Cobb Hill Cohousing is an intentional community in Hartland, Vermont, co-founded by Donella Meadows in 1997, situated adjacent to the sustainability-institute. It represents Meadows's conviction that sustainable living required not just analysis and advocacy but community-scale demonstration — that thinking-in-systems-2008 insights about resilience and feedback-loops had to be tested and embodied in actual social and physical infrastructure.
The community was designed as a working experiment in sustainable community life: shared land, shared facilities, private homes, and a commitment to reduced ecological footprint through collective organization. The cohousing model was chosen deliberately — it occupied a middle position between private suburban living and fully collective intentional community, a structural choice consistent with Meadows's interest in leverage-points-paper-1999 at the level of goals and paradigms rather than rules and regulations.
The co-location with the sustainability-institute was not incidental. Meadows saw the institute's research and consulting work and the community's daily practice as complementary: the institute could study and advise on sustainability questions in the abstract, while Cobb Hill provided a site where those questions were lived. The community embodied what her writing called the integration of analysis and action — the refusal to treat intellectual understanding of overshoot-and-collapse and exponential-growth as a substitute for changed behavior.
Meadows's involvement in co-founding Cobb Hill in the years before her death (meadows-death-2001) reflects the broadening of her vision from modeling and writing to institution-building and demonstration. The sustainability-institute, the balaton-group, and Cobb Hill together constitute an integrated program: international intellectual network, applied research institute, and lived community demonstration.
After Meadows's death, Cobb Hill continued as an active cohousing community. It remains a tangible artifact of her belief that sustainable systems are built at the human scale of community, not only at the scale of global models or policy frameworks — a conviction she expressed in thinking-in-systems-2008 and in her years of column-writing as "The Global Citizen."