Our website now has a new community section. I recommend going there now to see what it is.

This new website section serves a few purposes:

1. An introduction to steem communities with real examples
2. Demonstrates individuals of steem communities creating positive change
3. Provides more context to our vendors as humans
4. Sharing a general pride for our communities
   
   

Fundition Update

This post is an update to our fundition project; an update regarding our steem onboarding efforts.

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The following is a reproduction of the Homesteaders Co-op Community page.

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Homesteaders Co-op Community

Our Homesteaders Co-op is a community run marketplace. We choose people over profit. Cooperation over corporation. And so we have more opportunity to choose how we operate – as a community.

How do we heal our relationship with money? Community.

Contributors

Our contributors are a group of folks that have volunteered to help write our community blog. These are people that enjoy blogging on the steem blockchain and choose to inspire, empower and share knowledge with our audience.

Our contributors are helping us shape our message. They receive some rewards from the steem blockchain, which is extra incentive, but they are primarily contributing because they want our free community economy to thrive. They see social value our marketplace and realize that they can play an integral role in helping our community marketplace thrive. They do this voluntarily.

It is interesting when you look at how powerful this can be. Our contributors are all friends with each other (not co-workers), and they are working off each other’s energy. They have joy and pride in the messages they are sharing on behalf of our community marketplace.

Elders

I borrow this quote from @trucklife-family‘s post titled Does the saying “You should respect your elders” still hold true today? She sums up the definition of and need for Elders in community quite nicely.

Elders/Wisdom Keepers Down through the Ages

There was a time in Western Society were one would have respected Elders within their community. These Elders were not necessarily old people, but rather people who would hold a lot of wisdom and whom the community would approach for advice or council. They would include both old and usually middle aged men and women. The term Elder was then met with respect and held in high esteem. These people earned your respect through their actions and deeds. The would strive towards building a better community for all. Yet they would be humble. These are what Elders are meant to be.

Our elders fit this definition. They are men and women that are both old and middle aged. They have earned respect from our Homesteaders Co-op community members through their actions and their deeds. Through humble actions, wisdom and advice they help us build a better community, which equates to a better community marketplace. For these reasons we hold our Elders in high esteem.

Vendors

We wouldn’t be a community marketplace without our vendors. Per our selling requirements, our vendors are committed to sustainability in their lives and their business. They understand that our Earth has limited resources and supports much more life than just us humans.

Our vendors prioritize connecting, or re-connecting with nature and Mother Earth. Our vendors are taking actions to live more sustainably. We want to leave a healthy Earth to our children’s children.

We hope that our community marketplace can be an inspiration to others. Our vendors are role models to other producers and our customers are role models to other consumers. We want to reward our vendors who take conscious actions in their lifestyles and businesses. We can choose to do this because we prioritize people over profit.

We reward our vendors by offering them a venue in our marketplace. We also reward them by promoting them in our steem community blog.

Our vendors live internationally. There are too many vendors to list here in this space. We invite you to explore our vendors on the vendors page.

Customers

Our customers are part of our community too. Let’s blur the lines between customer/vendor and friends/community members. Steem has opened safe spaces for our deeper voices to be heard by each other; It is through communicating and reciprocation that we bond together. We bring that intention here to Homesteaders Co-op.

Likewise our vendors put intention into their work and ultimately their products. We hope to attract customers that appreciate these intentions, have similar values and want to support a world with healthy intentions. There is plenty of opportunity for relationships to form around appreciation for each other.

Unsubscribing From Greed

Since we, as a community marketplace, are not seeking profit from our vendors they keep 100% of their proceeds. Our vendors are more empowered and our customers feel more pride in their purchases because they know that 100% of their money goes to the individuals and families that they want to support.

Generosity is contagious. One generous act leads to another. We have proven this here already. People noticed that we are empowering, inspiring and encouraging our vendors, rather than mining them for money.

Many folks are offering help in terms of volunteering their time and effort to help our community marketplace succeed. However small or large their efforts are, they all add up. People want to see our community marketplace succeed because they recognize how important it is to address the issue of greed by choosing generosity.

The great thing about having community help is that we will need less income to sustain our marketplace. This allows us to shift our focus from money to what really matters … the people. The people are why we are here to begin with.

Our Community Meeting Places

As an international community we meet online. We have two main venues for meeting and communicating:

1. Steem

Steem is a social blogging platform. Many of our community members author personal blogs that are published on the steem blockchain. We also have a Homesteaders Co-op community blog where we share updates about our community marketplace, as well as highlight members of our community.

We are learning from each other about homesteading, gardening, self sufficiency, natural medicine, spirituality, and many, many other topics from the myriad of interests that our communities explore. We encourage each other’s personal growth, and we encourage positive and healthy actions both on and offline.

You can find links to our contributors’ blogs next to their bios below. You can find links to our vendors’ blogs in their store profile pages.

2. Discord

We also meet in Discord, which is a messaging app. We can chat by text and also by having voice calls with any number of people. We use Discord to discuss the direction of our community marketplace, brainstorm ideas, help each other out, and in general have a good time!

You are most welcome to join our chat room by clicking on this discord invitation link.

Meet Some of Our Community!

@minismallholding – Contributor – Australia – Blog

I grew up in a family that grew vegetables, composted, recycled and reused and occasionally hand crafted what we needed. Living in England, gardening was as easy as planting and letting nature take its course. In my early 30s we moved our young family to South Australia and gardening was a bit less simple. The last 7 years has been a learning journey as I try and apply natural systems to bring nutrition to a barren soil on a suburban plot and am starting to learn a bit more about the difficulties we face as we try to recover ecosystems destroyed by deforestation and intensive farming. The size of our plot means that I can experiment with working in some ways that work for larger pieces of land, but I also have to look at downscaling and ideas for growing when you don’t have so much outdoor space. This means I can draw information and inspiration from both homesteaders and urban gardeners. My hope is to share what I learn and hopefully help and inspire others to look at producing some of what they consume.

@thistle-rock – Contributor – Canada – Store / Blog

I had never considered myself to be a homesteader. I was just living life the best way I knew how with what I had at hand. I am passionate about life, but as I age, I have become even more passionate about my health and the well-being of our earth. I have chosen to find ways to eliminate waste, live as chemically free as possible, to be responsible for my own well-being before relying on doctors, big pharma and corporations at large, and to live both frugally and with less. Treating the world and eco-system with gentleness and care, being kind to my fellow beings, and exploring what Mother Nature gives us for free are what brings me the greatest joys and allows me to live a more stress-free life. Treat yourself with kindness and the rest will follow. I am honoured to be a part of the Homesteaders Co-op where our journeys cross and meet and often become one towards the same goal.

@wwf – Elder – Alberta, Canada – Store / Blog

White Walking Feather has been living off grid with his wife since 2007 and he was featured in the hit youtube video UNGRIP in 2011. He is an author, activist and staunch advocate for peace, freedom and non-violence. He has been writing on the Steem blockchain since October 2017 and is well known for his unyeilding moral and ethical stances. As a result, he has been invited into several communities and tribes as a participant and elder in order to help provide Spiritual Mentorship for those interested in walking the path.

@nateonsteemit – Contributor – Texas, USA – Blog

I’m a lifelong Texan (will be forever, God willing), a permaculture newbie of about a year and a half, and a big time chicken lover. I’ve fallen in love with permaculture and the integrated models of health and agriculture from a monetary and philosophical standpoint. Natural medicine is the people’s medicine, and seeds are better than money.

@sagescrub – Contributor – Oregon, USA – Store / Blog

I have found joy, peace, love and gratitude in learning to reconnect with earth, nature and land. The latest years of my life have led me to pursue gardening, homesteading, permaculture, herbalism, wild foods and natural medicine. Being out of the rat race, connecting with community, volunteering on local farms and having dirt under my fingernails bring me great joy. This path has led me to see my fellow humans as my kin, rather than separate from myself. As the founder of Homesteaders Co-op I have found a way to combine my skills as a web designer with my passion for living naturally, pursuing personal freedom and inspiring and empowering others in my community.

@riverflows – Elder – Victoria, Australia – Blog

I’ve always believed in the power of the natural landscape and it’s bounty to heal us. I was raised with health-conscious parents who taught us that good health started with what you ate, and this extended to good home grown produce. We were lucky enough to get a 5 acre block of land in the Surf Coast Hinterland in Victoria, Australia, where we have a big vegetable garden, fruit trees and chickens. I’m a nature girl at heart – a surfer, a gardener and an appreciator of all the wild things! Being on Steemit allows me to connect to like-minded people that care about this beautiful Earth of ours and enjoy being a little independent from mainstream systems, and Homesteaders Co-Op takes it a little bit further by allowing us to connect in other ways too. To me, it’s more than just a marketplace – it’s a place for us to connect, share wisdoms, and grow in all kinds of ways.

@pennsif – Elder – Wales, United Kingdom – Blog

I am a long time prepper and part-time homesteader based in west Wales in the UK. We produce a fair amount of our own fruit and veg on our smallholding on our patch of Welsh mountainside. What we cannot produce ourselves we try to purchase locally and organically. I hope soon we have more UK vendors on Homesteaders Co-op to buy from. My dream one day is to have a walled garden and a large greenhouse heated with our own wood so we can grow bananas – not an indigenous crop of wet and windy west Wales! Aside from the joy of sharing what we have here with my wife and children, my proudest achievement is planting 10,000 native trees around our homestead. Year by year the trees grow and transform what were once closely grazed and ecologically diminished sheep pastures into an ever more rich and diverse ecosystem. May the trees grow forever…

@senorcoconut – Contributor – New York, USA – Blog

I love life, traveling, meeting people from all different walks of life and now with my little family of three, we are condensing all the fun things we’ve seen and learned about on our world travels into a 20 acre property where we want to build a community style Homestead, heavy on the side of Art Fabrication, Natural Building and Teaching Self-Reliance. We’re calling it a Multi-family Homestead with Anarchist Tendencies! Our little one calls it Dream Land. (You can find us on instagram: @Dreamland_xp) We are still looking for others to join us on the journey by the way…So if you or anyone you know is interested in living this way, please contact us (New York State, Mid Hudson Valley area). If you would like a more in depth look at who is Senor Coconut, look at my “Humans of Steemit” post.

@porters – Elder – Saskatchewan, Canada – Blog

I am a pine dweller, feeling fortunate to have a home place in the Boreal forest amongst a community of hippy, back to the lander types. I have a great love of nature, which was instilled in me at a young age by my father. I live attuned to nature, looking to it’s abundance to help sustain me and my family along with my gardening, bartering and sourcing out local goods. We built our homestead, not off-grid, but fully capable to live sustainably if the grid goes down. I am very appreciative of the Homesteaders Coop and the multitude of opportunities it has opened up and I’m happy to contribute to it in any way I can.

@stortebeker – Contributor – Mexico City, Mexico – Blog

Can you maintain a sustainable lifestyle while living in one of the biggest urban centers of the hemisphere? I say you’d have to be crazy not to try! In this vein I have been exploring all the possibilities an urban setting offers to grow something useful out of all the stuff around me. This includes a full palette from making probiotic drinks such as water-kefir and kombucha, setting up worm-bins for kitchen composting, to growing spirulina indoors. My other, not entirely unrelated passions are natural building, and bicycling, which complete each other beautifully when I ride my bike to construction projects. Since I consider community connections a vital part of a sustainable lifestyle, I also like to share what I know and what I make, either directly at a local producers’ market, or on-line through my blog on Steem, and the Homesteader’s Co-op.

@mountainjewel – Contributor – Missouri, USA – Store / Blog

We (Wren and Ini) are part of Homesteaders Co-op because we are passionate about living out our values as stewards of Gaia. We believe in the healing powers of the Earth’s inhabitants and want to share and learn with others about how to live in alignment with nature. We are establishing a permaculture homestead and nursery in the Ozarks of Missouri. We love to be a part of @homesteaderscoop to share in the camaraderie of like minded people also seeking healing, wellness and cures from nature.

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Donate To Homesteaders Co-op - Help Us Keep Our Marketplace FREE

We have an ongoing crowdfunding project at Fundition. You can donate STEEM, SBD, USD (via PayPal) as well as other popular cryptos such as BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, XMR, BTS, DASH, DOGE, TRON.

Help us keep our marketplace free of commissions and fees. Homesteaders Co-op is 100% free to vendors and customers. Your donations will go a long way to help us maintain our marketplace and keep it free.

Donate to our Project on Fundition

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A Free Marketplace for Steem

We provide a FREE marketplace for you to transact in STEEM, SBD and USD. Our vendors are committed to sustainability, ethics and quality in their lives and work.

Unlike other marketplaces our vendors are not charged listing fees, subscription fees or transaction fees. This service is 100% free.

Support Your Alternative Economy:

1. Purchase handmade products and ethical services with STEEM, SBD or USD at homesteaderscoop.com
2. Join the conversation in our Discord Group
3. Follow our Curation Trail on SteemAuto to automatically upvote our community
4. Delegate SP to @homesteaderscoop
5. Donate to our ongoing Fundition project

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Why Delegate to Homesteaders Co-op?

Your delegations will help us grow our community and reward our members for their ethical choices and actions.

In our modern world it is not always easy to choose to live sustainably. To do so often means forgoing income potential and the status quo. Our Steem Power is used to up-vote community contributors and vendors in thanks for their efforts.

10 SP | 25 SP | 50 SP | 75 SP | 100 SP | 200 SP | 500 SP | 750 SP | 1000 SP

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Who is Homesteaders Co-op? Read our introduction

Want to Become a Vendor? Learn more and apply here

Logo design by @frejafri - illustrator & artist available for commission for steem/sbd

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We Have Free Instant Steem Accounts to Share!

We have free steem invites for friends and family of steemians that are participating in #homesteading, #gardening, #sustainability, @naturalmedicine, @ghscollective, @tribesteemup, @ecotrain, @earthtribe and related communities that share common goals. Signing up to steem with our steem invites are instant and free. If we have enough free SP, invites will come along with a small delegation.

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@adollaraday - Charitable giving project