Mission

Welcome to the Great Alpaca Collective!

The Great Alpaca Collective started as a dream at the close of the 1900s. Our founders were puzzled by the fact that so many people were facing the future with fear, trepidation, and a growing lack of empathy. With the birth and rapid growth of social media, we have witnessed how the soullessly efficiency of commercial algorithms built upon our worst impulses to create an economy of fear, xenophobia, and divisiveness. With the monetization of this distrust, we seem to have moved into an era of 'global anxiety disorder' aided, of course, by the collective panic and low-level agoraphobia gifted to global culture by COVID-19. This, we are afraid, is what is now being called "The New Normal."

Our guiding philosophy is that, when it comes to living one's life in the moment, the old normal, the real normal is what has always served us best (unless we're talking about the 'old normal' of systemic racisim, fear bating, and governmental gas lighting, then, no). Our mission is to create small preserves where the really old normal can live and flourish around the world. The old normal involved engaging one's local 'world' every day; working, relaxing, and playing outside; and valuing, above all else, what Industry has tricked us into calling our "free time." The time you are not at work is not free! Indeed, most of us pay heavily for it -- including selling ourselves into servitude for 40+ hours a week. What we call 'free time' is our living time, and it is incredibly costly. If one must, one can waste whatever time they see as 'free' at work. All the rest, by default, is yours and we believe that time is best spent seeing the world and making connections with its endless variety of peoples; experiencing living to the best of our ability; and finding joy in even the most fleeting of moments of life. When we value our own lives and see our daily experience as contributions to the one-off masterpiece that is a complete human lifetime, we come to value the lives of others just as much as our own.

The human imagination and capacity for curiosity and compassion is endless. Yet our lives are woefully short. The Great Alpaca Collective holds as our guiding principle that we should spend what little time we have on this earth experiencing the joy that can come from recognizing the resiliency, creative genius, and desire to love shared by all people through time and around the globe. Peace and life in harmony can only come from a greater understanding of our shared humanity -- and this can only come through travel and experience in the wider world. For how can anyone offer salvation for the world if they have never experienced it?

We at The Alpaca Collective don't claim to have the solution to the modern world, but we hope our approach can be the small acorn that produces a mighty oak (and, to stretch the metaphor a bit, encourages others to plant acorns!). Our idea is simple: locate affordable plots of land in places that we love around the world + make them relatively self sustaining + share access with family and friends in an informal network of time sharing and co-vacations. Keep it personal, keep it simple, and, in whatever way possible, make it green.

Here's how it works: someone in the Collective finds a place, say near the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, or, maybe, on the banks of the Odense River in Denmark. Once the site is developed to the point where it is somewhat self sufficient (i.e. solar on site, a camping pad, well access), simply list it with the Alpaca Collective, throwing out some rough dates that the propertyt will be free. Other members of the Collective can then reach out to use the site during their travels. We do this outside of VRBO, AirBnB, and similar services (which we still use for formal rental of our spaces), so that if you are part of the Collective, then there's always a back door open for you somewhere. If you have yet to locate your own Collective retreat, the only thing we ask is that in the future you try to become a host to help expand our options - or - if you'd like skip the ownership route and use your skillz to help us upgrade and maintain our little respites around the world, then bring it (and maybe bring a few power tools, too). It's all good.

So load your panniers, stock up on alpaca chow, and hit the road. There's a manger waiting for you somewhere! 🦙