Developing ‘Intentional communities’ is one option for building resilience among Cuenca expats

Editor’s note: See the author’s previous article, Survey shows an ‘approaching tsunami’ of demand for expat assisted health care Cuenca; Can it be met?

By Harry Watkins

I was shopping at Coral, in the Batan Shopping Center the other day, when I saw a 70s something woman with a full arm cast, struggling to adjust a sling for her arm while juggling a heavy bag of groceries.

Walking over to her, I offered to help, and she responded with tears in her eyes, “I’m beyond help.”

Then her expression firmed, and she said, “No thank you; I’m fine.”

Reluctantly, I chose not to push harder.

It was just one of many encounters in the last year that has made it clear to me that the expat community in Cuenca is confronting a significant challenge: how to cope with long-term disability and/or end-of-life care.

An Epidemic of Health Challenges
My wife and I have lived in Cuenca for six years. In that time, we have known expats who have broken ankles, hips, arms, legs, kneecaps, and collar bones. Some have needed hip replacements, shoulder surgery, and spinal fusions.

Two friends have lost a partner. Two others have had partners progressing into dementia.

Some of these friends and acquaintances had extensive financial resources, and extensive circles of close friends who stepped up to help.

Others have been on their own and have been living on a modest Social Security stipend.

The city of Cuenca says there are about 8,000 North Americans living in Cuenca. The vast majority are over 65. Of those, 45 percent are single and living alone, according to the Cuenca Expat HealthCare Study, in November 2024.

Research in the United States shows that more than 20 percent of adults over 65 currently need help with one or more “activities of daily living” (activities of daily living – ADLs – such as dressing, toileting, transferring, handling medications, etc.), according to a 2023 study.

Our experience here in Cuenca makes it clear that many expats here will eventually experience medical challenges which will require them to seek help after they are released from the hospital.

Expats’ Coping Strategies
I recently completed a research project on behalf of a medical team here in Cuenca in which I asked readers of Gringo Post and CuencaHighLife two key questions:

• Who would you call on for help if you had a medical emergency requiring long term care, and
• What would you do if your need for care looked to be indefinite in duration.

The respondents overwhelmingly wanted to stay in Cuenca!

Married or partnered respondents were most likely to assume that their partners would provide care for them, followed by expat and Cuencano friends.

Single respondents pointed first to their friends as a source of support. But for serious support needs of long duration (such as ADLs), respondents were relatively more likely to point to two options:

• Paid help from health aides and/or housecleaners in the expats’ homes.
• Moving to an assisted living facility.

This choice was strongly impacted by the marital status of the respondent. Married/partnered respondents strongly preferred the option of staying in their homes and hiring paid health care at home.

Single respondents were half as likely to view staying at home as a viable option and were twice as likely to point to an assisted living facility as their preferred option.

Lack of Assisted Living Facilities Hits Singles Particularly Hard
This divergence in plans by marital status makes sense. A spouse can monitor the care given to their partner by a paid caregiver, but a single expat, living alone, and perhaps disabled, has no one who can reliability supervise such care.

Thus, it makes sense that singles might consider assisted living facilities the better option. The problem, of course, is that there are currently very few facilities in Cuenca and Ecuador.

And fewer still meet the standards expats might hope for.

Virtually none of them have staff who speak English. They tend to have very limited space, unappetizing food for some expats, few activities, and little stimulation.

What is a single expat to do? Well, how about getting a roommate?

This is not a joke. Of the 360 respondents to my survey, 44 percent were singles living alone, while only three percent were singles living with a roommate.

An option for singles and couples to build more resilience in their lives is to embrace some form of intentional community which, among other advantages, would make the home care option more viable.

 What is Intentional Community?
Wikipedia defines an intentional community as “a voluntary residential community designed to foster a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. While some groups emphasize shared ideologies, others are centered on enhancing social connections, sharing resources, and creating meaningful relationships”.  It continues “…some see them as a natural response to the isolation and fragmentation of modern housing, offering a return to the social bonds and collaborative spirit found in traditional village life.”

While there are many types of intentional communities, the ones arguably most adaptable to the needs of Cuenca expats as we age might be co-living groups, co-housing communities, and housing cooperatives.

Co-living arrangements usually involve three or more unrelated adults choosing to share housing accommodations. In Cuenca, a small group of individuals might choose to buy or rent housing that they would share.

Usually, each individual or couple in these relationships have their own bedrooms and bathrooms, but share common space including kitchens, living rooms, laundry rooms, and game/craft rooms, and as applicable, gardens or terrace space.

Depending on the relationships and arrangements among the members, they could share meals, social gatherings, friendship, and mutual care.

Of the three alternatives, this is the least formal arrangement.

In co-housing, a group of individuals come together to live in a community based on a self-managed common housing project. Cohousing communities often share resources like tools, babysitting, creative skills, or in the context of this article, mutual health care.

For example, a group of expats in Paute are currently in the process of planning a tiny-house community centered around shared community resources including a community garden and a community center where shared meals and social events will occur.

In Cuenca, a group of individuals and/or couples might collaborate to rent condos or apartments in the same building and commit to build community and mutual care within that building. I currently know of another group of four adults, 2 men and 2 women, who are exploring this option together.

A Housing cooperative (or housing co-op) is “a legal entity which owns real estate consisting of one or more residential buildings. The entity is often a membership-based cooperative, with membership granted via a share purchase in the cooperative.

Each shareholder in the legal entity is granted the right to occupy one housing unit. Members pool their resources so that their buying power is leveraged, lowering the costs associated with home ownership.

Also in some cooperatives, the members through their elected representatives, screen and select who may live in the cooperative.”  This is the most formal of the three options but might offer advantages of a legal framework for ownership issues and sharing costs and responsibilities.

All these forms of intentional community have the potential to add to the social connection, richness and resilience of their participants.

Cuenca expats, singles and couples alike, might consider exploring one of these alternative housing alternatives as a creative way of building the capacity to embrace at-home care if needed.

Friends living in proximity in the context of one of these communal living arrangements might be counted upon to monitor the delivery of healthcare services to a degree that that could not be expected of friends living across town.

Moreover, a group of expats, working in community, might be able to share and better afford the costs of home health care services as needed.

Yes but….
Any discussion of intentional community is quick to bring objections, or at least, skepticism, especially among individualistic North Americans.

The idea is commonly conflated with a “commune,” kibbutz, “eco-village,” or even cults following a charismatic leader.

But the idea has been embraced in one form or another throughout U.S. history. One example is drawn from the experience of homesteaders during the 1800s.

Homesteaders working to “prove up” their claims often initially built their homes in the center of their 160-acre homesteads. But loneliness and the need for collaborative labor progressively drove them to move their homes to the corners of their homesteads so at least four families could live in proximity, creating a small intentional community characterized by mutual social interaction and support.

Today, high housing costs, loneliness, and social and environmental concerns are driving a dramatic growth in intentional communities.

“We estimate there are between 10,000-30,000 intentional communities worldwide. Many are quite informal or are based in a traditional village setting. Communities often fail to get started, others stay small and choose not to list on ic.org, others can grow to a significant size,” said Foundation for Intentional Community on their website.

How to Build an Intentional Community
The first step is to talk with your friends about the issue. The inevitability of needing assistance as we age is a topic we would all like to avoid thinking about. But this is obviously not wise.

Find those from among your circle of friends who are willing to engage in the hard but rewarding work of building more resilience through intentional community.

Individually, or as a group, consider reaching beyond your current friendship circle to find other expats who are willing to think and dream together about possibilities. For example, consider advertising for participation in discussion groups. There are many reading groups here in Cuenca.

Consider forming a reading group that will explore the excellent literature and online resources on forming Intentional Communities and discuss what you learn together. Resources to explore might include:

• Community Finders – a website with many useful resources.
• Creating a Life Together, Diana Leaf Christian – a classic but still useful book on intentional community.
• Building Belonging, Yana Ludwig – a more recent book on creating intentional communities
• Starting a Community – an online, on-demand course, also by Yana Ludwig
• CLIPS (Community Learning Incubator Programme for Sustainability) – a group of guides and resources for forming communities
• The Cooperative Culture Handbook by Yana Ludwig and Karen Gimnig – addresses solutions for the biggest challenge to intentional community: interpersonal conflicts.

The resources above draw from the experiences of hundreds of successful and failed communities, and will encourage your group to:

1. Discuss and develop common values and objectives. Dream together. What would an ideal community in the context of living in Cuenca together look like? Each participant may have different perspectives. That’s ok and helpful for either reaching a richer consensus or for determining that one or more participants may need to look elsewhere for participants with a common vision. Work towards articulating and composing a vision statement for your group.
2. Explore how different living arrangements might work for your group. Close friends with a similar tolerance sharing common space could share a large apartment or adapt a house together (a Co-living arrangement). Groups made up of more disparate individuals and couples who need more privacy might do better with a co-housing arrangement, for example, by renting apartments in the same building.
3. Consider your background. What has gotten in the way of living with others in the past? Are you willing to do the work to learn to live collaboratively? (The Cooperative Culture Handbook is extremely helpful here!) Be sure to test compatibility: trial runs. Travel together. Room together. Watch for red flags as you discuss (and disagree) on community design options. Intentional Community arrangements work well when the members have good self-knowledge, effective communication skills, are flexible, and embrace give and take. Unfortunately, prospective participants who have a history of broken relationships in their home countries may well bring chaos and discord into new intentional community arrangements.
4. Develop a Tenant in Common agreement, and where indicated, formal legal membership documents addressing such issues as:

• How do we choose/add members?
• How do we make common decisions?
• Do we have explicit expectations for community engagement?
• Are there investments in shared resources? How are these handled? (such as what if a group decides to buy a house or a building together?)
• How does an individual terminate the commitment to (and possible investments in) the community?

Intentional Community and Long Term/End of life Care
An obvious benefit of living in an intentional community is social connection which has been shown to mitigate loneliness, depression, and the onset of dementia among other benefits.

But it can also be a path to greater resilience in the face of the health challenges associated with aging.

For example, a group of friends I know intend to buy and adapt a house with sufficient room to house themselves with provisions for privacy, and to house a permanent caregiver/housekeeper.

Absent a plan like this, a group of neighbors could compact to provide supervision and assistance if one of their members needed to bring in a home health care worker to provide needed care.

There are many other issues which the readings listed above will help you work through. But the point of this article is that the need for community has been successfully addressed by many, many people in North America and worldwide.

There are helpful guidelines to make success more likely. It takes work, flexibility and a willingness to embrace a new way of living, but we expats living in Cuenca, far from family and the support systems common to our home countries, have an even higher need for the benefits that can come from the effort.

Moreover, we have already demonstrated an ability to embrace the new simply by being here!

Above all, be patient, hopeful and keep the end in mind: living more resiliently in community.
________________

Harry Watkins, Ph.D. can be reached at 099-948-0708 or hwatkins@pointloma.edu.