Caroline Clarice Estes

Estes—Caroline Clarice Estes, 94, on July 13, 2022, in hospice care at Alpha Farm, an intentional community rooted in a shared vision of harmonious living near Eugene, Ore. Alpha caregivers, family members, and hospice staff supported Caroline in her final journey. She was buried at Alpha Farm.

Caroline was born on March 14, 1928, in Oklahoma City, Okla., the only child of Leonard Fuqua and Madelia Fay Jenkins Fuqua. Her parents divorced when Caroline was five. She and her mother moved to her maternal grandmother’s home in Sherman, Tex., where they lived among a large extended family. Her grandmother’s gracious welcome made a deep impression and set the tone for Caroline’s approach to community decades later. Around age ten, Caroline and her mother moved to San Francisco, Calif. There she graduated from Lowell High School.

Caroline attended the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University. Around this time, she was married for two years to Dwight Rush. Following college, Caroline taught at the California Schools for the Deaf and Blind in Berkeley (now located in Fremont), and later served as a legal secretary to attorney Melvin Belli. She married newspaper editor Jim Estes, and both joined Berkeley (Calif.) Meeting. Caroline and Jim raised two daughters, Maria and Ronnie Mae (later known as Trinity).

Caroline became active in movements for peace and social action, beginning with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid-1960s. She used her experience with Friends business meetings to help large diverse groups make decisions by consensus at a time when this approach was virtually unknown outside of Friends. In the early 1960s, the family moved to Philadelphia, Pa., where Jim and Caroline worked for American Friends Service Committee. Caroline refined her understanding of consensus decision making.

Caroline received inspiration to start an intentional community and returned to the West Coast as a founding member of Alpha Farm in 1972. She helped guide Alpha to adopt a form of governance based on Quaker principles and practices including consensus and peacemaking. From 1973 until 2016, the community operated Alpha-Bit Café as a bridge to the wider community. Caroline served as manager, hostess, and chef.

Caroline worked closely with Ed Morgenroth, a friend and mentor, during his tenure as clerk of Pacific Yearly Meeting. Ed’s clerking skills and style were a model for Caroline. She put peacemaking and community building into action in ever-widening circles. She became a leader in the intentional communities movement and served for many years in leadership positions with the Fellowship (now Foundation) for Intentional Community.

Through Alpha Institute, Caroline used her skills as a group facilitator to develop the use of consensus among secular groups such as the North American Bioregional Congress and the Greens’ national conferences. From 1994 to 2009, Caroline worked extensively with Waldorf schools and other nonprofit organizations across the United States and Canada.

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 husband Jim once said. She held to her Spirit-led vision of Alpha with a tenacity that at once inspired the community’s life and enabled it to survive, but also limited its capacity to evolve over time. People came and left because of Caroline. Her legacy lives on at Alpha Farm, now the longest continuously running intentional community in Oregon.

Caroline was predeceased by her husband of 55 years, Jim Estes, in 2013.

She is survived by two children, Maria del Rosario Navarro Davis and Ronnie Mae (Trinity) Carey; four grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and many “chosen family” members at Alpha Farm.