Dwell-With-Us Doc

Hi, We’re Liza and Adam

This is kind of like a date-me doc, but about us as a couple looking for a community or people to start one with.

We want to live with other people. Great if some of those people are kids. We’re in the process of starting a family, and our ideal setting is a coliving of families and friends who raise kids alongside each other.

Who are we?

Liza Simonova (35) is an entrepreneur, facilitator (circling, other relational practices), dancer and community builder. She cofounded the foolsvalley.com project (a residency, retreat, and research center near Lisbon). Fluent in Russian, English and German, and working on Portuguese.

by the sea

Adam McKenty (42) is an inventor of things spiritual and technical. He grew up on a homestead in the Canadian wilderness and has worked as a software developer, writer, photographer, non-profit director, scuba diver, gardener, stone mason, carpenter and musician. Has worked for community/ecovillage networks (GEN, FIC) and sat on the governance boards of many non-profits. After moving to Berlin in 2020, he founded the church of interbeing, an experiment in non-religious community ritual.

Where / When?

  • Ideally in the proximity of Berlin
  • If it’s a great fit it could be anywhere in Europe
  • Beyond Europe — possible, but only in a couple of years
  • Close to nature
  • Could be an existing project or a new community we create
  • We’re flexible about the number of people (5-500) and specific area, if it’s a good fit in other ways
  • Two timelines: if we find a place soon, we would move there this year. Otherwise, next spring or summer

How would we like to live?

Our ideal balance of shared and private space: you see others naturally and spontaneously by default, but there’s enough space you can be alone when you want. This could look like separate flats with shared common areas, multiple houses with a few people/families in each, or some other configuration.

Room to dance. Space for gardening. Sauna. Hot tub?

The aesthetics of our environment are important.

Liza by a redwood tree

Depending on a configuration, we imagine at least some shared meals each week, and a few structured touchpoints like a community/house meeting as often as needed (probably between weekly and monthly).

What’s the vibe of people we’d like to live with?Ambitious explorers of the internal and external world. People who seek living in community, understanding that it takes something like a village to raise a child (as well as to raise an adult).

Some values

We enjoy both deep embodied / emotional connection and intellectual conversations and don’t want to choose one or the other in choosing a community.

We want to live in a way that is aligned with ecological harmony and social sustainability.

We’re both spiritual and empirical. We want to take science and evidence and reason seriously, while not making them the boundary of what’s allowed to be real, or cause for closed-mindedness.

We’re both ambitious about our own growth, and about creating projects that make a difference in the world.

We’re more interested in integrating or playing with polarities than being embedded in them. If you’re very strongly identified with the political left or right to a degree that limits conversation or makes topics, ideas, or ways of being impossible to talk about, we’re probably not your ideal housmates.

We’re close to sex-positive and poly worlds, and even though we’re currently a monogamous couple we would be happy if the values of those spaces are welcome.

What we bring

Governance and leadership. We’ve both held organisational leadership positions and have experience creating and participating in governance — finding the level of structure needed to support functioning community life. Liza cofounded a business and grew it to 500+ employees.

Practical skills. Adam grew up building, designing and fixing things, with experience in construction, landscaping and gardening, electronics, etc. Can bring practical knowledge useful to most community projects.

General competence. Our projects have ranged from building a swimming pond to launching tech products in unfamiliar technologies to scaling a business. We learn fast and adapt to whatever a project needs.

Financial capacity. We’re financially equipped to buy in or otherwise be active/leading financial participants in a project.

Play and a sprinkle of madness. We’re weaving singing, playing, being all around weird into the daily life and do also take abstract thought with a certain degree of sincere irony.

Relational practice and communication skills. We’ve both done a lot of meditating, and a lot of relational practices (circling, various coaching and dialogue methodologies). We’d like to live these methods with others, and can also share them.

Kids

We don’t know how raising children will look in practice! But, here are some thoughts and questions about it.

Ideally, we want to collaborate with other parents and families, either in a structured way (for example some slots of rotating shared childcare each week), or more informally. More importantly, we want to be close to other parents so we can hang out together with children! Potlucks! Forest exploring! Water fights! Building things together. Singing.

Careful relationship with technology: phones, AI, and digital devices are super useful, and also hazards to cognitive freedom and wellbeing. How do we raise children with fluency in using them, and immunity to being used by them?

Nature is the original playground and classroom. We want our children to grow up in it!

Authority and self-responsibility: we want to balance necessary authority as parents with giving space for children to learn and grow and discover their own strengths and limits, not micromanaging.

Many parents lie to their kids, or pretend to know things when they don’t because it’s convenient. We don’t want to do this.

Action potential:

If this sounds interesting, please be in touch!

Some options:

  • Refer us to people and places that you know that could be a good fit
  • Invite us to meet a project you can see us becoming a part of
  • Become a part of the founding group of a new place with us
  • If you’re not available for this project right now, but may have interest in the future — you can still contact us and keep in touch as things unfold