When people talk wistfully about the "spirit of Geel" and how they wish it could be recreated in the US, they're referring to a fantasy of the program, not the Colony of Geel or the current programs offered by OPZ Geel. Regardless of the history of the program, fantasy Geel isn't entirely disconnected from today's OPZ programming.
The "spirit of Geel" refers to programs where participants have:
Freedom to focus on living
Room and board
Medical care
Essential transportation
Living stipend for incidental expenses
Accessible support
Selection of day programs
Team to connect participants to additional support
Participant directed approach
Community integration
Participants paired with a supportive family who opted-in
Participants given opportunities to support each other
Living within a tolerant broader community
Authorities trained to work with people with different communication styles, with an emphasis on de-escalation
24/7 response team provided by OPZ Geel
Unfortunately, the basic premise of having affordable housing, medical care, and other essential supports in place is rare. Putting these supports in place – and keeping them there – carries a significant administrative burden in the US, Canada, and the UK. When these basic supports are in place, participants and community members are eager to and able to create programs to meet the rest of their needs.
The limits of mutual aid
It’s much more difficult for communities to provide baseline support – like housing, medical care, and ADA support – often because of the same regulations that were put in place for our protection.
A reporter covering the story of Stuart Potts, a man providing housing as mutual aid, tells us:
“His work is entirely informal, operating outside the auspices of any governing authority, charity registration, funding body or council department. Last year, the council rang Potts, asking to inspect the flat since he was advertising it as a shelter. “They said: ‘We need to know if the cooking facilities are safe,’” Potts recalled. “I said: ‘All right, I’ll kick them out on the street and we’ll see what the cooking facilities are like in a fucking tent, shall we?’” He gave a dry laugh, shaking his head. (The council didn’t come: he successfully argued that since it’s a private property, they had no right to inspect.) The entire operation is funded out of Potts’ pocket: a universal credit allowance that after his rent – £595 a month – leaves him with less than £100 a week.”
The man being profiled, Potts, was evicted by a previous landlord for allowing people to stay with him. There are laws against having too many people stay in a home. There are laws preventing people from being kicked out if they break house rules, since people have rights after a certain amount of time. Potts had previously housed himself and other people needing a place to go by squatting abandoned commercial buildings.
Paperwork
The biggest hurdle, of course, is the cost of housing. As the housing first model demonstrates, everything else hinges on that.
Bureaucracy requires a stable address, phone number, and a lot of documents. The more complex your life, the more documents they require.
There are programs in place to help people navigate administrative hurdles. New York’s LinkNYC network, which provides public wifi, charging ports, and free public phones throughout the city, has made it much easier for people to access services that require phone calls…and long waits on hold. The public library is another critical resource in connecting people with services.
“Many people who experience homelessness are stuck in this vicious circle. Without a birth certificate, you can’t get a passport. Without photo ID, you can’t get a bank account. Without a bank account, you can’t get benefits. Lees was eligible for a state pension, but with no bank account and no documentation, he couldn’t claim it.”1
When I didn’t have the required documents to get proof of residence in Lisbon, there was a workaround – I needed two Portuguese citizens from my neighborhood to vouch that I was a resident. The US, Canada, and the UK don’t allow for this way around paperwork dead ends. Even in the US – where my bank account was opened for me by my mother when I was a little kid with birthday money to deposit – I’ve had to get pretty creative in order to get required documents in order to access basic services and connect utilities.
Just as in medieval times, people need to prove that they belong to a place in order to access local services, especially housing placement.
The community that lives up to the spirit of Geel
In the end I’ve come full circle. It's the person who sparked my curiosity about Geel who’s come the closest to creating a community that lives up to our fantasy of Geel – Glenora Farm.
I arrived in Geel expecting it to look like a medieval village, since people writing about it make so much of its medieval origins. I also expected it to feel like it did when I arrived at Glenora Farms. Geel is a nice town, everyone I spoke with was lovely, I stayed in a beautiful home. I had a perfectly nice trip. Yet something just felt off.
Glenora Farm is in Duncan, BC. It’s on Vancouver Island, which is a ferry or seaplane ride away from Vancouver. Driving up to Glenora Farm felt a little bit magical. The first thing you see is a little shop they run, close to town, where they sell baked goods, eggs, and textiles. There are shady tree lined lanes. There’s the neighbor’s vineyard. It’s a bucolic ideal. It’s all rolling hills with mountains in the distance.
The main farmhouse is slightly chaotic in a way that feels lived in – it has a buzz of activity. I wasn’t sure which door I should knock on and knew it didn’t matter, because someone on the porch was already saying hello, finding out what I needed, and leading me to where I needed to go. This was not someone who was in charge of the nonexistent front desk; this was someone who happened to see me when I drove up.
The farm itself has one huge main farmhouse and several smaller buildings, most of which are tucked out of sight. They have a rustic architecture that’s somehow simultaneously grand and warm. It’s a working farm. There are berries with two harvests a year, thanks to the climate. There are summer and winter vegetable harvests. There is a pond, fenced in for safety. There are woods with neatly maintained walking trails. They have textile and wax facilities. They have a tiny lumber mill. There are chickens, cows, sheep, and the neighbor’s horses. They run workshops on arts, crafts, agriculture, herbs, and sustainability that are open to the public.
I didn’t expect the site to be so big, since the community only has up to 45 people and there were fewer when I visited. The tour was a bit overwhelming because there was just so much to take in. I hadn’t expected it to be so established – a whole world on its own.
The community is home to a mix of long-term residents and volunteers from Canada and abroad. Disabled adults who are unable to live independently live here with foster families and volunteers. The farm offers a wide array of work opportunities – and there’s a lot of work – so everyone, no matter their abilities or interests can find something to suit them.
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Anthroposophy and Camphill
Adola McWilliam is the founder of Glenora Farms. She had already retired when we met. I found her through CouchSurfing and she arranged for a way for me to come out and see the site within pandemic safety guidelines. They had a smaller set of volunteers than usual because the borders were still closed and there were safety restrictions.
Adola discovered the Camphill Movement in her 20s, while she was still living in the Netherlands. Once she got involved with Camphill she knew it was where she belonged. She started at the original Camphill Community in Scotland. The movement took her to Pennsylvania and New York. She was in her 50s when she moved to Vancouver, sight unseen. She and her husband, Charles, set up a school for children with disabilities there.
While living in Vancouver, the owner of a farm on Vancouver Island reached out to them about establishing a community on Vancouver Island. That eventually led to them purchasing 100 acres from him in order to establish Glenora Farms. He still owns the farm next door and remains involved. Now Glenora Farm is over 30 years old.
There are more than 100 Camphill Communities in 22 countries. They’re all inspired by anthroposophy, a spiritual movement. It holds that each of us has a perfect spirit and destiny.
I learned more about anthroposophy from Marnix, a Belgian doctor who’s lived in Ghent for the past forty years. I’d met with him to understand the Belgian medical system and learned so much more. He’s a walking encyclopedia of philosophy, history, and medicine. Marnix explained how anthroposophy is a philosophy that embraces Christianity and natural science. He volunteers with a Waldorf School once a week.
Anthroposophy has a form of holistic medicine. Anthroposophy is dedicated to sustainable environmental practices, including biodynamic agriculture and ecological architecture. Anthroposophy has ties to the co-op movement, thanks to their commitment to ethical banking practices and social responsibility.
Regulations determine what’s possible
When I met Adola, we discussed the struggles Glenora Farm has had with regulatory restrictions. It left her with serious concerns about the long-term viability of the community. We discussed the ways regulations we both supported – farmland preservation, protections for vulnerable people – were making it difficult for Glenora Farm to expand and causing ongoing struggles just to stay open. This was all compounded by the restrictions during the pandemic.
She’d had to stop hosting CouchSurfers, since they weren’t properly screened and vetted. Their ability to recruit volunteers from WWOOF and HelpX had been restricted. It keeps getting harder to get work permits for volunteers from abroad, despite the special rules in place to waive labor impact assessments and application fees for religious organizations doing care work. The regulations multiply exponentially when you go from a single house run by a single couple to a site with multiple families. It’s a working farm on land zoned for agriculture, so adding structures requires layers of special permissions, environmental impact studies, and proof that the building site is unsuitable for farming. Geothermal heating and energy efficient systems are more difficult to get approved, because they’re not standard.
Everything needs to be quantified and documented. Good care, doing the right thing, and a welcoming community aren’t things you can quantify.
It seems like residential communities have been facing increased scrutiny since residential schools have become a regular media topic. While well meaning, these safety requirements seem ultimately unrelated. The horrors of residential schools in Canada and the US didn’t happen accidentally, from visitors without current vulnerable persons police checks. Destroying culture, breaking family ties, and breaking spirits were the intended outcome of residential schools.
No one at the Camphill Communities is inspired by a colonizing or “civilizing” mission. They’re here to accept people as they are. Volunteers come to Glenora Farm because they’re interested in the Waldorf school philosophy and biodynamic farming.
There is a long list of disabled people who want to come live at Glenora Farm. They can’t welcome more people with care needs into the community. There are very few communities like Glenora Farm and other adult foster care arrangements are virtually unheard of in North America. When I mention ‘adult foster care’ people usually seem confused.
The neighbors, local politicians, and broader community in Duncan all support Glenora Farms. They always have, which is why Glenora Farms is located where it is. Yet the farm still struggles and it’s getting more difficult every year.
This was the conversation that made me want to go to Geel. I wanted to find out how their adult foster care program had been created and persisted for so long. I wanted to see adult foster care become available in every community, as part of programs like Glenora Farm as well as with individual families interested in opening their homes.
The lack of appropriate care for adults with disabilities is what keeps parents of disabled children up at night. How were the zoning codes, building codes, and care regulations written in Belgium that allowed for adult foster care? And…well, we know how that went.
We spend a lot of time discussing the ways problematic histories taint present day works. In this case, Geel’s ethical and empowering adult foster care program is possible because the village was selected by the Catholic Church to conduct exorcisms – their way of restricting charity to the ‘deserving poor.’ This link with exorcisms was used as justification for the city being transformed into an internal colony. That penal colony evolved into the program we have today.
This is why it was in Geel where I first encountered program administrators who weren’t eager to share the clever ways they’d found to work within the restrictions of regulations to keep their programs going. I’m so used to program administrators who are happy to have someone interested in the nitty gritty details. Instead of being open about what made their program possible – laws making it illegal for the mad to live in the community and establishing a penal colony – they threw me a bunch of red herrings and platitudes.
I, of course, overlooked the obvious clues to the truth…like the fact that it’s called the Colony of Geel. They may have not explained things to me, but no one in Geel lied to me about anything. They told me the truth American visitors are there to hear and glossed over the parts they assumed I didn’t want to know. It’s not their fault I somehow didn’t retain anything from all my history classes, leaving me unable to easily notice the relevant clues and piece things together in an instant rather than months of research.
Perhaps it’s not too late to use the laws that made penal colonies possible to set up an American or Canadian Geel. Old laws are rarely taken off the books. Carceral institutions are full of people with mental health issues, disabilities, and the elderly – institutions not hampered by the same regulations and restrictions faced by nursing homes or boarding homes, although I have no doubt there are plenty of regulations. Sometimes we need to get really creative in order to do what needs to be done.
That’s not the route Adola took. She used the Camphill Model and the motivation provided by membership in a faith community.
The metric I judge a community on is how it feels to be there. Do I want to hang out longer? Would I want to stay? If I don’t want to, can I imagine who would feel at home there? Do the people I see seem eager to be there? Do they behave like guests or co-creators?
Leaving Glenora Farms, I was imagining an alternate direction my life could have taken. Had I known about the Camphill Communities a few years earlier, I probably would have made different choices and ended up with a different sort of life. My life shifted and I needed to decide where to live. None of my options felt quite right, partly because of concerns around finances and health insurance.
The Camphill Communities ask that volunteers commit to a minimum of one year. The communities have things in place to take care of incidental costs, student loans, health insurance, and work permits. They provide time off and cover all living expenses. The community shares the farm income. They welcome families as well as individuals interested in joining. They work to provide safety and stability for everyone in their community.
Instead of imagining Glenora Farm as a haven for people who need care or a place to volunteer, I saw Glenora Farm as a place for people like me – people who want to be part of something.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/30/stuart-potts-man-who-turned-his-home-into-a-homeless-shelter