The Human Collective

The Matrix-Q House Projects, in the city, town, farm, off-the-grid, caravans, dune, or sea, provide a holistic self-sufficient system for co-working and co-living space

A system alone does not create a human living space. the human element is the necessary and main reason why these projects have been developed.

THE STORY

For 27 years our founder has visited, witnessed, and researched community living spaces and collaboration, with stories that repeated from place to place in the world.

In the 90s and 2000s community living spaces, off-the-grid, for example, invited new members to join with the romantic idea to live in nature, and reach a certain level of self-sufficiency. 

10 years later, the community members have invested not only in land and construction but as well into their lives and families. In most cases, in these specific communities, the capacity for wealth generation of their members changed. They were entrepreneurs or had a certain capacity for purchase before living in these communities.

10 years later their resources were extremely limited. A simple reason is that living off-the-grid requires focus, learning, attention, time, and lots of work, that before were not necessary (living in the grid, dependency system) as the system living in the grid, will provide them plenty of services, quality of life, health, and safety. To compensate, they had to create such services and quality of life conditions themselves.

While from an individual or family cluster point of view this new condition makes sense, and we would say is part of their journeys, the collective experiences were not fitting to everyone's preferences. Another community member may not agree with a self-organization and decision-making system in place, values, beliefs, or wealth generation systems, or even may have conflicts with money or the "outer" system in general; making it even more difficult to achieve something together.

Some communities took another extreme side of the possibilities, which was to create ashrams, following strict rules, philosophy, or religion; with a hierarchy system or decision-making protocol, and principles to observe. 

These community spaces were not inclusive and mostly required accepting a belief system in advance. Making after 10 years for its members a very complex and difficult foundation to match their interests or relationship to an outer world that does not match their belief systems. Creating as well a trapt for their futures.

In many of these communities, wealth was administrated by a central unit, and their economic system was not growth-oriented (Wealth was not shared).

RESEARCH

Community living has cycles, normally a curve in which the members of the community are engaged and by reaching a peak, the community normally dissolves. For several reasons, people change, belief systems too, wealth change, the world change, maybe some has families, or get new love partners, set new goals or priorities change. 

In a co-living space, you need to consider that change is an important element of the journey.

As well that limiting structures, may bring issues in the community or be exported into the life and future of individuals and their families. Equally impactful to have no structure at all, may create another sort of dilemmas.

Luis (our founder) has studied these scenarios carefully. Specialized in "the human variable behind the sustainable development equation".  (Co-Living, Co-working & Self-Sufficiency Publications at the Matrix-Q e-Library)

Good examples are the Kibbutz in Israel, which changed, some stayed in their religious setting, others converted into business cooperatives, and in other cases to just companies. Young people will leave the Kibbutz interested in the cities, and individualist western lifestyle, in opposition to the collective approach for decision making of the traditional Kibbutz, in which it is done what for the community means the best.

Another good example is the KAPs, Kots-a-projet of the UCL Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. 

In which students from diverse faculties live together for 2+ years, and care together for a project or task that has value for their city. A city that was built thanks to the KAPs, from bakery to waste management, to transport and communications, from the ground, more than 30 years ago. One of the important elements of these projects is that students face responsibility, dilemmas, and challenges together, learn to communicate, develop projects and even earn a living or create impact, while still studying at the university. In conversations with the KAP Historians of the UCL, together with Luis, found a gap in the system, as the KAPs did not carry a bitacora or logbook where all lessons learned could be registered. In 30 years generations of kapists did not learn from each other and learned anew in every generation. The knowledge transfer and experience transfer had a short cycle and no memory. This is the point where tradition, culture, and history play an important role, giving sense to customers, and rules and developing an identity. 

An Inclusive, Creative & Holistic Human Collective

Thanks to Luis research, innovation, and development of products, tools, skills, and methods, most of the dilemmas experienced by the communities he visited and or studied have been solved.

MATCHING

1. The Matrix-Q House utilizes a system of recruiting, in which candidates first participate in activities together, to verify they match the system and holistic lifestyle.
2. As a second step, eligible candidates will join Matrix-Q Projects, and team up to achieve outcomes, exploring their ability to collaborate, work and make decisions together
3. As a third step, their capacity to stand and thrive in the intensity of living together will be tested, with camps, weekends or trips.
4. Finally, the matching partners (house-mates) for a Matrix-Q House will be matched together.

We use to think this process takes time, it may take in some cases weeks, months, or years to find the right match for your Matrix-Q House, and we may find it risky. As what we want is the experience to live and work together. But that romantic idea is challenged by the reality of the human factor and the most common outcome of communities that started just by following a philosophy, a concept, or an idea. that 10 years after people are frustrated, unhappy, and without resources to change their living conditions, in other words, trapped in a situation they do not prefer.

But if instead of jumping into a community living space straight away you would wait to find the right matching partners, and explore a system strong enough to endure your changes, then you have achieved not only a better capacity to share, live and work together, but also better conditions for a long term sustainable, self-sufficient, and impactful co-living and co-working space.

So we decide to wait. Take our time. Find the right people. Get to know each other well. Do things together. Experience challenges. Learn, evolve. Have reasons to trust a future together and each other capacity. Then move in.

This approach has also other advantages:

• Our members learn how to lead a community themselves
• We develop along the process to get to know each other new skills, knowledge
• With our projects, we may create already new income streams that will become part of the Matrix-Q House Economy
• We build a culture together.

How do we do it? We utilize a universal language of peace, developed by the Matrix-Q Research Institute (learn more here)