The backstory of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist describes the Vertumna Group as an intentional community with land and resources, choosing Esperanto as a common language and favoring an in-common approach to childrearing ("it takes a village") over nuclear families.
The Vertumna Group acquired their spaceship, The Stratospheric, as a mothballed museum curiosity. They obtained a large gene bank to improve human genetic diversity in the colony. They acquired the machine intelligence Congruence to help with the exocolony voyage and founding effort.