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

Watching “Strategies and Perspectives for Anti-oppression in Cohousing” with Crystal Byrd Farmer, Sky Blue, Elliot Cisneros, and Mathilde Berthe from the recent Connecting in Cohousing conference I got to thinking about the way we build communities and our struggle to make them diverse. While I’ve been aware of many factors in the struggle for some… Read More

Transitions are stressful, even the good ones. When I was raising toddlers, their father traveled for work. The departures were hard. The returns were harder. Partly it was because I didn’t see it coming. After looking forward to his return for weeks, it did not occur to me that it could be both joyful and… Read More

PDX Commons, a senior community in Portland Oregon’s southeast neighborhood, decided it needed a video tour to replace the in-person ones we were accustomed to giving pre-Covid.  Our live tours were popular but given covid no longer tenable.  So of course the first act of any cohousing idea is to form a committee.  We kept… Read More

Karen Gimnig, Imago Facilitator and co-author of ’The Cooperative Culture Handbook’, led a large workshop  of Washington Commons’ members and Explorers interested in building community and deepening our connection to one another. Karen asked each of us to write 10 responses to the prompt, “Our vision is realized, we have moved into our new homes, and… Read More

I joined Driftwood about two years ago at a time when the group had been formed, land bought, and consultants and architects hired.  I found myself frustrated with our monthly General Meetings because I always wanted more exploration of the ways other communities had done things and the meanings of different choices. There simply wasn’t… Read More

2020 was a challenging, unexpected, and successful year for the Cohousing Association of the US.  It didn’t go exactly the way we planned, but we made the most of what we had and found we were actually quite prepared for the online connection that was required.   For more about 2020 in the life of the… Read More

At RoseWind, even as we continue with physical distancing and masking, we are bolstering our social connections, beyond emails and zoom meetings. This past week has seen deliveries of candles, home-made cookies, biscotti, jam, and yogurt; promise of delivery of a gourmet Christmas dinner to our single members; darning and mending favors; help getting a… Read More

“Let’s vote on it, and if that’s what the group wants to do, I’ll sign off”.  Everything inside me screamed NO, this is so NOT how we stay in community with each other! This is plain wrong. If we take a vote, then we have winners and losers. And one potential loser now has declared… Read More

An excerpt from “True Stories of an Aging Do-Gooder … How cohousing bridges cultural divides” by Alan O’Hashi There are a few terms that get tossed around when it comes to outreach to the broader public. “Publics” is a term I learned while a public relations intern during graduate school. A “public” is a group of individual people… Read More

Throughout 2020 forming cohousing communities have been enjoying the benefits of the Community Launch program with CohoUS.  We’re making it even better for 2021.  Jennie Lindberg of Sunnyside Village Cohousing describes her experience with the program this way: I want to give a big “shout out” to the Community Launch program at CohoUS. As a… Read More

The Community Partnership Program: Win-Win for Communities and Coho/US! Anyone who has participated in a Coho/US conference knows how much they learnedindividually – and the wealth of information and experience they brought back to their homecommunity. When a community joins the Community Partnership Program, every member getsunlimited access to all of the online conferences. That… Read More