Guest Profile
Diana Leafe Christian
Diana Leafe Christian is an author, former editor of Communities magazine, and a national speaker and workshop presenter on starting new eco-villages and community and sustainability. In the early 1990s Diana published a newsletter, Growing Community, about starting new communities. In 1993 she became editor of Communities magazine, a quarterly publication of the nonprofit Fellowship for Intentional Community FIC, about intentional communities and organized neighborhoods in North America. During her 14 year tenure she gained invaluable insight into what made communities succeed, and what didn't. Her first book on communities, Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Eco-villages and Intentional Communities was published in 2003 and her second, Finding Community: How to Join an Eco-village or Intentional Community, in 2007. That same year she stopped editing Communities Magazine to found Eco-villages newsletter, a project of Cooperative Resources and Services Project.
Christian speaks, leads workshops, shows slide presentations and she talks on community development, process, and creating and finding community internationally. Her favorite governance and decision-making method, which she now teaches, is Sociocracy, also called Dynamic Governance in the US. She has visited communities and presented workshops from one side of the globe to the other. Highlights of her journeys include visiting Damanur in Italy, teaching at Findhorn in Scotland, and at one of her favorites, the Kohonhaa Family a rural spiritual income-sharing community on the slopes of Mt. Fuji.
Her previous writing experience included articles for Mother Earth News, New Age magazine, Yoga Journal, and East West Journal. She also hosted radio interview programs in Hawaii and in northern California in the 1970s and '80s.
At Earthaven Eco-village, Christian works on the sustainable homesite she shares with her mother. She participates in Earthaven's consensus governance process, and serves on steering transition and membership committees. Christian also gives day-long tours of Earthaven.
