Work: A Clinic for Ailing Common Meals Systems

Joani Blank

Your common meals aren’t frequent enough, or not nearly enough folks attend those meals. Or the meals are too much work, or the record keeping is frustrating. Or there’s something else about your common meals that just doesn’t work as well you'd hoped it would. Bring those challenges to the clinic and we will aim to come up with a diagnosis and treatment plan. Although this session is designed for people living in cohousing communities, those in developing groups will benefit too as they can learn in the workshop how to avoid common pitfalls in designing a common meals system.

Joani Blank has lived in two cohousing communities in the S.F. Bay area for a total of 16 years (and has visited 61 others). Several years back Joani surveyed 19 U.S. communities about their common meals systems and wrote an article published in the print magazine Cohousing, which has been useful to many new communities in their planning. Coho/US will be doing a new and broader survey later this year, and will use the information gathered to update that article.