When we talk about Anarchy Ranch, we’re talking about more than a place to live, grow food, and work on projects. We want it to become a place where people in the San Luis Valley can come together and build businesses they own and run themselves.

When discussing Anarchy Ranch, we are talking about more than a place to live, grow food, and work on projects. We aim to be a place where people in the San Luis Valley can come together, organize, and build businesses they own and operate themselves.

That’s a big goal, so what does it actually look like?

One inspiration is Mondragon. The Mondragon Corp. is a network of cooperatives that began in the Basque Country, an autonomous community in Spain. It includes the Basque provinces of Álava (Araba), Biscay (Bizkaia), and Gipuzkoa (Guipúzcoa), surrounding two Enclaves, Treviño and Valle de Villaverde. The enterprises within are operated and connected by worker ownership, education, and helping one another. It’s our goal to put some of their methods into practice to see just what’s possible here in the Valley.

Anarchy Ranch seeks to be a starting point and support hub for all things local. OpKawap. The world has become hyper-individualistic, which, ironically, has resulted in a hyper-independence on necessities, goods, and services being outsourced. Oftentimes, outsourced to far-away places to enterprises that do not have the individual or the community’s interests prioritized at all. In an effort to curb this dependency that will undoubtedly collapse under its own weight, The Ranch seeks a better way. Growing Community and Feeding Resilience.

Someone might have land, another might have a skill, or a license, or maybe just an idea for something they feel their community needs. Someone else may just have the time and energy to make it work. The Ranch will be a physical and online space for people to find each other, discuss plans, organize, collaborate, and work out a plan of attack.

The local businesses grown from the process will belong to the people doing the work and creating the value, not to Anarchy Ranch, nor to an owner who acts as a dictator of the workplace. We aim to end the dominion of capital in local enterprise. We advocate for a strong network of local enterprises that will make their own decisions, share knowledge, tools, customers, or services with other locally owned and operated cooperatives in the San Luis Valley.

The Ranch gives us a place to put these ideas into practice. On 35 acres, we can grow food, raise animals, make things, teach skills, and work together as a community. Sharing experience of what may work, what may not, and coordinate ways to start chipping away at our community’s dependence on outside sources, especially for the things required for life. Water, food, and shelter.

Eventually, we really want to be a part of local cooperatives working together in meaningful ways. For instance, sharing bookkeeping, equipment, marketing, or marketplaces for what they are able to create. The learning curve for starting a business can be steep and lonely. That’s why we imagine a federation of locally owned and operated enterprises helping new groups. People who have made the mistakes should be sharing what they’ve found to work, and also what they found that didn’t.

These relationships are not forged overnight. It takes time, clear agreements, clear boundaries, useful skills, and most importantly, trust. I currently run and operate Anarchy Ranch, a project for growing community, feeding resistance, and teaching sovereignty. However, I am well aware the property will be far more productive and effective for the community if people own it with me. And the people who own it with me deserve a voice, and real ownership of the value created within those enterprises.

Our first steps are quite simple. Bring people together who want to build and create something. Then, discuss what the Valley needs and determine the plausibility of meeting those needs. Finally, execute a proper launch of those providing those goods and services. Each enterprise will serve as a learning experience for the next.

The vision of Anarchy Ranch is to create a more resilient community here in the San Luis Valley. One where the people doing the work own more of what they build, have a voice in their workplace, and are able to keep more of the value they create, here in the Valley.

We connect. We organize. We create.