In a recent post I talked about the aprons we use as part of our welcoming ceremony for new members. And I haven’t put it into the context of our overall welcoming ceremony.

As with our community, our welcoming ceremony is informal and homey. And it still has a little structure. The idea was to make the ceremony a re-bonding experience for everyone and a simple, but heart-felt welcome. At their inception, rituals can feel a bit home-spun, but they build quickly and don’t need to be elaborate.

I've just returned home from the National Conference in Seattle this weekend. I want to express my deep appreciation for the incredible effort it took to put this event on, the inspirational presence and talks by Jan, Mark and Robert, the great presentations, volunteers, and participants. And much, much more! I'm exhausted and exhilarated. Let's use our energy to further the movement.

Raising a Family in Cohousing, Part 1

Cohousing is often touted as ideal for families. As a mom in a developing community, I thought it would be good to capture how cohousing shapes our family and how family shapes this community.

Let's begin at the beginning. My name is Tiffany and I moved to Portland, Oregon, at the start of 2006. I lived in Seattle and my husband-to-be lived in Portland. Since my family lives in Oregon and my husband loves Portland like a friend, I made the move here.

The first thing we did was to find a nice place to rent to give us time to think about how and where we wanted to live. Alex, my hubby, had been following a listserv about cohousing in Portland and he told me what he knew about it. Intrigued, I agreed to go to some of the meetings that different forming groups announced on the listserv. I went to a cohousing social on my own and met the folks starting Daybreak Cohousing (then Sunrise Cohousing). I told Alex that he had to meet them too.

Part of the joy and struggle of creating a new community is creating the threads that hold us together. In our society and in our workplace, we often take for granted the structures and rituals that help us identify with each other. Many entrepeneurs have experienced the process of building a business AND a culture from the ground up. Communities aren’t much different.

At various times, we at Daybreak Cohousing have felt the strain of so much work to do in developing our future home. We realized early on that we needed to be especially conscious of building in pure social time as a balance to all our work, and to ensure that our extended family relationships grow along with the infrastructure.

Our Sharing Suppers were started to give us planned and very flexible social time together. The sharing suppers are scheduled, twice monthly affairs. We set the dates ahead of time, attempting to place them such that they are not too close to other community activities. And then ask for a volunteer host.

As one of the co-founders of Daybreak Cohousing, I spent a lot of time in the early stages researching what communities who had come before us had done to build their communities, both physically and as people. The Get It Built Workshop by Katie McCamant and Rick Mockler of Cohousing Partners gave me a solid overview and foundation in the overall process and I highly recommend it. I found a wealth of generosity and information on Cohousing_L and in talking with folks in our local communities here in Portland, Cascadia Commons, Trillium Hollow and Penninsula Park Commons.