What's in a Name?

Photo Credit: Amy Harper

What’s in a name?

Originally in the Summer 2021 Agraria Journal:

Over the years our organization has gone by different names, but the work has been essentially the same: to research, educate and promote community as both a cooperative attitude and place-based way of life.

Founded in 1940 as Community Service, Inc., the intent was to serve small communities by disseminating ideas and strategies for their economic and cultural vitality. It was only later that the term “community service” came to mean a type of local volunteering.

So in the early 2000s, the name was changed to The Community Solution, the name highlighting the ways that community — local, cooperative living — was the solution to many of our most pressing challenges, namely oil and resource depletion.

In 2009, we rebranded as The Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, honoring the work of our pioneering founder and reflecting our research and education prowess as a new kind of think tank.

The 2017 purchase of our 128-acre farm brought another shift. We called it Agraria in a nod to both a low-energy community design crafted by Pat Murphy and Morgan’s vision of vibrant rural cultures and economies laid out in several of his books.

The name Agraria speaks to the work to both reclaim and reimagine a more rooted way of life in deep relationship to the land and one another. It brings us back to our foundations as an organization, and as a civilization.

And it brings us to another name change for our 80-plus year-old organization. The legacy that began with Community Service and continued with Community Solutions will now live on under the banner of the Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice. After all, the more things change, the more they stay the same.