As you can gather, I spent considerable time away from home from 1960 to 1965. Most of my time was spent participating in CNVA activities, but I also continued to build in order to supplement our income. This way of life would not have been possible without the dedication and hard work of my wife—and many others who came to join us in Voluntown for a short or long time. To be part of CNVA and participate in demonstrations, picket lines, walks, and other actions was a moving and exciting experience for me. Even the inherent danger in the activities was part of the excitement. It was also very discouraging when nobody paid attention, which was often the case. Sometimes I think that all the activity was perhaps just a preparation for something I can express only by the word "community." Music was also part of the experience, and folk singers like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger were important members of the peace community.

In 1966 I built a house in Massachusetts for Milton Mayer, a co-worker of Robert Hutchins when Hutchins was President of the University of Chicago. The final price tag was over $50,000, a hefty sum in those days. When I returned to Voluntown, I decided it was time to build more comfortable and private living quarters for our family. I wanted to see how inexpensively I could do it, partly out of necessity, because we had very little money, and partly as a challenge. With my labor exclusively, except for a few volunteers here and there, I designed and built a 900-square-foot house on the Voluntown property. With two bedrooms, living room, kitchen, and bath, it cost only $3000. After building this house I realized that one of the questions we had never resolved concerning the Voluntown property was the ownership structure. When the purchase money of $17,000 had been given to us, we had set the farm up as a simple nonprofit trust. At the time it seemed the best legal solution, but I realized later that although the trust was the right answer for the CNVA organization, it didn't address the need for ownership of that which was created by the work and labor of individuals. Then I remembered having read Ralph Borsodi's description of his homestead projects like Bryn Gweled near Morris Milgram's project in Pennsylvania. According to this approach the land is held by the community as a whole, and individuals or families own their own house and anything they create on the land. They lease the land for ninety-nine years with automatic renewability and inheritability. In this way a family has equity and security but cannot profit from an increase in land value or speculation on the land. There was, however, one thing missing in this model: broad participation by the town or community. In the Pennsylvania projects, only lessees of the land could be included in the management structure, whereas having representatives from the larger community in addition to the actual lessees provides greater participation. Later, when we created New Communities, we set it up with elected representatives from the community.

In 1967 Porter Sargent, president of Porter Sargent Publications, invited me to meet with him and Ralph Borsodi in Porter's office to discuss our common concerns. Porter was a fellow conscientious objector who served at a Civilian Public Service camp. I had heard of him through other COs and also because of the large publishing business his family ran. They were well known for their reference books on private schools to assist parents in making decisions on where to send their children.

Borsodi had just returned from four years of teaching at the University of Amedabad in India. He and Porter were discussing the potential U. S. publication of Borsodi's book The Seventeen Problems of Man and Society, which had been published in India. Porter wanted to edit and publish it for U. S. readers, but he considered it too complicated in its present form and thought it would benefit greatly from some changes. Borsodi was a very stubborn man and did not want his work edited. The book was never published in the United States.

At the time of our meeting Borsodi was, to Porter's dismay, more interested in discussing a project he had worked out with J. P. Narayan before leaving India. To understand Borsodi's excitement, you need to know that J. P., as everyone in India called him. was probably the best-known man in India at that time, having organized the political coalition that had just ousted Mrs. Gandhi as Prime Minister.

J. P. and Vinoba Bhave were the acknowledged leaders of the Gandhian movement, which included the Gramdan or "village gift" movement initiated by Vinoba after Gandhi's death, Land was donated by individuals, held by the village as a whole, and then leased to people to use for farming, housing, and other uses. As it happened, I had met J. P. in London in 1959 when we were both involved in discussions about how to create a nonviolent Peace Brigade, one of Gandhi's ideas that he never had time to develop. Because J. P. wanted to join Vinoba in walking through the villages, he had resigned in 1953 from the first cabinet under Nehru after India gained independence in 1948. Borsodi, recognizing the similarity between his homestead projects and the Gramdan concept, proposed a plan to J. P. for creating a "Rural Renaissance," not only in India but also in other parts of the Third World.

In simplest terms the plan called for a novel way to make low-cost credit available to small farmers—particularly farmers in Gramdan villages. In this respect the concept was not different from many micro-loan programs (of which the Grameen bank is probably the best known); its uniqueness lay in the fact that it was designed to attract small investors instead of using public funds. This was to be accomplished by offering a kind of bond, or "debenture" as Borsodi called it, which would provide a guarantee against inflationary loss by being denominated in a basket of commodities. Having worked on Wall Street, Borsodi of course realized that simply offering such an attractive investment would not be sufficient in itself. It would have to be promoted in some way, and Borsodi thought J. P. could play a role here.

J. P. was a leader not only in India but around the world. He had spent a number of years in the United States, graduating from the University of Wisconsin. His English was nearly perfect. The target audience for investors would be the thousands of expatriate Indians in the United States and Europe, who would be drawn to hear J. P. speak and would make an investment. The U. S. dollars acquired this way would be used to purchase improved seed, fertilizer, and small-scale farm equipment; these, not money, would be given to farmers as loans—or credit. Many of the techniques used by Mohammed Yunus for the Grameen Bank were also part of Borsodi's plan.

After the initial discussion at Porter Sargent's office, I joined full steam. It seemed clear to me that this was what the world needed—or at least what I was looking for. Borsodi and I went to work. He enlisted a couple of local New Hampshire friends, Dick Newey and Gordon Lameyer, to help, and we began to put the pieces together. I continued to live in Voluntown, utilizing the office facilities there as much as possible. Borsodi drew upon his work with Irving Fisher at Yale University during the Depression to create a weighted basket of commodities to be used as the instrument for establishing the "standard of value" for the debentures, which he had printed in different denominations. We worked on lining up places for J. P. and Borsodi to speak in order to gain supporters for the project. But it was not to be. Borsodi was already in his eighties, and his doctor warned him not to overdo. J. P. was also in bad health and on dialysis; he had to drop out; Borsodi took a "leave of absence," and without their involvement we had to put the whole project on the shelf. Several friends in Voluntown and I turned our attention to creating a Community Land Trust project in the South.