Friskoven

The dream

Our hearts know that "it takes a village" to thrive in harmony and balance as human beings. Friskoven has grown out of a longing to live an everyday life with a caring, vibrant and committed community right outside the door surrounded by wild nature. Our dream is to create such a "village" in Friskoven, where our children can run free and play and learn from and with each other, in sufficient proximity to caring, inspiring and responsible adults. We dream of a committed community where we can find support and sparring both emotionally and in relation to practical projects and chores.

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The three pillars
The eco-community Friskoven rests on three pillars:

- Economic and Social Freedom

- Free and Self-Directed Learning

- Radical Sustainability

The three pillars together are the basis for how society is built, organized, operated and disseminated, just as they form the basis for the common visions that are implemented in Friskoven.

Values ​​and pillars must be seen as an accompaniment to the legal articles of association for Andelsforeningen Friskoven and convey more prosaically how we see Friskoven function both in everyday life and in relation to long-term planning.
All decisions and activities in Andelsforeningen Friskoven must therefore seek to meet and reflect these values, pillars and visions, just as we believe that it is central that individuals who want to be part of Friskoven can identify with and want to live these best possible.

 
Economic and social freedom
In Friskoven, we want to create a village where we help each other with tasks that society otherwise requires money for, just as we want to create a structure where a life can be lived with private care and shared luxury. Friskoven must facilitate the members' economic and social freedom and security by providing as many of the everyday necessities and facilities as possible, just as it is an active choice against private financial gain on home sales or rentals or the work of others.
We will prioritize keeping our common expenses low, just as we as a community will set an upper limit for how much you can sell your home for, no matter how much you as an individual have chosen to invest in your home.
By sharing resources and expenses as far as possible, ensuring relatively low living and living costs and creating a good framework for sustainable businesses, Friskoven must be a means of breaking the need for full-time work for the adults and full-time institutionalization for the children. With this, life in Friskoven can become a showdown with the increasing tendency to increased social dissatisfaction and burnout, which can result from having to sell a large part of one's time to cover basic necessities of life, and by extension live many hours daily separated from one's nearest and dearest. With great financial freedom, better conditions are created for a life with space for presence and care.
We want to own the land in common, but still have our own personal finances and the right to decide over our own housing. Co-operative members must together cover joint expenses through payment of monthly rent, as well as by reducing joint expenses by putting working hours (min. 8 hours per week) into Friskoven, just as we must secure against future unforeseen expenses and create capital for future development of Friskoven.

Free and self-directed learning
Central to life in Friskoven is to create an environment and a community with a focus on free and self-directed learning, where we residents, children as well as adults, can learn from and with each other, inspired by the individuality of the people and thereby the interests, passions and talents that we each bring.
With Friskoven, we want to create an inspiring and diverse learning environment for home care and home schooling, where we each take responsibility for creating a culture and a community that creates rich opportunities for children and adults to be inspired and supported in letting human beings' innate desire to learn flourish and develop.
In Friskoven, in collaboration with the strong home school environment on Bornholm, we will set up an "ALC" (Agile Learning Center) in our community house, where we can form a gathering point for the island's homeschoolers, side by side with community kitchen, multi-purpose hall and workshops. With this, we want to create a strong gathering place with i.a. communal meals and cultural events that extend beyond the land register to the Bornholm community.
We want to share Friskoven with other Bornholmers and visitors and therefore have visions of creating facilities for cultural events, such as presentations, music and learning opportunities for children and adults, with nature and the forest as a background. We will further develop our existing collaboration with civil society, within eg nature conservation, sustainability, rural development, low-impact construction, both on and off the island, with the goal of becoming a center for dissemination, for testing and for cultural encounters and mutual learning.
We hope to be able to create such an inspiring and nurturing community that the need to choose day care, school and full-time work to cover one's own and one's children's social needs does not feel like a necessity, but may even feel like a renunciation of a rich life and a community that unfolds right outside the door.

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Radical sustainability
Radical sustainability is a way of approaching sustainability that fundamentally changes our way of life so that co-op members can live within the planetary boundaries without exporting our environmental and climate impact to other parts of the world and without suffering significant economic and material deprivation.

The way we produce and use food, things, surroundings and nature will be sought to be shifted along lines of local and common supply, mutual aid, repair and recycling and cultures that value intangible goods.
For construction, we adhere to the National Association of Organic Construction's principles of local resources and minimization of waste, low energy consumption in production and use, healthy indoor climate and working environment and simple and sustainable constructions that are accessible to all and can be recycled - and a rejection of materials , which are based on dangerous or environmentally harmful substances.
For agriculture, food and nature relations we are inspired by permaculture and regenerative practice. We follow values ​​of local and self-sufficiency, maximizing biodiversity, food security and increasing soil and food quality and fully self-supporting circuits for water, food and resource consumption - and we do not use fertilizers or pesticides.
For energy and resource supply, we will work with common solutions with low complexity, preferably local supply and coherent systems based on renewable resources and local and regional energy autonomy, local biomass and heat pumps adapted to the residents' needs and own solar cells or Bornholm-owned offshore wind. We will work actively with resource and industry cycles to maximize the amount of recycling and reduce the need for energy input, both in construction, energy supply and management of water, wastewater, etc.
In transport, we seek to minimize our dependence on fossil fuels through carpooling, cycling, electric transport and lower dependence on transport, while at the same time we want to ensure mobility and coherence with the surrounding world, rather than seclusion.

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Values

It is a cornerstone of a healthy and solid community that the individuals who make up the community treat each other and their surroundings properly. Our values ​​in Friskoven reflect what we believe this requires.

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Mutual help and solidarity
Creating and realizing communities that go beyond individualism, consumption and separation between people and between human and nature requires that we together create a culture where the desire for and practice of mutual help, care and solidarity is central. This includes that we as human beings put cooperation instead of competition as a bearing societal value and in everyday life, as well as in our structures, choose to spend time, energy and resources on being there for each other. That we as a community take responsibility for each other's well-being and opportunity for development and work for cultures where we can find support and sparring both emotionally and in relation to practical projects and chores without expecting our own gain or financial gain.
Solidarity is the feeling of cohesion that arises through shared interests and values ​​and through the fact that we as humans create, invent and solve problems together. A cohesion that ranges from giving up part of one's own plan for the day in order to help another realize their idea, to thinking the interests of the community on an equal footing with one's own.

Caring

The ability to feel empathy and care for other people is an innate ability in man, and then it even feels good to do so. At the same time, caring for oneself, for other people and for the nature that surrounds us, is a prerequisite for us to survive, as well as preserve the opportunities to live a rich and good life here on earth. We consider caring for others and for nature as a fundamental value in Friskoven, which we not only care for children and the elderly, as well as people who are going through something difficult for a period, but for everyone in the community. Our cornerstone of radical sustainability reflects how the value of caring for nature is practiced concretely in Friskoven .

Our focus on the value of caring implies that Friskoven does not want to be a room for dominant and discriminatory behavior, either internally between the members, towards users and guests or towards the surrounding community.

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Trust and openness

We should show, or at the very least, practice having and showing confidence in ourselves, as well as in children and adults in the community. We regard trust as a fundamental attitude, which helps to form a safe framework that enables the cornerstone of mutual and lifelong learning, including development, innovation and creativity. We want a culture in Friskoven, where a trusting atmosphere is created, which gives adults, as well as children, the courage to try, make mistakes, as well as learn from mistakes and find the right solution or way. This requires an openness to other ways of doing things as well as an openness to other people's perspectives.

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Accountability and honesty  

For the community to be strong, it requires that we each take responsibility for who we are and thus where our boundaries go, as well as for what we feel, say and act on. When we show honesty towards ourselves, and towards others, we take responsibility for who we are and for our feelings, thoughts and for our actions. Many difficulties and conflicts can be resolved when we first and foremost take responsibility for ourselves and show honesty. For example, when we inadvertently bump into or step over other people's boundaries, which can not be avoided when living together in a close and committed community.

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Obligation

If people do not commit, communities do not arise and the strength of a community depends on the extent to which the individuals of the community commit to each other and to the tasks in which one is involved. The opposite of commitment can be described as "not caring" . In Friskoven, we care about each other and with the tasks that we have agreed to get involved in.

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Equality

We are all different and yet we are all equally valuable as human beings. A child is worth as much as an adult and this equality is observed in our speech and in our actions towards ourselves and towards each other. We all have an equal right to be heard, tried to understand and acknowledged for the feelings and thoughts we express or try to express.

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Visions in practice

Our visions of Friskoven emerge strongly from our pillars and values.
We want to create a small living eco-community in the area around the former production college in Almindingen on Bygaden 13 to 29A. We want to create a multifunctional rural settlement, an area with space for both housing, business and associations to support as many aspects of residents' lives as possible, create a breeding ground for a nourishing and inspiring home life and reduce our transport and resource consumption - our CO2 footprint.
Overall, we want a plan for the area that makes it possible to renovate most of the existing building stock for housing, businesses and joint activities, as well as to build a number of new homes on former construction sites.
Renovation and new construction with principles of low energy consumption in both production and use, maximum recycling, healthy and sustainable materials and co-creation for the residents.
We also want the undeveloped areas on the land register to be further developed towards higher biodiversity, local food security, regenerative, diverse forestry and art and participation areas with nature at the center.
We want to create the framework for both a sustainable housing community, a nature area and an area that addresses Bornholm and the outside world. We stand on the shoulders of many decades of work with eco-communities and sustainable settlement in the countryside and want to create a development area that can both show ecological, modern living in practice and explore future civic solutions to climate, environmental and social challenges.
A village in balance - a learning center for all ages - in community and in pact with its location in the rural zone. A place to visit for inspiration - and also just a place to live, create and work.