Photo by Lars Nelson
The Old Oak Dojo at 14 Chestnut Place in Jamaica Plain is a place where neighbors gather to rediscover how to create healthy and resilient communities. This small studio, which shares a half-acre residential lot with a community home, is an experiment in dissolving the boundary between public and private. Its purpose is to provide a space for community to meet, learn, eat, celebrate and play—and thereby restore our wholeness as citizens. We invite people who share our commitment to creating a more racially, socially and economically just world to join us in using the space.
The Dojo operates in the spirit of gift culture, which means that we don’t charge fees for the use of the space. We invite people who love this place as much as we do to volunteer their time to help us maintain its beauty.
The Dojo achieved the world’s most rigorous building standard, the Living Building Challenge (LBC), which challenges us to ask the question, What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place? The building is made of locally sourced and salvaged materials, harvests and re-uses natural resources and supports more than 1,000 square feet of urban agriculture.