Jeff Golden has a problem. He wants things to make sense.

In a world as confusing, complicated and troubling as ours can be, it’s a pretty irrational desire. The guy can’t help it, though, and because he’s a do-er as well as a dreamer, he has created a project that takes an innovative and sensible approach to helping things make sense. Called Common Fire, the project offers affordable green cooperative housing to sustainability activists, enabling them to save money, learn from each other, and tread lightly on the land.

The first Common Fire cooperative housing residence was completed in 2006. It’s designed for eleven residents and located on 36 rural acres in New York State’s Hudson Valley, about 100 miles north of New York City. The 3,600 square foot building has received platinum LEED® certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, and is the highest-scoring green building in the eastern U.S. (and the third-highest in the nation). “If we’re going to advocate for sustainability, we need to start with ourselves. By sharing space in a building that’s as eco-efficient as this one, it enables residents to walk their talk,” says Golden.

An extended emotional and intellectual journey brought Golden to this endeavor. “We need fundamental change,” he says, “and that won’t happen if people keep participating in——and thereby supporting——our current unsustainable structures and institutions. When social activists do this, it creates internal inconsistencies and it also makes us less effective because what the one hand does, the other hand takes away.”

How do social activists optimize their commitment? Golden has grappled with this issue for years and is especially clear on how you don’t do it. Call it Golden’s Rule: you don’t engage in behaviors that prop up our current unsustainable system. You step out of the loop as much as possible. You don’t collaborate.

Obviously, you can’t do this completely unless you want to live naked in a cave——and you can’t drive positive change when you’re disconnected from society. You’ve got to live in the world to do good in the world. Golden understands this, and so the creative challenge he’s been wrestling with has taken the following form: What system will enable sustainability activists to maximize the good they do while minimizing the negatives?

Common Fire is the practical answer that Golden and his wife Kavitha Rao have developed to these questions. Common Fire is a non-profit foundation with the mission of “build(ing) a diverse and powerful movement of people with a shared commitment to creating a more just and sustainable world, starting with themselves. We do this by bringing people together in spaces that inspire and nurture ways of being in the world that are holistically and deeply rooted in a culture and systems that are just and sustainable.”

Sharing expenses makes sense in other ways as well. Housing expenses at Common Fire average about $540 per month for a single room and $775 for a double, including access to common areas. Food is purchased in bulk, making for considerable additional savings. Because the building’s solar panels supply about 95% of the building’s electricity needs, utility costs are a fraction of the usual amount. All told, Common Fire residents save about 40% over what they’d have to pay if they were living on their own. One important benefit: more time to focus on their cause.

Residents also enjoy the benefits of living in a community of peers. This gives residents the opportunity to inspire and learn from each other——and sometimes to aggravate each other, too. Says Golden, “One of our main learnings has been around how to embrace diversity in a community of people who all believe in the need for positive change in the world. We’ve learned that while we all have the right to expect that others will take the time to learn about what our passions are, and vice-versa, we have to let go of the notion that we’ll all have the same priorities or expectations. For instance, I try to minimize how much electricity we use for lighting. Others limit their traveling far more than I do.  We talk about our choices, learn from each other and maybe we make some changes, but in the end we respect where we’re each at.”

Common Fire is thus a triple play of sorts: an eco-community, an economical community, and a learning community. It is also a model that can be replicated at different levels of scale. “We started small because we wanted to have something bite-sized to chew on,” Golden says. “For us, this is a living lab——a chance to build expertise.” He has received inquiries about developing similar cooperative housing projects from people in locations ranging from elsewhere in New York State to the West Coast. He is especially keen to develop an urban model and to have other co-ops “up and down the Hudson River. It would make a powerful statement and they could support each other,” he says.

Golden is happy to make his team’s expertise available to anyone who is seriously interested in pursuing the overarching model: it does not have to be a Common Fire project. Golden also believes the scale of these undertakings can be substantially larger than the 11-person launch project. “You want people to know each other, but otherwise I don’t think there’s a maximum size for an intentional community that’s committed to social activism,” he says.

Not everyone gets the Common Fire vision. Golden and Rao recently tried to establish a second cooperative housing residence in Kingston, a small Hudson Valley city, and were rebuffed by a combination of outdated zoning and resistance from a handful of prospective neighbors who saw the project through an antiquated lens as either a boarding house (read: bums) or a commune (drugs). There's an object lesson in this: visions that make perfect sense to some are invisible to others. Golden and Rao still hope to develop a project in Kingston, but there are no active plans underway at this time.

In the Dark Ages, monasteries sprung up around Europe as centers of knowledge. They were beacons of light during a time of darkness. Golden and Rao envision something broadly similar——cooperative residential communities throughout the U.S. and beyond where people driven by a common fire come together to do good work in the world.

In a time of vast confusion, it’s a vision that makes sense.