Poverty, disability, ageing, mental health, belonging and identity. Politicians wrestle with these big issues, but they seem insoluble. If the answers were easy and obvious, we would already be doing them. Yet a visit to the Bruderhof community in Sussex last year gave me serious pause for thought. This is a community unlike anything I’ve experienced, with completely different norms of existence, and it has gone far further to solving some of these problems than any government ever has.
The community’s prominence has risen in recent months following a BBC documentary. The programme didn’t shy away from some of the eccentricities, oddities and controversies of the community, but in a balanced way it did strive to show how they live.
