with super easily. For most of our gifts, we put a deadline on it and then used whatever funds we collected to determine what gift(s) to purchase.

All of this to say - sharing money doesn't have to be difficult. With tools like these two (and I'm sure there are many more), sharing is easy. Group gifting is quickly becoming one of my favorite things.

Last year around this time, we had our first declaration of czars. Recently, we declared new czars for the next year. Here are the czars for the upcoming year...

Adventure Czar - Bethany
History Czar - Jay
Study Czar - Jonathan
Sharing Czar - Amber
Service Czar - Ryan
Communication Czars - Bethany & Tessa
Photography Czar - Lauren
Research Czar - Travis

Each czar role comes with different responsibilities to do to make sure things get done/accomplished within Spare Key. Last year was a successful inaugural year of leadership roles and we are excited to see what will come this year!

 

Dinner Club is a neighborhood meal open to everyone.

Out with the old: Spare Key used to eat together once a week, and our weekly meal was a potluck. Potlucks are great so far as they go, but in our case we realized our potluck system had several problems.

First, potlucks are hard if you're doing them every week. Everyone feels like they have to bring something to eat, which basically excluded our busier friends who might like to stop by and be socialable but didn't have time to prepare a dish every week. So, we don't do potlucks anymore.


In with the new: Spare Key is proud to announce that Dinner Club now happens twice a week, Sundays at 5:30 and Tuesday at 6:30.

Dinner Club is a community meal in which the host house provides the meal and one other designated person brings a salad or something. Everyone else gets to show up and eat!

For the Tuesday dinner club, we rotate back and forth between two houses. For Sunday, we rotate back and forth between two different houses. There's a new facebook event for every dinner club every week.


Some Spare Keyers are moving to new houses / new cities (more on that coming soon), so we're still ironing out the host house rotation. But, if you're interested in stopping by for dinner, follow the Spare Key facebook page! There will be a facebook event for each upcoming Dinner Club, complete with time and location.

The facebook event is just to get a headcount. We try to invite people on the facebook event who we think might be interested, but you don't have to be invited to the facebook event to be invited in real life. If you're reading this, you're invited in real life.

Four More Years! Four More Years!

We had a fun time today eating breakfast at BruCo and then drinking Founder's Breakfast Stout on the back porch and dreaming about what the next four years will look like. Stay tuned, everyone! And thanks for your continued support.

Spare Key just finished reading Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's The Wisdom of Stability which makes a case for staying in place and investing in a neighborhood. This is the second of two posts inspired by that book.

In our mobile culture, we are constantly under pressure to move from city to city in order to advance our careers, to further our educations, or simply to trade up for nicer houses in nicer neighborhoods. We are taught that fulfillment is always just over the next hill.

"...We can see the paradox: the same restlessness that sends us searching for community also keeps us from settling down wherever we are."—Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Wisdom of Stability, p 20

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove does a great job of pointing out how despite our desire for true community, all of our social habits push us to seek what we're looking for somewhere else. There always seems to be bigger and better opportunities elsewhere.

Typically, there actually are better opportunities elsewhere. For this reason, we get very antsy when it comes to committing to anybody or anything.

But stable community cannot exist without commitment.

So if (and this is a big if!) community really is what we're looking for, stability of place is a necessity. There is no way around it. As Jonathan writes, "Stability demands that we do the long, hard work of life with other people in the place where we are."

I say "that's a big if" because I've moved at least once every year for the past ten years. Given the choice, I would do it all again. I moved from place to place in order to advance my education, learn about community and challenge myself. Sometimes we must go through a season of mobility to reach our goals at that time.

However, if a person chooses to move to a new city often, it is safe to say that person's immediate goal is not community. And that's okay. There are plenty of legitimate goals in life other than community. In fact, most people do not choose community and never do.

That's why intentional communities are radical. We like to call ourselves "ordinary radicals" (especially those of us in the New Monastic vein) because we make counter-cultural life choices.

Because we value friendship and conviviality, we decide to live together or near each other even though that decision might limit our other choices. Since we value collaboration, we choose to share things when we could just as easily go out and buy those things on our own. And because we value stability (and because our community members value us), we choose to stay in the place where we are.

This post was written by Jay Howard, Neighborhood Czar of Spare Key. If you missed the first of this series on The Wisdom of Stability, click here. 

Photo credit: The Wisdom of Stability

Spare Key just finished reading Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's The Wisdom of Stability which makes a case for staying in place and investing in a neighborhood. This is the first of two posts inspired by that book.

Spare Key's decision to read the Wisdom of Stability corresponded nicely with my and Amber's recent decision to buy a house. We have chosen to put down roots, and so it was nice to read something that affirmed that decision.

But in making his case for stable intentional communities, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove drew heavily from the Desert Fathers and Mothers. For example, he quotes Saint Antony a lot:

"In whatever place you live, do not easily leave it."
—Abba Anthony, 3rd century AD

As a recent home buyer, I resonate with the Desert Fathers' commitment to place. But in other ways, I have to admit I have a hard time getting excited about the wisdom of the Desert Fathers.

In many spiritualities---take Buddhism for example---the way of the householder is not considered a very spiritual path. In fact, the term householder meant "non-monastic" and contrasted sharply with the more spiritual and ascetic monastics who rejected the cares of society and sought freedom from all worldly attachments.


Christian monasticism makes exactly the same distinction between monastics and laity/householders. Monastics in general and the Desert Fathers and Mothers in particular always emphasized withdrawing as much as humanly possible from the distractions of everyday life. No getting married, no having a secular career, and certainly no buying houses.

Modern intentional communities aren't like that at all, of course. Instead, we put a great deal of emphasis on being active in our neighborhoods. Many intentional communities, including Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's own Rutba House in Durham NC, make a point of being hospitality houses.

So, while the Desert Fathers have much to teach us about the power of committing to a place, they're not quite as natural a choice when it comes to teaching us how to serve that place.

This post was written by Jay Howard, Neighborhood Czar of Spare Key. Check back later for the second part of this post series on The Wisdom of Stability.