Units, Groups, & Classes
The Social Architecture of the Branch and Village
I. How the Community Is Organized
An Enterprise Owner’s place in the community starts on a floor. Ten Enterprise Owners and their dependents share that floor as a unit; four floors make a branch; ten branches make a village; four villages make a district; twenty-four districts make a community. What follows is how that structure actually runs — who leads at each size of grouping, how the community’s four demographic classes turn into everyday social groups, how age-based classes organize teaching and fellowship, and how the weekly and quarterly rhythm holds it all together. How any of it gets paid for is a separate question, taken up in Gathering and Event Economics.
An Enterprise Owner is an adult who has committed personal capital to the community and built a Business Enterprise — a business, developed with the community’s help — sufficient to support themselves and any dependents in their care. Dependents (children, elderly or disabled family members, and others not yet able to sustain themselves) live under the care of exactly one Enterprise Owner.
| Grouping | Who’s in it | Roughly how many people |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | ~10 Enterprise Owners, one floor, plus their dependents | ~25 |
| Branch | 4 units — one apartment building | ~100 |
| Village | 10 branches | ~1,000 |
| District | 4 villages | ~4,000 |
| Community | 24 districts | 75,000–100,000 |
These headcounts include dependents. A Business Enterprise paper that instead needs “how many leased suites” — one per Enterprise Owner, no dependents — is asking a different question and will land on a different number (the Clothier’s 92,160, for instance). Both are right for what they’re measuring.
II. The Four Classes and Their Groups
Every Enterprise Owner and dependent falls into one of four classes, by chromosomal sex and self-declared partnership status: partnered males (A), partnered females (B), single males (C), and single females (D). Partnership is read broadly — legal marriage, cohabiting as spouses (including same-sex partnerships), or a stated plan to raise a family together — using a common-law standard where formal marriage isn’t yet in place, or isn’t affordable, in an Enterprise Owner’s culture of origin.
Within a branch, pairs of classes combine into four groups of about fifty each:
| Group | Classes combined | Who’s in it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Partnered | A + B | All partnered Enterprise Owners and their dependents |
| 2 — Singles | C + D | All single Enterprise Owners and their dependents |
| 3 — Males | A + C | All male Enterprise Owners and their dependents |
| 4 — Females | B + D | All female Enterprise Owners and their dependents |
These groups share the same four base classes as the community’s governing courts (Constitutional Master, Section 6), but they’re a different institution doing a different job. The courts generate the 480 governing presidencies of four and 640 presidencies of three across the whole community; the groups just organize everyday life on one floor and in one village.
III. One Office, Three Names
A branch has exactly four captains — one per class, one per floor — who together make up the Branch Presidency. No additional office exists beyond those four: “captain of ten,” “captain of fifty,” and “captain of one hundred” are the same four people, named for the size of the group they happen to be serving, not three separate jobs.
| Title | Who’s being served | Population |
|---|---|---|
| Captain of ten | Their own floor and unit | ~25 (10 Enterprise Owners + dependents) |
| Captain of fifty | A group — two floors sharing a class, e.g. both partnered floors | ~50 |
| Captain of one hundred | The whole branch, as the Branch Presidency | ~100 |
The same pattern continues at the village, district, and community size of grouping — a village president serving on the twelve-member village council is a captain of a thousand — without ever multiplying offices, following the presidencies-of-four and councils-of-twelve structure already set out in the Constitutional Master.
Captains serve four-year terms and are the only public servants required to live where they serve — on the floor housing their unit — with selection and any relocation arranged well before a term begins, and entry and exit pegged to the birthday of the president being replaced. A change in a captain’s declared partnership status mid-term never disturbs the office: someone who begins a term single and partners along the way simply finishes the term they started.
IV. Classes: Age Cohorts
Within a group, participants further sort by age into classes — the setting for most of the community’s teaching on Business Enterprise, economics, and constitutional principle.
| Class | Age range |
|---|---|
| Nursery | 0–2 |
| Toddlers | 3–5 |
| Young children | 6–9 |
| Pre-teens | 10–12 |
| Teens | 13–18 |
| Young adults | 19–31 |
| Adults | 32–72 |
| Empty nesters | 73+ |
This is the only sense in which “class” is used here — it has nothing to do with the four demographic courts in Section II.
V. The Weekly and Quarterly Rhythm
Units, groups, classes, and branches each keep their own rhythm, staggered so no two groupings compete for the same slot:
| Gathering | Frequency | Who | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Branch meeting | Weekly, Sunday, 45 min | Whole branch (~72 attend) | The four branch presidents rotate presiding and clerking |
| Class meeting | Weekly, right after the branch meeting | One group’s classes | Groups 1 & 2 on the 1st & 3rd Sundays; Groups 3 & 4 on the 2nd & 4th |
| Unit event | Monthly, a Tuesday lunch | One unit | Rotates by unit across 12 weeks of the quarter |
| Village weekday event | Weekly, Monday–Thursday | One class, village-wide | Pools that class across all ten branches |
| District week-13 event | Quarterly, evenings Mon–Thu | Whole district | Falls in the thirteenth week only |
| Community conference | Quarterly, the 13th Sunday | Whole community | Four parallel courts meet; Friday/Saturday cultural days precede it |
Villages take turns starting their Sunday meetings at 9, 10, 11, or noon on a four-year cycle, so every village eventually gets every starting time.
VI. Related Reading
| Source | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Constitutional Master, Appendix B | Canonical bureau and bureau names |
| Constitutional Master, §§6, 9, 13 | The four courts, and how presidencies of three, presidencies of four, and councils of twelve are generated |
| Captains of Ten | The documentary basis for the captain-of-ten office |
| Gathering and Event Economics | How the meetings and events described here are actually financed |