About GAPV
GREEN ACRES PERMACULTURE VILLAGE
GREEN ACRES PERMACULTURE VILLAGE is a retrofit intergenerational intentional community carved from within an existing suburban neighborhood in a college town.
This evolving Village, featuring three adjacent homes with two or three residents each sharing permacultured grounds, with pathways and common areas (two greenhouses, a workshop space, chicken house, shed, patio, gazebo, and brand new: a twelve-foot diameter yurt for visitors), offers itself as a tiny template for the transformation of suburban life in America.
Village rhythms feature both work and play. Featuring occasional workshops, weekly work parties, twice-monthly Community Dinners, and seasonal celebrations, we both integrate internally and promote outreach to the larger community. To this end, we offer tours, plus sponsor and encourage WWOOFers, including Indiana University Interns and Sustainability Classes, to demonstrate and promote values that lie below money as far as possible. To this end we keep rents low, work together on projects, encourage each other’s self-expression and entrepreneurial skills, honor our communion with the living Earth, and aim to live and work in place inside a sharing economy that values both individual expression and community cooperation.
Established in 2009 by founder Ann Kreilkamp who dedicated the sunny side of the just purchased house next door to her own for a Green Acres Neighborhood Garden, both our sense of community and our capacity for growing food have evolved organically over time. In 2012 Rebecca Ellsworth, an organic gardener for 40 years with experience in community gardens, joined us; she guided our gardening efforts for nine years, before moving to Hawaii. Seven years ago, a third adjacent house was added, its grounds also used for growing food, plus chickens. In 2023, a 12-foot yurt was added to the mix, functioning as an extra bedroom and a meditation space.
In August 2024, the third house was sold to Elisha Hardy, an experienced gardener, who had been attending our Community Dinners for years and wanted to dive in deeper. Elisha is now our garden manager, and has big plans, which started in November 2024, with a higher, sturdier fence to keep out deer.
In 2017 we were invited to establish a permaculture garden behind the house of a neighbor in exchange for part of the produce. Though the house was sold before the planting season, we view this kind of expansion as ideal, and in 2022 agreed to cooperate in the same way with a neighbor next door, refreshing their abandoned garden bed and planting tomatoes, basil and brassicas. But then, in 2023, the house was sold; so this venture ended as well.
In 2024 we invited two Green Acres neighbors to each have a bed in our large main garden. For the 2025 season, we are again inviting them, but this time to work in and share the entire garden, rather than having their own beds.
Our philosophy is one of “permeable borders”. In other words, our three-home property is defined, with clear borders, and we are also constantly experimenting with ways to increase interchanges with neighbors and thus continue to grow the interconnected web of community.
Likewise with Community Dinners, where we invite neighbors, friends and friends of friends, resulting in many surprising new connections.