I live in Mt Baker's shadow...near Bellingham. I also have had many thoughts about establishing community thorughout my life, but never really knew how to act upon it. I have scanned most of the posts and everything listed by everyone is what I have already read or started to plan for my/our future.
This is an old, but interesting article on money and different views of economy.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=886
It comes off of this site, well worth checking out,
http://www.fourthcornerexchange.com/
However the article is written by Bernard Lietaer ( who wrote a book called "The Future of Money" which none of the US book publishers would publish in the US). Anyway it's a great resource to re-think and re-tool how we want our community economy to look like.
I am not an economist, which is why I have been trying to figure out how to do things differently (meaning with respect to others and earth).