Meet our Board

Meet the committed, generous individuals who steer the Cohousing Association of the United States. We are actively seeking new board members to assist us in our mission. If you feel called to participate as a board member, you can find the application and the board member expectations in Microsoft Word format here: http://www.cohousing.org/docs/board_application.doc. If interested, please send a completed application to pam [at] dtbprojects [dot] com. Thank you for your interest.

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Terri Hugget
Daybreak Cohousing
Portland, OR

Terri is a co-founding member of Daybreak Cohousing. She is a principal in CircleWorks with Daybreak co-founder Kristin Wells promoting collaborative and community building efforts. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago and a Diplome from the La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine in Paris (hey, food is a big part of community building). And years of experience in business, project management, the food industry, and now development and community building. The rest of the community has helped bring me an appreciation of the need for a lifetime of communication skill building. Being a part of the Coho board is a way of giving back to a large community that supported us and supporting the community movement.

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Laura Fitch
Pioneer Valley Cohousing
Amherst, MA

Laura Fitch is a principal with Kraus-Fitch Architects, Inc. in Amherst, Massachusetts and a 16-year resident of Pioneer Valley Cohousing. Kraus-Fitch Architects specializes in energy-efficient building design for homes, commercial properties, and smart growth communities. They have worked on programming, schematic design, and/or full services on over two-dozen cohousing communities across North America.

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Pam Gilchrist
ElderGrace Senior Cohousing
Santa Fe, NM

Pam is a member of the ElderGrace Senior Co-housing community in Santa Fe, NM where she has served as the liaison between the developers and the initial residents. Having lived in a variety of intentional communities, she is enthused about co-housing concepts and the synergistic blend of private and community life. She sees co-housing as a way to live more sustainably on our beleaguered Earth; she aspires to do what she can to spread the word.

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Richard Kohlhaas
Casa Verde Commons
Colorado Springs, CO

Richard is a founding member of Casa Verde Commons beginning in 1999. He has a PhD in electrical engineering and is a retired US Air Force officer and business owner. At Casa Verde, he served on the HOA board for six years and is currently business manager. He is also on the finance, maintenance, and landscape maintenance teams, and serves as security manager and workshop manager.

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Steven Ablondi
Memel, South Africa

Steven Ablondi is creating senior cohousing as a promoter and developer in Memel, a town in the Drakensburg mountains of South Africa. He feels much can be done to reduce the amount of time necessary to create cohousing communities and has purchased land, received municipal permits and planted organic gardens and orchards for clusters of homes to be built with natural materials and using alternative energy. Steven has had field assignments with the United Nations in Cambodia, Bosnia and Angola. He is a graduate of the Northfield Mt. Hermon School, Wesleyan University and Vermont Law School. He makes his home with his wife on Lake Champlain in America and in the Memel Drakensburg in South Africa.

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Richart Keller, AICP
Pioneer Valley Cohousing
Amherst, MA

Rick Keller is a community/environmental planner and facilitator with a wide range of experience including housing consulting and development and environmental consulting. He has a longstanding commitment to social justice and to the development and application of creative and sustainable solutions to improving the quality of life for all. He has served as a board member and staff of numerous non-profit organizations. A graduate of Earlham College, he did his graduate work in community planning and coastal management at the University of Rhode Island.

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Jeffrey Ellis
Watersound, FL

Jeffrey Ellis is a native Floridian and the only current Southeastern resident actively serving the National Cohousing Board. He has been involved in all aspects of real estate since the early nineties and has been a Florida Licensed Real Estate Broker/Associate for the past fifteen years. As a longtime coastal Florida resident and Realtor, he has seen many people displaced out of beach living as the cost of residing near the water has become so cost prohibitive as each year passes. With this clear understanding, he and his wife recently purchased some multifamily zoned acreage and are currently in the infancy stages creating and forming one of Florida's newest Cohousing Communities. In his spare time, Jeffrey is a triathlete including being a multiple international IRONMAN Finisher, multiple marathon, long distance swimming and cycling finisher as well. In all, he has done over 250 endurance events since the early eighties.

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Join us! You can help us lead the movement by serving on the Coho/US board and our working teams. Learn more.