A Community Center for Heartbeet

Heartbeet Lifesharing is the newest Camphill community in North America. I became aware of Heartbeet at the Anthroposophical Society’s fall conference in 2009 when Hannah Schwartz shared its story of community outreach and engagement.

Hannah grew up in Camphill, and just out of college she and her husband Jonathan Gilbert bought a farmhouse in Hardwick, in Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom,” a beautiful region of small New England towns. Fifteen years later Heartbeet Lifesharing is a local institution and widely known for inspiring, youth-oriented conferences. After houses and a barn, it is now building a community and cultural center, “the heart of Heartbeet.” “It will be a venue for gatherings, concerts, festivals, plays, conferences, and many special events—a multi-purpose theater, seating 175 people, will be the core of the building.”

Out of $2.2 million there is just under $300,000 to raise. Hannah hopes that will be in place by year’s end so that the building can be finished by March. The fundraising “is beautiful work as it is all relationship building around something truly meaningful.”

The following is drawn from newsletters, pamphlets, and the Heartbeet website (www.heartbeet.org). Several pictures are from a fine video by Corey Hendrickson. — Editor

The mission

The Camphill impulse is multi-dimensional. An early mission statement described Heartbeet Lifesharing in part as “an initiative that recognizes the importance of interweaving the social and agricultural realms for the healing and renewing of our society and the earth. We fully acknowledge and live out of the understanding that every human being is unique and unrepeatable. In light of this insight, our mission is to offer both a vacation and respite program and a permanent residential program for developmentally disabled individuals that focus not on a person’s disability but rather on his or her capacities.”

Today, Heartbeet is a vibrant lifesharing Camphill community that includes adults with developmental disabilities. Working from a philosophy of social therapy, Heartbeet has become recognized as an innovative model of care for individuals with special needs. It is a fully licensed Therapeutic Community Residence.

In Camphill you approach who you meet in a very different way. We’re not care-givers, we’re caring for each other. So really we’re recognizing each human being as having a destiny to fulfill.

— Heartbeet co-founder Jonathan Gilbert

Jonathan Gilbert

Five extended-family homes form a supportive environment that enables individuals to discover and develop their unique abilities and potential. Heartbeet provides work and artistic opportunities, which help adults with special needs participate in the community in a meaningful way. This means:

• healthy and fulfilling adult relationships

• building practical and artistic skills

• meaningful vocational experiences

• integral membership of a caring community

• love of lifelong learning

• openness for new experiences

• social and self-awareness

• mutual trust and respect.

Independence & success flourish. It is a place where differences fade and diversity is celebrated!

Because of Heartbeet, the hopes that we had for Max at his birth—of a happy and productive life surrounded by loving family—have been restored. We see so much promise in Max’s future now. His life at Heartbeet is a dream come true.

— Amy Gleicher, parent

The youth conferences

Rachel Schwartz (now Rachel Knauf) was prime mover in ten years of twice-yearly Heartbeet Youth Conferences. Themes included “The Whole Human Being in Relation to Karma” and “Learning the Signs of Destiny through Thinking and Artistic Experience.” Three conferences explored, four at a time, the experience of the twelve sense identified by Rudolf Steiner: lower senses of touch, life, movement, and balance; middle senses of smell, taste, sight, and warmth; and the upper senses, hearing, word, idea, and perceiving the “I” of the other.

Conference #20 was “Know Yourself and Change the World”: finding the courage to begin (Joan of Arc for inspiration), making connections between inner work and social justice and transformation, karma and reincarnation, the new clairvoyance, and more. The coordinating role passed to Annie Volmer with the next conference, “Encountering Thresholds: The Courage to be Vulnerable.” Annie wrote, “Heartbeet remains committed to the destiny of these very special events. We are working hard to fill Rachel’s shoes!”

In fall 2014 a new direction came: an International Camphill Youth Conference. As Haleh Wilson reported to being human, “Nearly eighty attendees came together to frame important questions about prevailing dynamics between the generations of Camphill. After four days, such questions had been identified, parsed, and refined, and participants had struck new friendships of the kind that serve increasingly to knit Camphill together as an international community.”

This year the Second International Camphill Youth Conference offers “An Anthroposophical Initiative: At the Altar of the Present Moment—An Exploration of Selfless Collaboration.” It welcomes those, young and old, who will to carry the spiritual impulse of Camphill into the future. The organizers write:

Since parting from the last conference, members of the planning committee have been mindful of the deep suffering of humanity on a world scale as well as in our communities, our relationships, and our selves.

We’ve been led to ask what it might mean to become a selfless collaborator in our time—to learn to gently ask the healing questions for our brothers and sisters in pain, and to cultivate vulnerable spaces wherein we give of our listening and our compassion. The last conference brought us down a path much like Parzival’s, where we came, each in our own way, to recognize our individual failures and the failures of our communities and of modern humanity. What happens when that self-knowledge is given over to the healing forces of the Christ who spoke, “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there shall I be”? How do we take up this sacred responsibility for the altar of the present moment which exists between human beings? Have we advanced far enough in our inner striving that we can offer our own suffering at this altar, that it may be transformed through Community into the courage to meet others in the present moment, and to hold—as conscious, selfless deed—their suffering as our own?

Can [the Parzival] story encourage our own intergenerational collaboration? We have a sacred responsibility for one another. This thought will be at the heart of our explorations together.

To strangers I think it will be interesting for them to learn what Heartbeet is about. It’s up to them if they want to come and support, it’s up to them, it’s their own calling if they’re ready. Being supportive means to bring of your utmost self, and I think that’s important.

— Annie Jackson, resident

Annie Jackson

The building impulse

Six years ago Per Eisenman wrote, “Our temporary conference community…has been coming together faithfully for nine years. The Heartbeet Lifesharing community hosts us and grows around us, like a time-lapse movie of a growing flower. Every six months there is a new development, a new home, new barn, new coworkers.” But this unfolding was interrupted in January, 2013: “Heartbeet Lifesharing’s new home, Sophia House, nearing the end of construction, was destroyed as a result of a chimney fire. We are deeply thankful that no one was hurt! Our hearts are heavy, but we are slowly getting off our knees. Although this is a tremendous setback, we are working hard to continue embracing the vision and enthusiasm that has filled the air at Heartbeet over the last year.”

Hannah Schwartz speaking at a community meeting.

Out of the ashes of Sophia House came the impulse to build a community center. Reporting from last fall’s meeting Haleh Wilson wrote, “On September 20, 2014, 101 years since the laying of the Foundation Stone of the First Goetheanum, a Heartbeet ceremony incorporated conference participants in a poignant visual reminder of Camphill’s basis in anthroposophy and the legacy of Rosicrucianism. A vast cross [of ashes] was laid on the site where Heartbeet will soon commence construction on its Community Center. Participants joined Heartbeet community members to form a circle around the site while seven bunches of red roses were laid in the circuit that appears on the Rose Cross, a symbol that urges us toward renewal. ... Certainly in the moment of that September 20th ceremony, the Rose Cross image seemed to speak to the events of today’s Camphill movement, a call for renewal in the face of forces seeking to change us: the cross on the Earth, the wide circle around it, people joining hands, voices lifted in song.”

Joan Allen, who just passed away and designed many if not all the Camphill Halls in the USA, planted a further seed in conversation with Hannah Schwartz. “The idea was to have something that pre-dates the materialistic nature of our times, or came before its full onset, built into this inevitably modern building. I was coming home at high speed from a long trip when through the trees the colors called me to turn around.” On display in an antique store was an 1830s stainglass window from a church in New Haven, Connecticut. “The window itself is mostly a deep blues and reds with golds, Tiffany-style with motifs of a swan and the lamb as well as a special cross between the two big panels.”

There are many powerful things happening in Hardwick but the one I am most excited about is Heartbeet. The sheer humanity that is practiced there every day is an antidote to what is wrong with the world at large. —

Mateo Kehler, Co-Owner of Jasper Hill Farm and a new board member of Heartbeet

Mateo Kehler

Community benefits

The new community hall will be a powerful, integrating space, in service to Heartbeet, the “Northeast Kingdom,” the international Camphill community, and the anthroposophical movement. The benefits, including cultural, educational, economic, and environmental one, have been carefully planned out.

For Heartbeet itself the Community Center answers the need for more space. “Our growing community is squeezed to capacity. With five lifesharing homes, we can no longer comfortably meet under one roof or welcome the local community to the extent that we would like. The ability to gather together is essential to building community life, and keeps everyone connected through shared experiences.”

Heartbeet has a limited number of designated building sites, so the Community Center is multi-faceted, with a multi-purpose theater, seating 175 people, as the core of the building. It also houses therapy rooms, a community library, a bakery and processing kitchen, and administrative offices. Paper-making, weaving and felting workshops can expand into the old administrative spaces. Massage therapy, fitness classes, art exhibits, quiet study space, and computer access are available on site! Baking and food processing for the entire community take place in the Community Center kitchen, providing a training workshop for Friends with special needs.

The most important thing that Heartbeet brings to our area is a broader perspective on diversity. I love watching friendships develop, discomfort melt away, as Heartbeeters integrate into the community, spreading their own brand of love and joy. Every town needs a Heartbeet.

— Pete Johnson, owner of Pete’s Greens

Sign for Hardwick’s annual community dinner.

From its beginning Heartbeet has participated in the annual town dinner, and for the last four years family and friends have gathered at a local church to celebrate a Passover Seder.

“In the new center there will be space to host regular community meals together, and expand our ability to connect and host other Camphill communities and anthroposophical events. There will be an inclusive, noncompetitive environment for a broad range of quality arts events, including plays, concerts, dance performances, contradances, readings, and lectures. It expands opportunities for collaboration with local artistic, cultural, and educational groups.”

The final push

Hannah Schwartz writes, “In January we thought we were finished planning, but we needed to go back to the drawing board to keep the building within budget. Now, with the help of our tireless advising team, we are excited to say that we love the final building plans, and feel that we have just what we need and not an inch more.

“The building will soon start its material manifestation! We hope to break ground in late summer, though the exact date will depend on permitting. Imagine with us the festivals, plays, group meals, life celebrations, music and art that will fill this space! It will bring relationships, joy, inclusion and understanding that will resonate within Heartbeet and far beyond.

Community music-making at Heartbeet.

“We are all living and breathing with anticipation of the community center. This building will be the bridge to allow the gifts and Community music-making at Heartbeet. treasures cultivated within our community to reach the surrounding extended community and will make collaboration possible with the many already interested parties that have approached us. Once construction has started we will begin formalizing plans for upcoming activities, and I hope that within the next year you will come and see some of these dreams and initiatives underway in this amazing new space! To date we still need the last $300,000 to get us across the finish line. A profound and humble thank you to all who have brought us this far!”

Hannah Schwartz was co-founder and Executive Director of Heartbeet Lifesharing; the community is on the internet at www.heartbeet.org and on Facebook.