REAL LIVES Unite Community ‘WE’RE ALL IN T


Unite Community helps secure a unique way of life “tremendous”


Thanks to the enduring impressions of the flower power era, a commune is more likely to be associated with bedraggled and lackadaisical hippies living in a broken- down Californian farmhouse than the down-to-earth residents of a picturesque English village.


But Botton, set amongst the


meandering drystone walls of the Esk Valley and surrounded by the wilds of the North Yorkshire Moors, has been disrupting common conceptions of communes for decades.


The residents, a mix of people with learning disabilities and long-term volunteers who care for them, live and work together, eschewing individual wages and pooling their resources to ensure everybody’s needs are met.


Over the last few years their distinctive way of life has been under threat, after the Camphill Village Trust (CVT) which manages Botton, along with eight other UK Camphill sites, decided to axe the model.


With Unite’s help, Botton’s residents and their relatives launched a successful campaign to prevent a number of the village’s volunteers, known as co-workers, being classed as employees; which would have forced them to live apart from those they care for and turned family-orientated households into group homes.


In January, around 60 adults, many with a learning disability, split from CVT to form a new shared lives community, the Esk Valley Camphill Community, under the management of a different social care provider. The group rent 13 houses in Botton from CVT and run a local health food shop, a community garden and a school that caters for people with learning disabilities.


“It’s nice to live here. The winters are cold


but beautiful and the summers are lovely. It’s safe and there are lots of friendly wonderful people,” explained 37-year-old James Skinner, who has lived in Botton for 12 years.


“I joined Unite Community and the campaign because I wanted to stand up not just for the rights of the co-workers but for villagers like myself as well. It’s important to live as part of a community and I didn’t want that to change.”


The group bought a health foods shop in nearby Danby village around two years ago, after CVT began to dismantle the model of shared working between co- workers and villagers at Botton’s farms, wood workshop and bakery. Although villagers still have access to the original facilities, the health food shop, along with a handmade crafts store and a kitchen garden, preserve the community’s preferred model of communal and purposeful work and reward.


On the day uniteWORKS visited the Esk Valley Camphill Community, co-worker and Unite Community member Mark Barberwas busy serving customers at the Danby shop.


‘Looking after each other’ Mark, who also works as a teacher in Botton and has volunteered in Camphill communities for 20 years, said, “It’s a very different way of living I suppose. Because we pool our wages there’s a huge reassurance. While you’ll never be rich, you’re not worried about living from one week to the next. Money is shared according to the needs of the person. It’s like being a member of a family. Everyone looks after each other.”


On the drive back to Botton, along a road skirting the myriad greens and browns of


the moorland, co-worker and


Unite Community member Kathryn Von Stein, 51, said the campaign had elicited


26 uniteWORKS Spring 2018 support from the


surrounding area. Unite was instrumental in raising publicity and public backing, she explained, as well as providing industrial representation for co-workers during disputes with CVT.


Going forward, Kathryn said, the group hope to forge closer ties to the local community and have plans to buy a property and farm land of their own.


Kathryn left a career in IT sales to volunteer as a co-worker in 2004. Stuck in the “rat race”, she decided to opt for a simpler, more meaningful, way of life. On a broader level, Kathryn said the fight to keep the communal model – begun when the first Camphill site was established in 1940 for refugees escaping the Nazis – speaks to a wider debate of how society operates.


“At the end of the day, we’re all in this (life) together. Whatever form care takes, it is based on the normal parameters of human respect. The model didn’t need to be changed. It was a question of leaving a situation where people are treated as extended family and introducing a transactional relationship that would restrict all of us from maintaining or forming real friendships,” said Kathryn.


“It’s a microcosm of the bigger question of how people should interact with each other, of what society is and how it functions.”


Naturally, meals are a big part of life in Botton. In an age when many families simply don’t have the time to sit and eat together, the collective routine of cooking, laying the table, eating and cleaning up, sets the community’s social rhythm.


“Mealtimes here are very special,” said 58- year-old co-worker Erwin Wennekes. Erwin came to Botton from the Netherlands more than three decades ago


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