One of the most radical part of the vision is that we want all of the activity to be infused with fun. I want to establish the first silly charity in history. Foolishness is embraced, often to extreme, in even the most profound of situations. In our normal, serious world with somber environments (even though no research supports being serious and thousands of research papers encourage joy and humor as healing), we saw no contradiction in feeling that a non profit organization could also be an amusement park, even implying it is important for staff and patient.
The ideal staff people we looked for were, by intention, happy, funny, loving, cooperative and creative. I knew the key to the creation of this beautiful model was in the people deciding and choosing to live there; because it is people that really make a model. Ideas can only be as real as the people living them. Politically, our most potent wedge for change would be living happily together, in constant, joyful service, fully expressing our creative selves at extremely low salaries. The point was not to try to teach a staff this, but to find people for whom this was their way of life.
