In a recent post I talked about the aprons we use as part of our welcoming ceremony for new members. And I haven’t put it into the context of our overall welcoming ceremony. As with our community, our welcoming ceremony is informal and homey. And it still has a little structure. The idea was to… Read More
Last year Americans drove 5 billion miles caring for seniors in their homes (Meals on Wheels, Whistle Stop Nurses, and so on). In our small, semi-rural county in the Sierra foothills, Telecare made 60,000 trips in massive, lumbering, polluting vans-buses – usually carrying only one senior at a time – schlepping a couple thousand seniors… Read More
by Terri Huggett Part of the joy and struggle of creating a new community is creating the threads that hold us together. In our society and in our workplace, we often take for granted the structures and rituals that help us identify with each other. Many entrepreneurs have experienced the process of building a business… Read More
By Sterling Newberry At various times, we at Daybreak Cohousing have felt the strain of so much work to do in developing our future home. We realized early on that we needed to be especially conscious of building in pure social time as a balance to all our work, and to ensure that our extended… Read More
As one of the co-founders of Daybreak Cohousing, I spent a lot of time in the early stages researching what communities who had come before us had done to build their communities, both physically and as people. The Get It Built Workshop by Katie McCamant and Rick Mockler of Cohousing Partners gave me a solid… Read More
The Great Depression, probably not, but we sure have a mess on our hands. On Sunday, October 5th In Fresno, CA the Cohousing Partners and McCamant and Durrett Architects (MDA), and an awesome cohousing group celebrated the grand opening of La Querencia cohousing among hundreds of well wishers, under glorious blue skies and next door… Read More
By Diana Leafe Christian If a cohousing community uses the word “ecovillage” in its name, is it really an ecovillage? What does that mean, anyway? Today I got an email from a cofounder of a cohousing project in the Northeast. She wrote, “Can you tell me how a community gets to use ‘ecovillage’ as part… Read More
By Diana Leafe Christian If you want to join a cohousing community, in my experience there are at least two ways to plan visits to likely existing communities and/or core groups of forming communities. One way is to visit only those that seem like likely candidates — communities or groups you’re actually considering joining, given… Read More
An acquaintance of mine, Chris Zimmerman, owns and operates a couple of assisted-care facilities in Alameda, California. He inherited one at age 23 and subsequently built a second one. He’s now 60, and despite the limitations of an assisted care environment, he has developed astute theories about seniors and elders. Like many observers of the… Read More
Diana Leafe Christian What happens when a cohousing community changes in values, lifestyle, and “community culture” over time? And how might this affect you as an a new incoming member? I have a good friend who lives with her young son in a cohousing community she helped to start. When she and the other founders… Read More
By Diana Leafe Christian If you’re looking for a cohousing core group or existing community to join, you’re probably thinking about what you want. You may also be considering what personal characteristics tend to lead to enjoying —even thriving — in cohousing. Because I live in community myself, and I’ve talked with many others who… Read More
By Diana Leafe Christian “The results of this water test are enough to make the hair on the back of anyone’s neck stand up!” the scientist at the testing lab told my friend. Soon after she bought a home in a brand-new cohousing community, the weather turned cold. She and her neighbors turned on the… Read More
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