Kat Kinkade
From ICWiki
Kat Kinkade was one of the seven founders of Twin Oaks Community as well as a founder of East Wind and Acorn Communities.
Kat was born in Seattle in 1930, the depression era. She became the first person in her family to go to college by attending the University of Washington for one year. There she met and married Army Sergeant Donald Logsdon.
When the marriage fell through, Kat took her four year-old daughter to live in Mexico City, Mexico, here she taught English to first graders at a private elementary school for five years.
She returned to the United States in 1960, got a job as a secretary, and became an avid international folk dancer. She and her daughter Josie (who was now twelve) joined what would become the famed Los Angeles Troupe Aman.
It was while living in Los Angeles that Kat read the book "Walden Two" by BF Skinner. She became obsessed with the idea of a group of people who could live cooperatively, with true equality of income. In 1967, with six other like-minded souls, she founded Twin Oaks Community in Louisa.
The early years at Twin Oaks were difficult but exciting. Kat believed in the idea of the community so strongly that she was not deterred by 25 cents a week spending money, having to take turns commuting to Richmond to find temporary work, or by folks who found the lifestyle too difficult and left.
She believed strongly in equality, and was careful to include others in setting up by-laws that would prevent any one person from telling others what to do. An incisive thinker, she "led through persuasion" and helped put in place systems that still help make Twin Oaks the success it is today.
Over time, Kat helped form two other communities also still in existence: East Wind in Missouri and Acorn in Louisa county. She wrote many of the early Twin Oaks newsletters, as well as two books on the subject of Twin Oaks: "A Walden Two Experiment" and "Is It Utopia Yet?"
At the age of 70, with not much physical strength, Kat decided she wanted to try living in a house of her own, something she had never had the opportunity to do. She moved into a tiny little house in Mineral (near Twin Oaks and Acorn), and enjoyed planting many beautiful flowers, rescuing five cats of her own, and bottle- feeding the occasional litter as a foster mom. In December 2007, when she became too weak to live on her own, Twin Oaks graciously took her back in and took care of her in a way that only the most attentive and loving of families would have done. When she passed away, her beloved cat Oolong was by her side.
