The Hub project goes online!

The Hub natural building community is now both on the ground and online, looking for connection and resilience in the face of climate instability and the effects of capitalism on all of us.

We started with a straw bale building project that focuses on hiring and training women in construction and natural building, set in an ecovillage called Dancing Rabbit in rural Missouri.

Five years later, we are expanding outward, looking for human connections, collaborations, and cross pollination of ideas and resources to build a future we can look forward to, that includes everyone. The Hub is an umbrella of inclusion for like-minded people and cooperative businesses, to see what we can do with our collective energy and interests.

Our focus is on doing, rather than talking about doing. Anyone else out there have an urgent feeling about the future of our planet? Anyone else yearning for more beauty, art, meaning, purpose, joy, friendship, freedom, and support in their lives? We have been concentrating on teaching natural building skills both in our village and to visitors, and natural building lends itself easily to cooperation, collaboration, fellowship and artistic expression. We are working to create an inclusive, empowering work environment, trying different ways of flattening the hierarchy.

Our intention is to concentrate on resource sharing (the Hub building is a resource sharing building, more on that online), such as setting up a tool lending library for our village, and offering our natural building skills to maintain and repair the many natural buildings here. The Hub will host classes on topics such as foraging and cultivating personal resilience. We also hope to host a gathering of all of you someday, fostering those connections and showing you, in person, the beautiful building we have created.

Which brings me to the Hub’s new online presence on Substack. This is where I share more stories about my experiences doing natural building and where we can geek out over all the details of a natural building project. There are videos and photos, and audio recordings of me telling stories of my experiences over the last five years.

Does that mean we’re done with the project? Heck no! You can keep up with the latest projects we’re working on as we continue to bring our building to life.

I invite you to visit us at TheHubCollective.substack.com. You can subscribe for free or support our collective and its projects by becoming a paid subscriber. Either way, you can read crew member Ciaran’s blogs on building a resilient community and watch videos about ecovillage life and tutorials on natural building. Connect with our friends who have their own Substack sites and the ways they are building a resilient future. Join our community from wherever you are, and add your voice to our collective.

In community,

Liz Hackney
Hub mastermind