A personal note from Adrian Bowden, founder
The roots of Connect Association go back to 2005. But really, they go back further than that — to a long stream of attempts to build something I could never quite name precisely, but always recognised when I felt it: community life that is alive, open, and genuinely connected to the world people actually live in.
I have spent most of my adult life trying to build that. This is the story of how I got here.
Oslo, 2005
In 2005, I helped found an earlier version of Connect Association — Foreningen Connect, as it is called in Norwegian — together with others in Oslo. At the time, I was involved with Hausmania, a space still shaped by the squatter movement and alternative culture. What drew me wasn’t the place itself but the possibility it represented: a meeting point between very different worlds.
I was asking a question that still feels relevant today — could you connect anthroposophical youth, the Camphill movement, and a more alternative urban culture? Could a movement like Camphill, with its deep roots in Steiner’s social vision, find ways of speaking to ordinary contemporary life — to young people, to art, to social experimentation — rather than retreating into its own familiar circles?
I was strongly influenced at the time by the Filipino thinker and anthroposophist Nicanor Perlas, whose work on civil society, culture, and the need for new social forms helped shape how I thought about what was possible. And by Otto Scharmer’s Theory U — the idea that real change comes from listening deeply, from sensing what is trying to emerge rather than simply repeating what has already been tried.
Pennsylvania and the Power of Local Exchange
Life moved on, and so did I — eventually to the United States, where I served as Executive Director of Camphill Soltane in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.
Phoenixville became another chapter in the same long story. There, I was involved in developing a range of social entrepreneurial projects: the Soltane Café, the Soltane Store (later Studio Entwine), Soul Kitchen, Community Arts Phoenixville, and Phoenixville Area Transition — part of the wider Transition Town movement. These were not simply businesses or programs. They were attempts to create places where community, creativity, work, and inclusion could genuinely meet — including people who are often left at the edges of more polished versions of community life.
Out of that work came one of the projects that still feels most alive to me: a local community currency called SOLS, built on the Waves platform. The idea was simple but serious: could a community create its own medium of exchange, rooted in trust and participation rather than dependence on dollars? Could value circulate in a more human, more local way?
We even made magnetic badges with QR codes representing units of the currency — crafted by hand using woven materials from Studio Entwine — so that people without smartphones could still take part. That detail mattered enormously to me. The currency wasn’t meant to live only on a screen. It was meant to be social, visible, tangible, and genuinely inclusive.
That experiment is one of the direct ancestors of =CONNECT, the community currency we are developing today.
Networks, Platforms, and What the Internet Ate
In the years between Oslo and Pennsylvania, I was also part of another stream of work: trying to build online networks for values-based community and collaboration. The Associative Economics Network was one of them. WeStrive.org — built on Drupal, and for a time full of possibility — was another.
In the early days of social networking, before the current giants had swallowed nearly everything, it felt genuinely possible to build purpose-built platforms where people could connect around shared ideals rather than simply being users inside vast commercial systems. For a while, we were part of something real.
But the internet shifted beneath us. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter absorbed the social life that smaller networks had been trying to create. Much of that work became redundant, at least in the forms we had imagined.
The impulse didn’t disappear. It just had to find new forms.
COVID, Return, and Beginning Again
Then came COVID.
Like so much that depended on people gathering and building together in shared space, much of this work stalled. The pandemic interrupted not just projects and events but momentum — the rhythm of social life itself.
My family and I moved to Norway, back to Camphill. And that return made me look again at something that had been important for many years: the role of young volunteers in community life.
Over the years, I had worked with volunteers from many countries — through European Voluntary Service, through AmeriCorps, through direct applications. Again and again, I saw how much energy, idealism, and genuine renewal young volunteers bring — not just to the organisations they work with, but to the communities around them.
Back in Norway, I noticed that the old EVS model was no longer being used in the same way. That felt like a real loss. It also felt like an opening.
At around the same time, we had created Solborg Forening — a local association connected to practical community initiatives including car sharing and volunteer coordination. Something was pointing in a clear direction: there was a need for a platform that could bring together volunteering, local initiative, associative forms of economy, and newer possibilities for digital cooperation.
That is the background to the Connect Association as it exists today.
What Connect Association Is For
Connect Association is built around three things that have always belonged together in my thinking, even when they appeared in different forms across different years and places.
Volunteering. We work with sending and host organisations to place young volunteers in diverse, intentional communities. Volunteering is not just a program. It is a form of social renewal — for the volunteer, for the host community, and for the wider world that needs people who have learned to live and work across difference.
=CONNECT, our community currency. Drawing directly on the experiments in Pennsylvania and the thinking that preceded them, we are building a mutual credit currency for online and local use — including here in Norway and in Pennsylvania. It is designed for circulation, not speculation. For trust, not extraction. And we are looking for founding members and stewards to help shape it.
Governance and administrative services. Across all these years of work, I have seen how many good organisations and initiatives struggle not because the vision is wrong, but because the structures aren’t right. Connect Association offers practical advisory and operational support to organisations working toward social renewal and ethical governance.
Seen from the outside, the journey that led here might look scattered: a squatter venue in Oslo, an online social network, a café in Phoenixville, a handmade community currency, a volunteer program in Norway. But I have never experienced it as scattered. To me, it has always been one long effort — to build structures that help people work together more freely, more imaginatively, and more meaningfully.
That is what Connect Association is about.
If any part of this resonates with you — whether you want to volunteer, join as a founding =CONNECT member, offer your skills as a steward, or simply find out more — I would love to hear from you.
Adrian Bowden
Founder, Connect Association
Solborg, Norway