Layer 0 · Identity

Purpose Charter

  • Layer: 0 — Identity & Scope
  • Status: Stub — not yet adopted
  • RCOS reference: §2.1, §2.4, §2.5

Primary Purpose

Define exactly one primary purpose. Must describe the enduring reason for the community’s existence. Must be stable across time.

To make regenerative community living — rooted in care for people, land, and life — structurally accessible, resilient, and replicable, reducing humanity’s dependency on extractive systems one community at a time.

Secondary Purposes

Optional. Must not conflict with or override the primary purpose.

  1. To develop and maintain reusable foundations — tools, standards, and resources — that lower the barriers to starting, sustaining, and replicating regenerative communities.
  2. To demonstrate through lived practice that regenerative community living is viable, replicable, and worth choosing.
  3. To grow a distributed network of communities that support, learn from, and strengthen each other.

Non-Goals and Exclusions

What this community explicitly is not.

  1. EcoHubs is not a political party or ideological movement.
  2. EcoHubs is not a for-profit real estate or investment vehicle.
  3. EcoHubs is not a single prescribed way of living — it provides structure, not answers.
  4. EcoHubs is not a short-term project collective or event-based community.

Conditions for Purpose Change

Purpose changes require a Constitutional decision (Layer 2) and must follow the change process defined in Layer 6.

The primary purpose may only be changed through a Constitutional decision as defined in the Decision Matrix (Layer 2), requiring a supermajority of Full Members (≥⅔ of votes cast), followed by a ratification period of no less than 30 days. Secondary purposes may be changed through a Strategic decision. Any change must be recorded in the Version History (Layer 6).

Identity Constraints

§2.4 — Any identity-level constraints that materially affect participation, behavior, or governance. Must be testable and enforceable through defined processes. Must NOT be enforced implicitly or informally. Examples: ethical or behavioral boundaries, participation prerequisites, non-negotiable cultural or ecological constraints.

  1. Members must not act in ways that concentrate power, extract value, or cause harm to people, land, or the community’s governance integrity.
  2. EcoHubs may not be used as a vehicle for speculative financial gain — internal economic mechanisms exist to recognize contribution, not generate profit.
  3. No member, founder, or role may claim authority that is not explicitly granted through the governance system.
  4. EcoHubs and its communities must not cause sustained net harm to local ecosystems, land, or biodiversity — practices that degrade the conditions for life are incompatible with the primary purpose.
  5. Ecological impact must be considered in all significant resource, land, and infrastructure decisions.
  6. The structural layer of EcoHubs — its governance, membership, and operating system — must remain non-ideological and non-normative. It provides scaffolding, not a prescribed way of living.
  7. No specific belief system, spirituality, culture, or political ideology may be required as a condition of membership or participation.
  8. Diversity of approaches to regenerative living is a feature, not a problem — the structure exists to enable this diversity, not constrain it.

Ratification Record

  • Adopted:
  • Decision type: Constitutional
  • Version:
  • Decision record:

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