The Alternative Tribe was envisioned over a period of years by Carissa Rodgers (now acknowledged as Jionni Olamide) a former pastor who saw the Church as a vehicle for organizing communal life in a sustainably holistic manner. After accepting the inherent sociopolitical issues attached to Eurocentric institutions, she began studying other methods and avenues to accomplish the same end. The Tribe is an effort to move the most effective of those methods into community to empower the collective to re-imagine and re-create a new future for itself that reflects common unity, shared values, culture and abundance.