In 2010, I attended the National Cohousing Conference in Boulder along with two days of training at the Coho University to learn about how to start a cohousing community. I traveled there with a friend and met two other ladies from Nashville while at the conference.

We all traveled back to Nashville and started meeting right away and organized a great group of people. The conference was an incredible event with a wealth of information both from professionals who built these and members who lived there. We decided immediately that if we were going to see a community in Nashville, a blue city in a red state, we would need professional help.

So, we set out to use qualified professionals and in 2011 we held a ‘getting it built’ workshop with Chuck and Katie McCamant. And they described the property where we should build as a place that “on Saturday morning a young mother with baby in carriage could walk to a coffee shop.”

Early 2012 we found that land, an acre in Germantown, a charming community near downtown Nashville with great restaurants and a wonderful coffee shop walkable to this community.
The conference was unquestionably the launching point for this new community now under construction to be ready for move in late spring 2015. If you have a chance to go to the conference this next May, 2015, don’t question it, go!

Diana Sullivan, Germantown Commons, Nashville, Tennessee