Oct 5, 2013 2 min read

PHOENIXVILLE, Pa. – The best thing about the group home where Cindy Moore once lived was her friends.

Otherwise, the food was lousy and activities were scarce. Moore was bored.

So, more than a year ago, the animated West Vincent Township resident moved to a place where she is more than just a client with intellectual disabilities whose basic needs must be met.

At Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, Moore is considered a working artisan.

“Tuesday, it’s pottery. Wednesday, weaving and Friday, we fluff wool,” said Moore, 47.

She is part of a crafting community, making rugs, scarves, and other items to be sold at farmers’ markets as part of the mission and philosophy that is the foundation of the village.

The sloping, 432-acre Chester County homestead and farm near French Creek is a place where 100 residents – 44 of them adults with developmental disabilities – create crafts, grow vegetables, make bread, sell their wares, and live together in a nuclear-family arrangement in houses spread across the property.

It is one of 80 such Camphill communities worldwide (nine in the United States) that are part of a movement founded in 1939 by the Austrian physician Karl Konig and based on the teachings of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Both believed that every person, including those with disabilities, has a role in contributing to a world whose environment and people are interdependent.

“We provide a place for people to be included and to contribute,” said Felicity Jeans, executive director of Camphill Kimberton.

This weekend, the community is hosting a conference of 60 people from 11 Camphill locations in the United States and Canada to learn crafting techniques, improve skills, and discuss the therapeutic virtues of crafting.

Craft communities believe there is “soul-building, healing power, and sense of fulfillment” in creating something from natural materials by hand, said Thomas A. Guiler, a Syracuse University doctoral student who is studying crafter communities. Guiler will speak at the conference.

Residents and students from the two other Camphill communities in Southeastern Pennsylvania also will attend: the Camphill Special School in Glenmoore, Chester County, for youngsters with intellectual disabilities in kindergarten through 12th grade; and Camphill Soltane, also in Glenmoore, a program similar to Camphill Village Kimberton but for young adults.

With Kimberton, the three area communities make up a continuum of community for people with disabilities as young as 5 and as old as 90.