I The Cohousing Association welcomes blog posts from anyone in the cohousing movement

63 communities -. These communities opened their doors for National Cohousing Open House Day, Saturday, April 27, 2019. Click on listed address for a map link, but please don’t actually go there without making prior arrangements (don’t make us have to take down this list). Every cohousing neighborhood is independent, and there’s no substitute for… Read More

With forming communities wanting to be as diverse as possible, the topic of Housing Segregation and its Impact on Cohousing couldn’t be more important. Crystal’s recent WebChat describes the history of segregated housing in America, the ways in which federal policy created and maintained segregation, and the ongoing impact of those policies and ongoing racist… Read More

Strong facilitation makes for effective and efficient meetings. One ticky part is the balance between the need for strong leadership and the need to be an equal member of the community. This is where contracting comes into play. A facilitator needs a clear agreement with the community about their roles in the meeting and what… Read More

One of the joys of working for the Cohousing Association is supporting the movement that is cohousing. We believe that cohousing is about more than what is achieved by any one community and more than the sum of those individual achievements. The collective potential of cohousing is literally to change the world. As cohousing grows,… Read More

Below is an excerpt from a Communities Magazine article. Read the full article at https://www.ic.org/im-not-a-racist-but-racism-is-in-me-and-in-my-community/ Author Joe Cole will be presenting at the National Cohousing Conference in Portland this June. A few years ago I attended a film showing at a restaurant in Durham, North Carolina. Seventy people turned out to watch the film, which… Read More

I would like to say that mine is a household where celery never goes limp in the crisper. That whenever bread gets stale and milk sours, I miraculously combine them into a delicious bread pudding. Hah. While I may have great aspirations to using every last scrap of food, the plain truth is that in… Read More

In community, and in life, there are many personality types and many ways for those personalities to clash despite everyone’s best intentions to get along. There is a framework from the theory of Imago Relationships that distills this down into two general patterns. I find it useful for understanding a lot of interpersonal conflict and… Read More

Retrofit Cohousing Is there another way to create cohousing? Many of our wonderful cohousing communities have been built on a foundation of member investment with a great deal of support from building professionals. In this week’s WebChat, Alan O’Hashi considers a variety of paths to cohousing. 1. Stout – the most common approach requiring a… Read More

Yana Ludwig’s second WebChat was another great success. This time she tackled the topic of Cooperative Culture, giving us 6 of her 10 strategies for being effective in cooperative governance. Yana begins with an introduction to the extremes of the cooperative spectrum and the dangers of overcompensating. Then she guides us toward balance in the… Read More