At the 2022 Mariposa Freedom Festival, Catherine Bleish delivered her talk “Integrity and Community,” sharing her evolution from Ron Paul activism and police accountability work to building intentional communities like Greenbrier (a 55-year-old nonprofit in Central Texas) and producing Anarchapulco. She emphasizes that successful community requires both moral integrity (honoring your word, consent, accountability) and structural integrity (strong boundaries, vetting people), warning that without them drama and toxicity erode groups while alignment with shared values creates stability and longevity. Catherine stresses getting clear on personal values through self-work, choosing tribes wisely, and holding ourselves and others accountable so the next generation can inherit real freedom — noting that pop-up communities like Anarchapulco and long-term ones like Greenbrier both thrive when built on these foundations. For replays of this talk and tickets to future Anarchapulco events, visit anarchapulco.com and use coupon code SOVEREIGNLIVING for 10% off your purchase, with 10% of the proceeds going directly to Catherine to help fund her projects.
Transcript:
And I’m going to think Attica took over helping sponsor this event. They had a big part to do with it. And they have, Attica Poko. And, Ken, who I call Poco as, the first two weeks of February. And if you use the code Mariposa to receive 10% off anything from anarcho loco.com. And again, I apologize for that little bit of a hiccup.
I’ll introduce our next guest, which is at Catherine on the scene. Wednesday. She’s the producer of Anika Poco and her presentation is called Integrity and Community.
Hi, guys. How are y’all doing? Good. I got the baby. If she starts the first, my husband will take care of it. I have this theory. She’s gonna fall asleep. So if you don’t mind, I’m in a rock. If that doesn’t make anyone anxious. How many people here have been to Erica?
School. Oh, like a third, maybe. How many people have not been to Erica for a girl, but once ago, a couple days ago. How many people have heard of that? Erica Pogo with. I want to go. I know some of you don’t know. Okay. And Acapulco is one of the few communities that I have become a part of.
And this is not a, permanent community. I call it a pop up community. It revolves around a gathering, right? And there are people who live there full time. But generally speaking, other people go as a pop up community. People show up, and we now gather in Brownsville, which is south of our people go and they show up a few weeks before the event.
They usually stay a few weeks after, and we’ve got a nice group of people there for six weeks or so. And of course, there’s people who just show up for the actual event. I’m also involved in other communities. I live in an international community in Central Texas, and I started laughing to myself, and I was listening to Josh speak because he said, you don’t gotta go live in the woods and play in the dirt.
And that’s literally what I do. We live on 173 acres. It’s a community that started in 1969. For those of you. Well, probably for everybody, because I didn’t know this information even as someone born raised the United States. The nonprofit designation became a thing in 1968, and a whole bunch of intentional communities popped up everywhere across the United States.
Big chunks of land, 200 acres here, 200 acres there. The one I’m on is 173 acres. And it has been in existence this whole time. It was formed to create alternative educational systems because the founders, most of whom were students at the University of Texas, to become teachers, and they saw what was happening. They saw that schools were starting to teach to the test and that things were changing.
And they said, you know what? We’re going to start a different thing. We’re going to try something else. So they bought this land and they moved out there, and it was part of the free school movement, and it’s evolved into what it is today. I’ve been part of other communities as well. I’ve been a part of the broader Liberty movement, so to speak, since 2006.
I was really involved in the Ron Paul campaign, and a lot of the different things that spun out from that, the police accountability movement and, and different some movements that were involved with the Liberty community as a whole. And what I’ve learned since 2006 is that it isn’t easy to do community. It’s hard work. And I think something that people overlook when they are getting involved in community is that it takes more than having a similar vision.
Just because somebody says they’re an anarchist or a volunteer. It is true that they believe in the idea that they live in freedom doesn’t mean they actually share the same values as you. So George Sherman said, there’s always drama in community, and I don’t necessarily believe that that is true. I think there’s always conflict, and conflict is a human experience that we’re all going to have.
I think drama is unnecessary and drama takes place when people are doing community with the wrong people or in the wrong way. So drama to me, I try to turn to the winds and it’s not working. Drama to me is a manifestation of community done incorrectly, and it is a symptom of something that can be healed. And sometimes it means changing who you’re relating to and who you’re doing life with, right?
Sometimes it means working on yourself. And this is where boundaries come in. And accountability comes in. And I think these are absolutely paramount and foundational in community. If you don’t have accountability for your own behavior, you are not going to do well in any community, be it a spiritual community, a church, or a neighborhood or a school or an intentional community.
If you do not have accountability for yourself, for your actions, for your words and the way that you are behaving, you’re going to be the weak link right? If also you don’t have solid boundaries, and if your tolerance level for your behavior in others is too high, you also become a weak link. Community requires boundaries. Community requires accountability.
And the reason I titled my talk integrity in Community is because I believe that this is the foundation of what makes community work. So what is integrity? Does anybody here know what integrity means? Yes. Nobody is doing the right thing when it is acting, I like that. Any other definitions of integrity? So there’s. Yes. Go your well. Be safe doing what you say.
Yes. Honoring your word. Doing what you say. You will do. So when you look up the dictionary definition of integrity, you have moral integrity. And this is what y’all are describing right here. This is the honesty and the adherence to your principles. Right. And you also structural integrity. Right. So think of the foundation of a house. If there’s not structural integrity in that foundation, if there’s cracks, if it’s crumbling then that building is not built with integrity.
Right. It has a risk of leaks or collapse or, or whatever is going on. And I think both of these forms of integrity, they are requirements for a community to be successful. Okay. So let’s dig into that a little bit. Does anybody here have a theory on why moral integrity might be important in the community?
Yeah. You you know, just hanging out with other people. It’s not easy. Yeah. So when you think about moral integrity, there’s the very basic universal morals that I think most of us can agree on most at the time, like being honest, honoring your word right. But there’s also higher principles that some of us choose, like volunteerism. Okay. Some people honestly believe that they are living a moral life when they are subjugating their idea of what is good in the world upon others.
Right? And those might be people that we choose not to do community based because their values are not in integrity with ours.
But it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t or couldn’t gather with other people who have similar values to them. So when we talk about monetary systems, when we talk about decentralization, why do we want to decentralize the economy? Does anybody have an idea?
Create stability. Right. It gets rid of a single point of failure. If something happens with Bitcoin we have gold, we have silver. If something happens with Monero we have Ethereum right. There’s multiple options. We have multiple choices. And the impacts of one of those choices failing is much less severe when there are others that can come in and fill the gaps.
And this is something I talked about in my workshop yesterday about decentralizing your own income. If you can find a way to have 5 or 6 streams of income, if one of those isn’t going the way you want it to, or one of those really is, you have a choice to lean in or lean out, right? And it creates stability in your life without causing monotony, which is what happens to a lot of people who work in the corporate world.
They do something over and over every day. They become miserable. They contract. And for me and my personality type, I need to be able to ebb and flow right. And I have found that having multiple streams of income allows me to have stability in my life, because when I’m done with something, I already have something else to catch me and to carry me or what I’m really, really excited about something.
I can lean into it and bring more resources and abundance into my life. I believe that this applies to community as well. The more decentralized we are as people, the more quality we have in our relationships and the more stability we have as a whole. So this means we don’t have to be 100% in agreement with everybody. It just means we have to be in alignment with the right people.
So the community where I live, where my children are being raised, where I spend my daily life, there’s 25 adults, there’s 15 children. I would imagine we’re going to grow a little bit in the next several years, maybe adding ten adults or so. I’m not speaking for the whole community. We have a process for that. But that’s just what I think is likely coming down the pipes and we’re keeping it small and we’re keeping it intimate because it’s stable.
This group has been doing life together since 1969, and they’ve learned how to do conflict. So when I said earlier about the drama being inevitable, I don’t believe that. I believe that is a signal. If something isn’t right, conflict happens, and we need to find people that we are comfortable doing conflict with. So where I live in Central Texas, the way they resolve conflict is through conversation.
This is a consensus based community. And if someone really strongly thinks that something is wrong, they have the ability to stand up and say, no, I’m not going to agree to this. And that’s when the community needs to rally together and say, okay, let’s find a way for you to get on board so that we can all move forward, unified.
And it’s a really beautiful process and some people say, you know what, I don’t agree with the choice you’re making. But I don’t care that much. So I’m just going to voice it and step back and let you all move forward. And I’ve watched this. I’ve been there for two and a half years, and I’ve watched this take place.
And people who are not behaving with integrity to the values of this community, they’ve been removed. And that makes me feel safe. There. That’s one of the reasons that we decided to stay and we decided to build. We’re building a cabin there, and I would not have done that if I had shown up, got involved with the community, seen these people who were treating others in inappropriate ways be allowed to stay, because this is where my kids are being raised.
This is where I want to spend the rest of Josie’s childhood. Right? And I’ve got two older kids there as well. So if I’m showing up to a place where I’m going to invest my time, my energy, my resources, my life force, energy, I want to know that their standards are as high as mine. And I want to know that if somebody is being a bully or treating other people inappropriately, that there will be accountability without accountability and without boundaries.
Sometimes these personalities have the capability to erode a community and to create foundations in the cracks. And this is when communities fail, and this is when drama becomes incessant and perpetual and pervasive and actually begins to do damage to something that could otherwise be incredibly beautiful. And this is a process that I have watched the community of an archipelago go through raising of standards.
The implementation of boundaries. And I have seen an Poco move from the very chaotic, hostile, sick community that’s featured on HBO. Did anyone watch The Anarchists on HBO? Few people. Those were our dark days, right? And in going through them, we decided as a group of people who are voluntarily interacting with each other and creating this pop up community once a year, that we didn’t want that anymore.
We made this choice years before HBO was anywhere near involved. Right? This is something that we have been going through. So what does that look like? Well, first and foremost, it looks like speaking up in the face of toxicity. It looks like speaking up in the face of imbalance. It looks like speaking up and communicating. When someone is not in integrity with your values.
So what are the values of volunteerism? You? Anyone want to call them out? I guess, log law, consent consents. That’s a good one. I like that one. Consent. That’s a huge that’s like the baseline, right? For a volunteer community. And what is the opposite of consent, coercion. And how do you coerce somebody? You make threats. You silence, you shame, you ridicule, you attack.
Well, it’s like looking around, you realize, gosh, there’s a lot of coercion taking place in this community, and it’s not who we want to do life with. It’s not who we want to build with. And we made the decision to start setting boundaries. If you are engaging in coercion behind closed doors, but you’re taking a microphone and you are breaching freedom, you are not welcome on the stage where people go, that is not going to happen ever again, because we believe so strongly that the only way to create a future of actual possible freedom.
If you hit her head for six year, it requires being in integrity with our values and we cannot be in integrity with our values. If our organizing committee or the speakers on our stage are not walking the walk, and what we found is we begin to set these boundaries, that some people didn’t take them very well. Some people retched and having standards set some things just as simple as,
Asking someone to pay for a media pass when their past included food. I’m entitled to this. There’s a lot of I deserve this because I’m entitled to. Because, well, in the context of American poker, nobody is entitled to an hour to poker except for Jeff, who owns that? He’s a founder, right? What are we? No one is entitled to somebody else’s business, to somebody else’s soapbox, to somebody else’s food.
You earn that, you negotiate for that. And when you start throwing a fit, it shows me that you are willing to engage in emotional coercion to try and get you why you’re not someone I want to do life with. But when you say, hey, you know what?
I hear where you’re coming from, and I think I can provide enough value that you’d be willing to let me in and eat on your dime, and you talk me into it. That opens the door for me to participate in consent. And you are likely somebody that I want to do business with, right. And so setting boundaries is an excellent litmus test to see if people are or should be allowed into your community.
You are community starts right here. And right here is not an integrity with the values that you hold in your heart and the values you hold in your mind, then you will never be in integrity with other people. It’s not possible. So the first thing that we have to do is we want to build a world that is not subjugated to tyranny and coercion, is it?
We have to learn how to get into alignment with our own principles. How many people here in this room know what your value system is?
How’s the room? So how can you be in integrity if you don’t know your own values? I encourage you to get clear. Some things you can do to get clear is to meditate, to journal, to find some stuff to do is on YouTube. Don’t join a cult, but maybe, you know, explore. Start asking yourself questions. What matters to you?
What do you want your life to look like? So how did I end up in this intentional community? Okay, I’m living in a converted school bus. Has been I’ve had it for eight years. I’ve got my kids, my my husband and I just got married. He moved from Italy, is working on his green card. We we knew that we wanted him to work from home, so we knew we needed somewhere to park our converted school bus.
We knew that we needed an outside kitchen and bathroom. We needed an office for him. We wanted it to be in the forest. We wanted it to be walking distance to other children with families who are like minded. And I got clear and I wrote it down and a line item listed every single thing I wanted. And I’ll tell you what, after I posted that on Facebook and emailed it out to my friends and family for people recommended the community where I now live because I got clear what are my values?
My values included my children being able to grow up as free and sovereign as possible. My values included being around people who didn’t have don’t run from people who had conflicts and who could get through it with integrity. And I found it when I got clear. And when I got clear and I communicated to the world at large, that community fell in my lap.
And it has been one of the greatest blessings of my life. I love doing community where I live. It’s absolutely incredible.
Same thing with Hanukkah. I love doing community where I work. I have my dream job. It’s incredible, but it was really stressful when I first got involved and I wasn’t sure, are these people I want to do life let go. There’s a lot of drama. But as I began to take steps into and further navigate myself within and around, I began to realize, okay, there’s some subgroups here.
This isn’t all one big thing, right? There’s decentralization that already exists. It naturally happens right? And so my husband and I, we were in Italy summer of 2018, and we were like, really exploring this concept of community and who we wanted to do life with. And we came to the conclusion that we needed to be really careful with the anarchist community in Acapulco, because we saw a lot of toxicity and we made some strategic choices.
We didn’t allow certain people into our home, we didn’t go to certain things, we didn’t associate with certain people. And sure enough, our intuition was right. There was a murder. Someone got killed in our community, and we had the foresight. We just had this conversation with our friend Piazza about discernment and judgment. But at the time, we didn’t know the word discernment or we weren’t using it.
We were using the word judgment. And we decided it’s actually really good to be judgmental. It’s actually really good to take assessment of the people around us and say, you know, just because you’re showing up at the same conferences us doesn’t mean that you are people we want to do business with, that we want to raise families with that.
We want to feel happy with that. We want to associate with. Right. And something that Piazza had brought up in our conversation this past week. And if you guys watched the Anarchist pizza was a spoon vendor, the telekinesis girl at the very beginning. She brought up that a lot of people are afraid to be seen as judgmental, and so they will tolerate poor behavior from others and what I have found is this is very common with speakers, people who have a YouTube channel and can give talks on microphones and who aren’t necessarily functioning in alignment with the values in which they are preaching, but they do so much good for the community.
Is that true? If somebody is speaking truth to power on the internet, but they’re berating people behind closed doors, are they really doing good for the community? Is that really somebody that we want to build with? Is that really somebody that we want representing us out in public? I don’t want to be associated with that. And I don’t care what you’re talking, I care how you’re walking and I care how you’re treating other people.
So I have found that it’s actually more possible for me to do community with people who I don’t. 100% philosophically agree with, but who I 100% energetically vibe with.
So in our intentional community, we are not dogmatic to any way of politics. We are there for the children. So there’s lefties and there’s libertarians and there’s anarchists and there’s conservatives. And you know what? We do life together and we do it together really well. And our community is based on consent. No one is getting forced to do anything.
And there’s also strong boundaries. The two people that I have seen behave poorly were given the opportunity to get into alignment. And when they couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t, they were asked to leave.
And that is integrity. And that is how communities begin to stand the test of time.
What I love about what’s happening right here is that community has been built, and the way I see it, I feel it. The energy is here. It’s happening. Right? There’s connections here, there’s love here, there’s friendship here, there’s chosen family here. And I think that’s only going to begin to grow. And what is really important is that we remember that we are not required to all like each other.
We are not required to all cohabitate. We are all not required to spend every week with one another.
We find our tribe who we vibe with and when the bigger issues confront us, like masks or vaccines and we bind together because we agree on that subject, that’s enough. We don’t have to subject ourselves to constantly being around people who don’t necessarily hold the same values.
Or who don’t necessarily practice the same values.
So I’m on a journey. I’m changing, I’m growing, and I believe that other people can too. So I’m not advocating just right people lives and I cut them out. But sometimes you have to do that temporarily. If things are really, really out of balance or really, really toxic. I believe I was one of those toxic personalities that took the podium.
I was 23 years old doing the Ron Paul delegate. I don’t think the bones and I thought I knew everything and I wasn’t nice to people, and I was short and I was beaten and it was yucky and you could see it manifesting in my health. I had acne all over my face and I was really, really out of balance spiritually, mentally, physically, like in all of these ways.
And I changed. I made a choice. I got arrested twice, and I decided this is not the life for me. I don’t want to be confrontational anymore. I’m tired of putting myself at risk. I had children, my ex got arrested when my first born was five weeks old because of a free speech thing. So no no no no no more.
That’s not how we build. It’s not helping anything, but it’s making me physically sick. So integrity is the bottom line.
We can all pretend that we’re building a community by rallying around buzzwords and what we will find is this inevitable drama that Josh mentioned. That is what will happen. But if we get beyond the buzzwords and we start drilling down into our core ethics, our core values and building relationships around that and healing ourselves and changing ourselves so that we are in integrity and in alignment with our own values.
We become a person that others can build with. We become a person that others can count on and depend on, and we become worthy of the people who are dependable, right?
That is how balance relationships are built, and I believe we can start now. Each of us, or continue the process. If we’ve already begun of working on ourselves and working on our communities, setting strong boundaries, holding ourselves and each other accountable so that we can actually build a community that stands the test of time. Because if we are not in alignment, if we do not have integrity to our values and our morals, I don’t believe our children will see freedom in their lifetime.
Their freedom is dependent on us. It is dependent on our ability to get into alignment and to function with integrity to our shared values. Hold each other accountable, set strong boundaries.
And of course, have a little fun along the way. Right? Okay, I think are we ready for the next person. So thank you guys I appreciate it. Thank you very much Katherine. And keeping with integrity, I want to apologize for my little blunder. That was a fantastic, fantastic presentation. And you hit a lot of important very important points about choosing your neighbors, keeping yourself accountable.
And that way, other people may want to be your neighbor. And that way you can choose the community you want to be a part of. I really want to appreciate. I really appreciate that conversation. You do.
