The use of games, experiments, and exercises has been known and practiced intuitively by effective teachers throughout the ages. We are not surprised when our children discover the value of playing learning games. Why should it be otherwise for us? It isn’t. We learn best through games, activities, and learning exercises.

 

The Goodenough Community has always intended to be both a caring, healing environment and a learning/training laboratory. A core of leaders, most of them friends and colleagues for more than 30 years, have carefully developed a philosophy of community life, which is expressed in personal agreements, organizational processes, and life-ways proven effective over time.

 

An essential strategy of the community is to develop its members well, and then to guide and support them in serving society. Specifically, we engage each stage of our personal and collective development with a suspension of disbelief or doubt about our own worth and ability—a pretending to be nobler selves than we usually manifest, until our minds can get around this and give the pretense our full attention. After enough attending, we integrate our learning into our lives until they becomeintending—a conscious willingness to be and to accomplish more.

 

As this level of selfhood is allowed to function, we encourage one another into extending our awareness to allow our best selves into more and more of our lives. Finally, contending with newly outgrown world views, we are able to transcend our old ways, and the process begins anew. To increase our awareness of the possibilities before us, we agree to suffer the vicissitudes in order to enjoy the satisfactions of this life-long learning together.

 

We are primarily a learning organization. 

This requires openness to experimenting with ways to approach our ideals, allowing failed attempts to be lessons learned that improve the next experiment, rather than excuses for giving up. We realize that we are ultimately engaged in the infinite game of life. Success at this game requires us to play many creative finite games in order to sustain the momentum and renew the promise of the infinite game.

 

Our cultural processes serve us well. 

Our members regularly meet as women, as men, as couples, a family of families, as youth and as Third Age.  All of these cultural programs include a developmental focus that helps people accomplish their developmental tasks and age gracefully. The overall goal of these cultural programs is to help people become mature, sane, proactive, and creative.