Caroline Clarice Estes

Caroline Clarice Estes was born March 14, 1928, in Oklahoma City, the only child of Leonard Fuqua and Madelia Fay Jenkins Fuqua.

When Caroline was about five, her parents divorced, and Caroline and Fay moved home to her maternal grandmother’s home in Sherman, Texas, where they lived in a large extended family for five years during the Depression. This was Caroline’s first, archetypal community, where her grandmother’s elegance and gracious welcome made a deep impression, and in many ways set the tone for how Caroline would approach community decades later. There the family gathered for dinner every night around the large, walnut dining table that now stands in the dining room at Alpha Farm. Around age 10, Caroline and Fay moved to San Francisco, where Fay married Ernie Southard and Caroline graduated from Lowell High School.

Caroline attended UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University. Around this time, she was married to a young lawyer, Dwight Rush, for two years. Her work after college included teaching at the California Schools for the Deaf and Blind in Berkeley, and later serving as a legal secretary to leading attorney Melvin Belli. She married newspaper editor Jim Estes, and both joined Berkeley Friends Meeting; they raised two daughters, Maria and Ronnie Mae (later known as Trinity).

Caroline became active as an organizer, facilitator and consultant in movements for peace and social action, beginning with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid-1960s. Here she first used the training and experience of Friends business meetings to facilitate diverse groups of hundreds of people in making decisions by consensus, at a time when this was virtually unknown outside of Friends.

In the early 1960s the family moved to Philadelphia, where Jim and Caroline both worked for the American Friends Service Committee. During those years, Caroline refined her understanding and use of consensus decision making so that when she received inspiration to start an intentional community and returned to the West Coast as a founding member of Alpha Farm, she was able to help guide Alpha into a consensual form of governance.

Based on Quaker principles and practices including consensus and peacemaking, Alpha Farm has sought to include people from a wide range of social backgrounds and political and spiritual leanings in creating a self-reliant, sustainable community of people living in harmony with themselves, each other and the Earth.

From 1973 until 2016, the community operated Alpha-Bit Café in Mapleton, offering outreach and a bridge to the wider community. Caroline served as manager, craft buyer, and a gracious hostess and chef for Friday night dinners.

After returning to the West Coast, Caroline also resumed working closely with Ed Morgenroth, a F/friend and mentor, during his tenure as clerk of Pacific Yearly Meeting. For several years in the 1970s, Caroline worked with Ed and others to coordinate the secretariat, the temporary office of PYM during the annual session, helping to put proposals and minutes into written form to facilitate decision making in plenary sessions. In the years to follow, Ed’s clerking skills and style would continue as a model of best practice in Caroline’s facilitation and teaching of Quaker-based consensus process outside of Friends.

Over the decades, Caroline continued to put peacemaking and community building into action in ever- widening circles. In 1979 and 1980 she helped organize large conferences, called ComeUnity conferences, at Breitenbush Hot Springs in Detroit, Oregon, where she again facilitated plenary sessions of 500 to 600 people by consensus. She became a leader in the intentional communities movement and served in leadership with the Fellowship (now Foundation) for Intentional Community (FIC) for many years.

Following her belief that consensus is an appropriate form of decision making for our times, and that it is often misused, she drew upon the spirit and practices of Friends, and began teaching Quaker-style consensus process to the groups she facilitated. Caroline’s commitment to the spirit of consensus and her skill with the process became an inspiring influence in the communities movement and beyond. Through Alpha Institute, she used this growing skill as a professional group facilitator and trainer to expand and develop the use of consensus with secular groups, such as regional and North American bioregional congresses and the Greens' national conferences. From about 1994 to 2009, when she was over 80, Caroline also worked extensively with Waldorf schools and other local and national nonprofit organizations across the U.S. and Canada and mentored many others who followed in this calling.

Caroline will be remembered for her intelligence, high energy and clarity; for her beloved standard poodles; as a powerful, stubborn visionary; and as “the inspiration and exasperation of Alpha Farm,” as her husband Jim once said. She, and the vision she carried, touched and enlarged many hundreds of people. She held to the Spirit-led vision she had been given of Alpha with a tenacity that at once inspired the community’s life, enabled it to survive, but also limited its capacity to grow and evolve over time.

People came and left because of Caroline. And yet her legacy lives on at Alpha Farm, now the longest- surviving intentional community in Oregon.

Caroline died at Alpha July 13, 2022, as she had lived. Through an eleven-month period of injury and healing followed by hospice, it took a village of Alpha caregivers, family members and hospice staff to support Caroline in her final journey. She was buried on the land at the farm. A memorial the following summer drew family, friends, neighbors and Alpha Farm members and residents past and present to honor her and share stories.

Caroline was preceded in death by her husband of 55 years, Jim. She is survived by her daughters, Maria del Rosario Navarro (Estes) Davis of Federal Way, Washington, and Ronnie Mae (Trinity) Estes Carey of Eugene, Oregon; grandchildren Persephone Starks, Cory Fletcher, Jonathan Davis and Dwight Davis, Jr.; six great-grandchildren; and many “chosen family” members of Alpha Farm, including Andrew Dumitru and Lysbeth Borie of Eugene, Oregon, and their children Morgan Dumitru and Elena Borie.