The Document Most Communities Get Wrong
The community agreement is the most overworked, underused document in intentional community life.
Most communities spend six months drafting one. They argue over wording. They consult templates. They produce a 22-page document with sections on conflict resolution, financial transparency, environmental ethics, and decision-making protocols.
Then nobody reads it. By month nine, half the community can't remember what's in it. By year two, three of its core principles have been quietly violated and nobody has noticed.
This piece is about how to write community agreements that actually survive their first year. The principle is simple: write less, revisit more, and make every clause accountable to a real situation.
What a Community Agreement Is For
Three things, in this order of importance:
1. A reference point during conflict. When a disagreement happens, the agreement is what you point to. "We agreed in May that conflicts get surfaced within 48 hours." 2. A signal to new members. The document tells incoming members what kind of community they're joining and what's expected of them. 3. A historical record of what we believed at the time. Year five, you can look back at year one and see how your understanding has evolved.
Notice what's not on the list: a marketing document, an inspiration text, a complete worldview. Those are different documents. Don't confuse them.
A community agreement is operational. Treat it that way.
Write It Short
The single best thing you can do for your community agreement is keep it short.
Aim for 1,500 to 3,000 words. That's 4 to 8 pages. Anything longer and people stop reading. Anything shorter and you've underspecified.
Our Sanctuary's agreement is 2,400 words. Eight sections. Each section is one to three paragraphs. Every clause has a clear actor ("members will," "the steward will," "the community will") and a clear behavior.
Things that don't belong in your agreement: long preambles, philosophical justifications, lists of values without behaviors attached, boilerplate from other communities you copied.
If a clause doesn't tell someone what to do or what to expect, cut it.
The Eight Sections That Cover Almost Everything
After looking at maybe forty community agreements, the ones that work tend to cover the same eight territories. Adapt to your context, but cover all of them.
1. Membership. Who can join. How they join. How they leave. Probationary periods. 2. Decision-making. Which kinds of decisions go through which process. Who has authority over what. 3. Money. Contribution structure. What's covered. How financial decisions are made. Reserve funds. 4. Labor. Chore expectations. How rotations are managed. What counts as a contribution. 5. Conflict. How disagreements are surfaced and processed. When to bring in outside help. 6. Use of common spaces. Quiet hours. Guest policies. Shared resources. 7. Children, pets, and partners. How members' families and animals participate. 8. Amendment. How the agreement itself changes. How often it's reviewed.
That last section is the one most communities forget, and it's the most important. An unamendable agreement decays into either irrelevance or tyranny.
Write Behaviors, Not Aspirations
The single most common failure mode is writing aspirational language that nobody can act on.
"We commit to honest communication" is aspirational. It's not actionable.
"Members will surface conflict within 48 hours of becoming aware of it. Members will use the structured Sit-Down process described in the conflict Scroll" is behavioral. It's actionable.
The first version makes you feel good when you write it. The second version actually changes how the community functions.
When you draft each clause, ask: "If a member violated this, would I know? Could I name the violation?" If the answer is no, the clause is too vague.
The First Draft Is Always Wrong
Your first draft of the community agreement will be wrong. This is normal.
It will be too long. It will have aspirations dressed as policies. It will overspecify in some areas and underspecify in others. It will be missing a section you can't see yet.
Don't try to perfect it in committee. Ship it at "good enough." Use it for a year. Watch where it fails.
We use what we call the "ship it ugly" rule. The first version of any community document goes live at 70% quality. The remaining 30% gets fixed by reality, which is a much better editor than any committee.
The Annual Review
This is the practice that makes everything work.
Once a year, the community sits down for a half-day and reads the entire agreement together. Out loud. Every clause.
For each clause, three questions:
- Have we been honoring this?
- Is this still the right behavior?
- Is anything missing?
Most clauses pass without comment. Some need small wording updates. A few get rewritten substantially. Once every two or three years, a whole new section gets added.
The review is the antibody against agreement decay. Without it, the document becomes a fossil. With it, the document becomes a living mirror of how the community actually runs.
We document each year's review as a Scroll: what we changed, what we didn't, why. Six years in, we have a clear archive of how our agreement has evolved. New members read both the current version and the evolution log. They get the reasoning, plus the rules.
Make It Accessible
A community agreement that lives in a Google Drive folder nobody opens is dead.
Put it in your Library. Link to it from your onboarding Scroll. Reference it in Council. When a relevant clause comes up in conversation, name it. "That's covered in Section 3 of our agreement."
Members should be able to find any clause within thirty seconds. If they can't, the agreement isn't working as a reference point.
In our Sanctuary, the agreement is the most-viewed Scroll in our Library. About 60 views per month across 14 members. That means everyone consults it about four times a year on average. That's the right rate.
Handle Disagreement With the Agreement Itself
What happens when a member doesn't like a clause?
The wrong move: ignore the disagreement and hope it goes away. The right move: surface it, name it, and either revise the clause or accept the disagreement openly.
We had a member in 2023 who never agreed with our policy on guest stays. We didn't change the policy (most members supported it). We did document her disagreement in the Scroll. She lived with it. The policy is more stable, not less, because the disagreement is on the record.
A community agreement that pretends to total unanimity is brittle. A community agreement that holds visible disagreement is resilient.
When to Rewrite from Scratch
Every five to seven years, most community agreements need a full rewrite. The community has changed. The original assumptions are stale. The accumulated amendments have made the document Frankensteinian.
Don't try to patch a document that has gone past its useful life. Sit down. Read everything you've learned across the years. Write a new agreement that reflects who you are now.
Keep the old one in your Library, dated, marked "superseded." Future members can read it and see how the community grew up.
What You Get In Return
A working community agreement does three things over time:
- It speeds up onboarding (new members can read who you are in fifteen minutes)
- It accelerates conflict resolution (you have a shared reference point)
- It makes the community more itself (writing things down forces clarity about what you actually believe)
The community agreement is the spine of how your community will run for years. Treat it that way. Build it carefully. Revisit it regularly. Trust it during hard moments.
A six-page document, used well, will hold a community together better than fifty earnest conversations.