William Aal

Bill is deeply involved in social and environmental justice work with a focus on agricultural sustainability and social healing. As part of Tools for Change, he is known for his activism and training in the service of racial and gender justice. Versed in opening the heart and imagination, awakening people’s best thinking and inspiring group transformation, Aal works with group reflection to unleash collective genius in organizational settings. He has worked with many co-housing  projects and intentional communities all along the West Coast. He is also co-director of UnConference.net, providing innovative meeting design and facilitation for industry, education and the scientific community. Bill co-authored Practical Meditation for Busy Souls (2008) with long time partner Margo Adair who passed away after a long illness in September, 2010. Her work lives on.

Sarah Arthurs

Sarah Arthurs with Cohousing Connections is a graduate of the 500 Communities Program and an affiliate of CoHousing Solutions. She is currently working on cohousing projects with Katie McCamant in Canada. Sarah has lived at Prairie Sky Cohousing , for over a decade and is motivated by the richness of that experience to make the connections that help cohousing to happen.

As a psychologist, group therapist, person of faith and Zoom enthusiast, Sarah is also excited to work with existing groups to assist them in thriving during these unusual times. Please contact Sarah@cohousing connections.ca to discuss how as a community you can say yes to the unexpected invitation this pandemic offers; an invitation to explore more deeply what it means to be neighbours.

Sky Blue

Sky Blue has spent the last 20 years living, working, and organizing in intentional communities, cooperatives, and community organizations. He has visited over 130 ecovillages, cohousing, coliving, co-ops, and communes in the US and Europe. He served as the Executive Director for the Foundation for Intentional Community and has worked for the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, Global Ecovillage Network of North America, and consulted with a variety of projects and events. As a movement builder he explores the relevance of intentional communities as laboratories and training grounds for addressing the systemic problems humanity faces.

Karen Gimnig

Karen Gimnig is a facilitator and consultant for cohousing communities, and Communications Director for the Cohousing Association of the US.  She supports communities in building richer relationships as the foundation for effective process and collaborative living and guides communities to engage conflict productively and safely. She believes that ongoing monthly support offers communities the best opportunity for relationship success.
Karen is certified as a Professional Facilitator with Imago Relationships

Rebecca (Becky) Hogue

Becky is a member of Treehouse Village e(Cohousing) located in Bridgewater Nova Scotia, Canada; however, Rebecca currently lives in Sunnyvale California. Treehouse Village is in the development phase with members located as far as California and the UK. Prior to Covid-19, we created hybrid online-face-to-face retreats. Since Covid-19 we have had to change our model and make our retreats fully online. We have a successful model that our community members enjoy, which we would like to share with you. Rebecca’s professional background is as an instructor in the uMass-Boston instructional design program and a cofounder of Virtually Connecting (http://virtuallyconnecting.org).  She brings her experiences with online community building in other contexts to her work with Treehouse Village.

Mary Kraus

AIA, LEED BD+C is a cohousing architect and facilitator who has worked with over two dozen communities in the US and Canada over the past thirty years. She was a founding board member of the Cohousing Network (now Coho US). She lives at Pioneer Valley Cohousing, the first cohousing community in the eastern US, where she can be found preparing dinner in the common house kitchen with her cook team.

Elizabeth Magill

Liz joined Mosaic Commons Cohousing in 2002 and moved in 2009. She’s been on the Community Support team since early on. Her day job is as a pastor, writer, and workshop leader, helping people address the hard things in life.

Alan O’Hashi

Alan has a diverse professional background beginning with a career in city and tribal management and land use planning in Wyoming. After moving to Colorado his interest evolved into nonprofit fund development, including several years building Habitat for Humanity homes. He also served a term on the City of Boulder Planning Board and recently completed a stint on the Boulder Affordable Housing Working Group. After being laid off a job, he grew tired of working for marginally competent bosses, and took some production classes at the local public access TV station and am now Executive Director at Back Country Media and haven’t looked back. He’s currently producing two documentaries about cohousing – having lived at Silver Sage Village for six years. He looks forward to helping move cohousing into the mainstream.

Ted Rau

Ted has lived in Pioneer Valley cohousing since 2010 and is part of their Community Life circle as well as the governance improvement circle there. He is a song-writer, plays in video-editing, and he is a transgender parent of 5 kids.

In his work life, he supports workplaces and volunteer organizations in using sociocracy, as a trainer, coach and writer. He is co-founder of Sociocracy For All, an international organization with more than 130 members worldwide. He is co-author of the sociocracy manual “Many Voices One Song: Shared power with sociocracy”.

www.sociocracyforall.org  @sociocracyforall.org

Laird Schaub

Laird has lived 41 years in intentional community, mostly at Sandhill Farm, an income-sharing community he helped found in 1974. He launched a career as a group process consultant in 1987, and has worked with more than 150 intentional communities (including 70 cohousing groups), both as a trainer and as an outside facilitator to help groups navigate anaerobic dynamics and organizational snarls. His specialty is up-tempo meetings that engage the full range of human input, teaching groups to work constructively with conflict, and at the same time being ruthless about capturing as much product as possible.

Gina Simm

For over 30 years Gina has been teaching in early childhood education. Most significantly, her knowledge of Nonviolent Communication has transformed her classroom into a place where systems of the heart create a child-centered environment for moving through conflict. She was asked to write a book about her systems for staying connected and has recently published Heart to Heart. Gina lives in the Pioneer Valley Cohousing Community in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she is the leader of the Care and Counsel Circle.

Watch here for information on our speakers as it becomes available.