Layer 0 · Identity
Purpose Charter
- Layer: 0 — Identity & Scope
- Status: Stub — not yet adopted
- RCOS reference: §2.1, §2.4, §2.5
Primary Purpose
RCOS definition2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.5
- 2.1.1 A community MUST define exactly one primary purpose.
- 2.1.2 The primary purpose MUST describe the enduring reason for the community’s existence and MUST NOT be a short-term goal, project, or strategy.
- 2.1.5 No action, decision, or allocation of resources MAY materially contradict the stated primary purpose.
Why a single enduring purpose?
Every decision, role, and allocation of resources downstream has to stay consistent with one thing — the community’s primary purpose. If it drifts, shifts with trends, or gets rewritten to justify the latest project, there is nothing left to anchor governance to. A single, stable primary purpose is the constitutional north star: strategies change, the purpose does not.
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
RCOS definition2.1.4
- 2.1.4 Secondary purposes MAY be defined, but MUST NOT conflict with or override the primary purpose.
Why allow secondary purposes?
A community rarely does only one thing. Secondary purposes make space for the other concrete outcomes the community pursues — but they are subordinate. If a secondary purpose ever conflicts with the primary, the primary wins. Declaring them explicitly prevents scope creep from masquerading as core work.
- To develop and maintain reusable foundations — tools, standards, and resources — that lower the barriers to starting, sustaining, and replicating regenerative communities.
- To demonstrate through lived practice that regenerative community living is viable, replicable, and worth choosing.
- To grow a distributed network of communities that support, learn from, and strengthen each other.
Non-Goals and Exclusions
Why state what the community is not?
Communities drift by accretion — one uncontested assumption at a time. Naming what the community is explicitly *not* makes boundary violations visible early, and gives anyone a clear basis to object before an activity becomes normalized. Silence here gets read as consent.
- EcoHubs is not a political party or ideological movement.
- EcoHubs is not a for-profit real estate or investment vehicle.
- EcoHubs is not a single prescribed way of living — it provides structure, not answers.
- EcoHubs is not a short-term project collective or event-based community.
Conditions for Purpose Change
RCOS definition2.1.3
- 2.1.3 The primary purpose MUST be stable across time and MUST only be changed through a constitutional decision as defined in Layer 2 and executed via the change process defined in Layer 6.
Why make changing the purpose hard?
Purpose is the one thing everything else depends on. If it were easy to change, nothing above it in the stack — membership, governance, invariants — could be trusted to mean the same thing from one year to the next. Constitutional-level thresholds and a ratification delay force a deliberate, visible act, not a quiet drift.
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).
Ratification Record
- Adopted:
- Decision type: Constitutional
- Version:
- Decision record: