Balanced Budget Secret Weapon

Mac Thomson

After decades of doing this, Heartwood Cohousing has a pretty successful annual budgeting process in place and a secret weapon for arriving at a balanced budget that they’ll share with you.

Community Wood Shop/Work Space

Bryan Bowen and Scott Drennan

We will talk about how to get your community’s work space or woodshop up and running, what to include, and how to manage it over time.

Common Meals

Sheila Hoffman & Spencer Beard

Learn one simple and effective approach to your community’s meal program with no money changing hands. What makes it work and how can you adapt it to your planned or existing community? Hear from two founders, vegans, who visited many communities to synthesize their successful 3x week, 100% participation meal program.

Policy Review

Jenevieve Russell

Remember your guiding documents? Do they need to be updated or reviewed? Are they dusty or are they living, breathing documents? Have some ideas of what could use some changes, not sure where to start? Let’s get together to workshop some practical ways and ideas together! 

Mosaic: a web app for empowering cohousing communities

Sean Davey

Mosaic is a custom web application that is specifically designed to meet the online organizational needs of cohousing communities. The basics of Mosaic will be presented, followed by a roundtable discussion about how web apps could improve and meet community needs that aren’t currently being met.

Social Teams: before and after Covid

Lydia Thrasher & Vlad Barash

Bay State Commons

How do you manage the social life of your community, especially if your community doesn’t share a living space yet? Bay State Commons will share their approach to socializing – how we inspire our members (and prospective members!) to have fun together and get to know each other better. We’ll discuss BSC’s system for planning and hosting social events, including: scheduling, assigning teams, budgeting, how the system’s evolved as our community has grown, examples of past event ideas, and most importantly, the challenges and achievements of staying connected in the age of quarantine.

Getting the Work Done

Laura Fitch

How do you get all your community work done? Each cohousing group needs to decide what tasks to include in community work, what system to use to connect each member with their tasks, how to organize meals work in particular, and whether and how to enforce work agreements. In this session, we will explore the “affinity work system” used at Pioneer Valley Cohousing which has just celebrated its 25th year and is still going strong thanks to a robust work system.

Emergency Preparedness

Marilyn Chin

Living in community is not only the sharing of resources or common meals or participating in governance, it is also knowing what to do when an emergency occurs. This session will describe how one community developed its emergency preparedness and its 9-1-1 protocol through practice. This topic is targeted towards forming and established communities to thoughtfully anticipate and practice emergency scenarios from medical to catastrophic in order to minimize trauma.

Replacement Reserves – ignore them at your peril!

Lyons Witten

Hear from expert Lyons Witten on how to keep your community’s buildings and finances in good shape for generations. He will explain the importance of setting up replacement reserves (RR) from the date of move in, what is typically in an RR spreadsheet, where RR money is invested, and how the spreadsheet is updated annually. Your community will benefit greatly from a healthy RR account!

Common House Reservations and Fees

Mike Mariano

Inspired by the cohousing model of collaboration, mutual support, and trust, your community can bring generosity and abundance to sharing the use of the Common House and other spaces. Using examples from cohousing communities in the Pacific Northwest, Mike will share approaches to revenue generation, maintenance, and ongoing stewardship. A social equity lens will help identify resource contributions that are valued, meaningful, and more widely available to all those participating in community.

Mutual Aid – A Panel Discussion

Neil Planchon, Bonnie Fergusson, Liz Walker, and David Jaggar

Members of three different communities will share their stories of ways their communities have pooled resources to help community members in need.  Each will tell of the structure they used, the success of the program and what they have learned along the way.  Join us to learn about “Spare a Dime”, “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” and “Rainy Day Fund”.  

Cohousing Home Pricing for Equity and Affordability  – How move from project costs to home sales price

Joren Bass & Eric Granum (UDP)

During the development process all communities must translate project costs into final home sales prices. This is one of the most important financial and collective decisions communities must make. A well-designed community will likely have a diverse mix of unit sizes and types. Each home will likely have unique attributes such as location within the community, differing access to light and views, or constructed attributes such as extra bathrooms or balconies. So how do you create a pricing framework that follow the basic cohousing principles of equity and shared affordability and also reflect the common market conditions for appraisal and financing.  This session will discuss pitfalls and successful approaches for developing communities can use to set home prices.