It takes a village

At Camphill, near Copake, the developmentally challenged find a sense of purpose and a life rarely available to them in the larger world.

By STEVE BARNES, Senior writer
First published: Sunday, April 16, 2006

COPAKE -- Billy Wait likes making trucks best.

He also shapes, sands, stains and fastens wood to craft fish-shaped trivets, and cutting boards that look like pigs or ducks or bunnies, and building-block sets that require meticulous affixing of little dowel pegs.

He prefers the truck with a backhoe on it -- a curvy, foot-long, heirloom-quality toy crafted of local hardwood harvested from the 600 acres of forest that surround Wait's home here in rural southeastern Columbia County, near the New York-Massachusetts-Connecticut border.

"I like to make things out of wood, out of wood. Wood. I can do it. It's something I can do," says Wait, 68, nodding his head continuously to emphasize words that spill fast and often repetitively. His birdlike features are expressive beneath the ever-present ball cap he wears while working in the wood shop at Camphill Village, an idyllic residential community of 234 people; 101 of the residents have, like Wait, a variety of developmental disabilities, including autism, mental retardation and Down syndrome. Their ages range from 21 to 92. Some have lived here for decades; Wait since 1968.

Lunch, coming up in a little while, will find Wait returning to the house he shares with eight others: four with disabilities, two 40-something "house parents" who have devoted their lives to the village, their child and a young volunteer who is spending eight months at Camphill. After lunch, back to the wood shop.

"I work here in the morning and the afternoon on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Saturday morning I clean the house and have chores. Chores in the house. Saturday afternoon, we go to the movies or shopping or go other places. Every Sunday morning I go to church. That's what I do," Wait says.

Camphill Village is opposite in philosophy and approach to state institutions, where many villagers spent time before moving here. And despite exponential improvements in the way society views and treats those with developmental disabilities, the outside world continues to daunt and baffle villagers, its conventions and complexities often beyond their abilities to navigate. Camphill, in contrast, is a place where Wait and his friends can truly contribute and belong.

Even more important, says Wait, "It's home."

A worldwide movement

Camphill Village, founded in 1961, is part of the international Camphill movement, which encompasses more than 100 communities and schools in 20 nations. The Camphill philosophy was defined in 1940 in Scotland by Karl Konig, a Viennese-born doctor whose work with people with special needs was influenced by Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian educator and social thinker. Steiner established anthroposophy, also known as spiritual science, a worldview that attempts to bridge the divides between scientific inquiry, spiritual beliefs and artistic impulses. Outgrowths of anthroposophy include Waldorf education, biodynamic farming and Camphill communities for people with developmental disabilities.

At the root of Camphill Village, as with its sister villages worldwide, are a few central beliefs, among them: the community is more important than the individual; and meaningful work that contributes to the community is healing and therapeutic, improving body, mind and soul. Residents with special needs are called villagers, while the nondisabled volunteers who live alongside them are co-workers.

"We try to offer full human rights, but we also try to offer full human responsibilities, too," says Richard Neal, Camphill Village's executive director. A Camphill Village co-worker in the early 1970s, Neal lived in a similar community in southern Germany for many years before returning to Copake in 1998.

He says, "We try to awaken in anyone who lives in the village -- villagers and co-workers alike -- the fact of the community needs. ... We (are) all responsible together for how we create our life here in the village."

Situated across forested hilltops south of Copake Lake, the village is comprised of more than 50 buildings, including 28 residences, a biodynamic farm, co-op store, cafe, bakery, organic herb and vegetable gardens, ponds, seed and flower gardens, 20 craft workshops and a cultural center that is the locus of the arts activities so central to village life. All buildings are linked by a series of roads, paths and paved walkways.

Working together

Every villager has a job or two, matched to their interests and abilities. Some work in the bakery, assisting the baker to produce items including bread, cookies and granola that are for sale to village residents and the public in the bakery shop. Others make woven clothing, maple syrup, stained glass, handcrafted blank books and photo albums, wooden toys and beeswax candles. Proceeds from sales in the village gift shop, bakery and online go back into the village fund.

Camphill Village also runs the Turtle Tree Seed company, which distributes 288 varieties of organic vegetable, herb and flower seeds grown at Camphill and 40 biodynamic farms and gardens across the country.

In the Turtle Tree workshop, 36-year villager Linda Lang, who says she has obsessive-compulsive disorder as well as mental retardation, sits plucking stray bits of dried leaves and stones from seeds the size of pinheads.

"I really like what I do at Camphill, and I'm good at it," says Lang, 57. "I never use that," she says, pointing to a lighted magnifying glass on the table. "I do this with my own two eyes."

Ricky Hauptman, 52, works all day alongside Wait in the wood shop during the cold months; from Easter to Thanksgiving he spends mornings in the shop, afternoons in the herb garden. Hauptman lives in a house with other villagers, Neal and his wife, and two young co-workers on yearlong stays.

Says Neal, "If I go outside of the village with Ricky, he's a little bit afraid of everybody. Here he's a totally independent person and makes a lot of contributions."

As Hauptman, wearing ear and eye protection, cuts out wood pieces on a jigsaw, more villagers work in another room of the shop. One occasionally sands a piece of wood, another pages absently through a magazine, and a third simply sits. There are no productivity expectations; the value is in doing, not completion. Meanwhile, Wait flits between his trucks, trivets and containers of dowels, explaining how he cuts them into pegs to be fastened onto building blocks.

"Some do more than others, but everybody does something," says Joanne Gambino, assistant director of development for Camphill Village and one of approximately 22 paid staff members, who do not live in the village.

A whole community

In principle, at least, residents make no distinction between those with disabilities and those without.

"We try to think of ourselves as a community as a whole, all 234 of us," says Neal. The $5.9 million annual budget has to cover everyone -- villagers, co-workers, co-workers' children and paid staffers.

As a practical matter, however, assistance is available only for the 101 villagers. Federal and state funds pay for between 55 and 60 percent of the estimated $50,000-per-villager annual cost of running Camphill Village. The remaining $22,000 is covered by contributions from villagers' families, grants from corporations and foundations and other fundraising events, such as a concert set for September in Manhattan's Lincoln Center that will benefit all 10 Camphill communities in the United States.

Villagers, all of whom have bank accounts overseen by their respective house parents, also receive a monthly check of about $678 for living expenses from the state Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities.

There is no set fee for a villager to live at Camphill. Very few villagers' families are able to contribute the full $22,000, and some can offer nothing, but no one is ever asked to leave for lack of money. Other families, grateful to have found a happy home for their special-needs relative, may give $100,000 or more some years, according to Gambino, the development officer.

Kerry Solomon, 34, born with mild retardation, moved to Camphill in 2000, attracted by the village's work and activities. At her job in the bakery office, she sticks labels on white 1-pound bags used to package cookies and granola.

"We felt the time had come where she should be much more independent, " says Ian Solomon, Kerry's father and a board member of Camphill Village who lives in the lower Hudson Valley.

"I can't tell you how reassured we are as parents that Kerry is at Camphill," says Solomon. "When Kerry comes home for a visit twice a year, she can't wait to leave and get back to her life at Camphill."

Many helping hands

Co-workers receive no pay; "neighborhoods," made up of three houses, share a communal budget that pays for all of their residents' food, housing, recreation and other costs. Many of the short-termers are foreign college students like bakery assistant Yae Won Kim, a 23-year-old who will return to her native South Korea later this spring after almost two years at Camphill Village, or recent graduates of U.S. universities who are spending a year with the volunteer AmeriCorps organization.

Other co-workers, like Neal, have been involved for most of their lives. And still others are like Ted Todd, a former surgical technologist, and Ben Matlock, a former college administrator. The couple quit their jobs, sold their Boston residence and moved to Camphill last summer to oversee a house with six senior villagers, including the eldest, 92-year-old Charlie Willmore. They willingly gave up a cosmopolitan life, substantial income, their own home, international vacations and largely unfettered freedom to become 24/7 house parents to a half-dozen aging adults with developmental disabilities and health issues.

The change and adjustment were a shock, the rewards even greater. Todd and Matlock say they have found at Camphill Village a community of people dedicated to living together, in harmony with one another and with nature. It also is service-based.

"It's not a community given to navel-gazing, staring at the clouds and thinking about the meaning of life," says Todd. "It's a community that is actually doing something. It's here trying to be sensitive and serve the needs of others."

Further, says Matlock, the philosophy of Camphill appealed to the couple's iconoclastic sensibilities: "The American culture says the more you possess, the more you have, the happier you are. (Here), happiness is based on something other than what you own."

A new way to live

One of the residents of the Todd-Matlock house is Karen Wallstein, 64, who was, she will quickly tell you, the very first villager. She arrived in 1961.

Wallstein says, "I knew this village from the very beginning till now. I've seen people come and go and die and everything."

In telling the story of her childhood in the 1940s and '50s, Wallstein describes a time of strife and unhappiness. Parents, school officials and doctors alike didn't know what to do with her. She ended up in an institution, heavily medicated. "You should have seen me: I took a lot of drugs and I looked like a dope fiend," she says.

Camphill Village eventually calmed her down, Wallstein says while knitting one of the endless series of scarves she makes for friends in the community.

"She always keeps a list of about four or five people that she's making a scarf for," says Matlock, watching benevolently from across their home's living room. "When she finishes one, she crosses off the name and goes on to the next."

Wallstein interrupts him to continue her story. "When I came here, I wasn't good. I had temper tantrums because I couldn't cope. Now I'm different. I'm still a little, well, still a little ..." she trails off, then says simply, "But I'm a lot better."

The two head to the dining room and sit down to lunch. Six villagers, Matlock, Todd and three young co-workers assemble to say grace with a song. They finish by saying, "May the meal be blessed."

Everyone speaks in unison, their hands joined around the table.

Staff writer Frances Ingraham Heins contributed to this story. Steve Barnes can be reached at 454-5489 or by e-mail at sbarnes@timesunion.com.

All Times Union materials copyright 1996-2006, Capital Newspapers Division of The Hearst Corporation, Albany, N.Y.