REGEN COMMUNITY TOOLS
EDITION OF …
Six free tools for forming community
Six of them. No accounts, no cost, nothing sold about you.
Most groups who set out to build something together never get there, and when they don't, it is almost never the land that stopped them. It is trust, and money, and nobody saying the hard thing early enough. These tools go in that order: find the people, see what already exists, read the ground, check who holds it, and start where you already stand.
The journey: find your people · see the field (what already exists, on a map) · know the ground (read the land honestly) · know the holding (who owns it, who decides) · begin where you are
If you want to hear when these change§ STAY
What changed in the dataEvery dataset is wrong somewhere. The record of what we found and fixed is public, so you can judge how carefully it is kept.
HiringThe tools here are free and stay free. Separately, Gustaf takes on commissioned research and builds.
An occasional noteNew tools, new data, and what we got wrong. No more than monthly, and never anything sold about you.
Where the people are§ THE ROOM
None of these tools can tell you who to call at eleven at nightwhen the meeting went badly. That part is people. Heart of Ecovillages is where a lot of them are: the magazine, and a Signal group anyone can walk into, whether you're already living in community or just circling it. Gustaf makes both. Walk in →
How these tools are made§ METHOD
People before landGroups usually break before they ever hold land, and they break on trust and money together. The only counted data puts internal dispute and economic failure nearly level: 48 and 43 of 83 nineteenth-century communes (Sosis & Bressler, 2003). Nobody has measured a survival rate for modern ones. The closest thing is a compilation on the Cohousing-L site: across 26 directory snapshots from 1994 to 2017, 317 of 461 resolved cohousing listings stopped before completion. That is 69%, or 55% if you count the groups still forming, and a stopped listing can be as little as a name change. These six tools follow that order anyway: find the people, see what already exists, read the ground, learn how what you build stays held, and begin where you are. Groups break on trust and money together, not on the land. Internal dispute (48 of 83) and economic failure (43 of 83) run nearly level in the only counted data we have (Sosis & Bressler, 2003). The tools are sequenced accordingly.
Source and vintage on every valueNo hidden composite scores. If a number appears, you can see where it came from and how old it is. The field shows why that matters: FIC's undated About page claims 500,000+ searchers a year while its own dated 2024 annual report counts 440,000 visitors to the whole site, and GEN calls 10,000 communities a 2019 aspiration on one page and a present-tense count on two others (pages retrieved July 2026). Not dishonesty, just numbers travelling without their dates.
Non-extractive by designFree to use. No accounts, no advertising trackers, no selling of anything about you. This page makes no third-party requests as it loads, so nothing about your visit leaves your machine unless you choose to send feedback; where the feedback form and the other tools do need one, the FAQ below accounts for it. Residential coordinates are rounded to two decimals, within about 800 metres.
We say what nobody knowsNobody has ever measured a survival rate for modern communities, no census of the field exists, and no matching tool has proven its scores against reality. More empty shelves, checked 25 July 2026: no study counts what share of seekers ever join a community, no public count of searches for the field's main terms exists, no study measures which sources AI engines cite on these questions, FIC's research page cites nothing newer than 2017, and the cohousing research bibliography last updated in April 2021. These tools compute nothing they can't back. Where a shelf is empty we name it and date the check — that's a feature, not a gap in the paint.
Corrections welcomeEvery dataset gets more accurate when a real person tells us what we got wrong. Write in.
Questions§ FAQ
What is Regen Community Tools?Six free tools for people forming intentional communities: Community Compass points you toward communities worth visiting, the Living Atlas maps 6,213 verified communities across 137 countries, drawn from a 16,390-record index, the Land Selection Framework reads land before you commit to it, Who Holds This? is a structural check-up of how a community holds its land, money and power, Community Commons is a field guide to building community where you already live, and the Resourcing Ledger is an honest accounting of what community life costs you.
How many intentional communities exist?No census counts them, anywhere — estimates run from about 1,400 (FIC directory) to 10,000 (Global Ecovillage Network), and the gap is definitional, not empirical: it depends on what you agree to count. The Living Atlas maps 6,213 verified communities across 137 countries, an independent, deduplicated count drawn from a 16,390-record index, hash-frozen so a re-verification wave in 2027 can measure attrition. We know of no prior baseline that is global, cross-type and independently verified rather than self-listed; dated snapshots of single movements do exist (Hutterite colony census, data year 2024; kibbutz counts since 1948; FIC Directory editions 1990–2016).
Does living in community actually work anywhere?Denmark counts it. At the end of 2025 the country had 613 bofællesskaber, living communities, with more than 18,000 homes between them; 162 of those communities and nearly 8,200 of the homes were built since 2020, close to four new cohousing homes a day. That is 0.62 to 0.64 percent of the national housing stock, up from 0.2 percent in 2000 — the university's own pages disagree on the last digit, so we print both (BUILD Rapport Nr. 15, Aalborg Universitet, May 2026, data to end-2025).
Why build another map when directories already exist?Because directories go stale, and the biggest one says so itself: GEN's own FAQ advises to "check back with the ecovillages about their current state, especially when you can see that they haven't updated their profile since a while," and notes it is "not directly working with the ecovillages on the ground" (ecovillage.org, retrieved July 2026). That is nobody's negligence; it is how the web works. Pew measured it: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were gone by October 2023, most often a single page deleted from a site still running (Pew Research Center, May 2024). Our inference, not Pew's: a directory without a last-verified date accumulates ghosts. The Atlas checked every entry against public web evidence in June 2026, says so on every page, and re-checks in 2027. See also the live community map on the Heart of Ecovillages homepage.
Do the tools collect or sell my data?No accounts, no advertising trackers, and nothing about you is ever sold. This page loads only from here: the typefaces are served from this domain, and so is the one small script that counts page views. That counter records that a page was opened and roughly where in the world from, with no cookies, no cross-site tracking and no profile of you; there is no session recording, and it never sees what you type. Nothing else about your visit leaves your machine unless you choose to send feedback — the feedback form posts what you type, through FormSubmit, to Gustaf's inbox, and only when you press send. Three honest notes about the other tools. The Land Selection Framework loads Vercel's analytics, which counts page views without cookies and without identifying you. In Compass, an email you enter in the opt-in goes through FormSubmit to Gustaf's inbox with your region answer, and anything you type into the chat is sent to Anthropic's API to generate a reply; the questionnaire itself is scored on our server and not kept, and save-and-resume lives only in your browser. Who Holds This? saves your answers in your own browser so you can come back to them, and never sends them anywhere. Every tool now carries an optional feedback button; it sends only what you choose to type into it, never your answers. Compass and the Living Atlas draw their maps from outside tile and code services, which see your IP address when the map loads, and the Atlas still loads its typefaces from Google (checked 26 July 2026). Community coordinates are rounded to two decimal places, so a published pin sits within about 1.1 km of the real spot.
Who makes this?Founded and built by Gustaf Palm, Founder & Toolsmith, who also advises communities and networks through Islands of Coherence and Heart of Ecovillages. Chris Morello is the suite's Town Crier — outreach and community, carrying the tools out into the world and bringing what he hears back into them.