Guiding Principles
Eight commitments that shape every decision we make.
We have spent considerable time studying communities like the one we want to build, L'Arche, Camphill, Marbridge, Bittersweet Farms, First Place in Arizona, SpeciallyAble in California, and others. We have taken what works, and we have set down in writing the principles we are committed to.
These are not slogans. They are the tests we apply when we make a real decision about a site, a partner, a design choice, a family.
The eight commitments
🧭 1. Start with the person
We begin from a belief the field calls person-centered: every person has value, voice, purpose, and potential, including those who do not speak and who need support in nearly everything. So we build the supports around the individual, what brings them to life and what matters most to them, rather than around a facility's routine. Each adult helps direct their own plan and their own day, alongside the people who know them best, and is supported to take up a real, valued role in community life. This is also how New York asks that services be delivered, person-centered and self-directed, so building the community this way keeps us aligned with the State even as we try something new.
🏘️ 2. Live together, parents and adult children
The single distinguishing feature of 1000 Villagers is that families stay together. Most residential models for adults with profound autism separate the adult child from family at the very moment a parent dies or can no longer cope. We are designing for the opposite. Parents and their adult children will live side by side, in adjacent homes within one community, for as long as parents are able. Professional support supplements parents, and gradually assumes the role as parents age.
🌅 3. Design for "what after us?"
Every parent of a child with profound autism lives with the same fear: what happens to my child when I am gone? The community is designed so that this question is already answered, structurally, through continuity of care, the presence of other families watching out for one another, a foundation and endowment built to outlast the founders, and lifespan security that ensures no resident is displaced when a parent or an adult child dies.
🏡 4. Choose domestic scale over institutional scale
A hamlet, not a facility. We are building small homes around a small commons, on a property where everyone can walk to everyone else. No long corridors, no dorm energy, no fluorescent lights. And the homes stay non-institutional in law as well as in feel, family-controlled rather than state-certified, with each family self-directing their own adult child's support, so the people who know each resident best keep the say over daily life. Domestic scale is not a nicety, it is a requirement for dignity, sensory regulation, and a sense of home.
🤲 5. Watch out for one another
Founding families remain present and watchful. This is not a feature for marketing; it is a structural safeguard against the neglect and abuse that isolated residents can suffer. When several families are bound together by the same stake in the community's wellbeing, the eyes that matter most stay open.
🌿 6. Design around the senses
Profound autism varies, and the spaces have to accommodate variation. Calm materials. Soft acoustics. Defensible quiet rooms. But also natural sunlight, active common space, and the texture of real life. The aim is sensory-considered, not sensory-deprived.
🌳 7. Stay open to the wider community
Not a compound. The driveway is visible from the road. The village integrates with the surrounding hamlet, not apart from it. Family members come and go; neighbors are welcomed; the model invites encounter rather than seclusion. Isolation is part of the problem we are solving, we will not reproduce it in our own design.
♻️ 8. Build to be replicated
Our name reflects the longer aim. The model is being documented as it develops so that other families can adopt it. We are not building one community; we are building a working template other parents can take to their own places. The goal is not exclusivity. The goal is to make the answer to "what after us?" available to more families than just our own.
Inspired by, but distinct from
We owe a great deal to the communities that came before us. We are different from each, in ways that matter to the families we are designing for.
- L'Arche and Camphill are life-sharing communities where people with and without disabilities live together as equal partners. They generally serve adults whose families are no longer in the picture. 1000 Villagers is built for families to stay together. Same humane impulse, different stage of life.
- Marbridge (Texas) and Misericordia (Chicago) offer cradle-to-grave care, often at significant scale. We admire their continuity. We are aiming for smaller, more intimate, family-anchored scale.
- Bittersweet Farms (Ohio) and Down Home Ranch (Texas) anchor community around meaningful work on a farm. We will keep work and meaning at the center; the farm itself may or may not be the form.
- Sweetwater Spectrum (California) and First Place (Arizona) have set the bar for purpose-built autism housing. We are following their lead and adapting the model to include parents and to serve adults with more profound needs.
- SpeciallyAble (California) is the closest peer to our model, a multi-generational co-housing community of twenty families, with paired homes for parents and adult children. We are in conversation with them and others working on similar designs.
It takes a village to raise a child, and even more so to keep that child safe, known, and held into adulthood.
What this means in practice. A decision is consistent with our principles if it lets parents stay close to their adult children, keeps the scale domestic, protects residents from isolation, and brings us closer to a model others can reuse. A decision that compromises any of those will be a hard conversation among the founding families.