Our Sunday mornings lately have begun with kale, cauliflower, and heaps of carrots. Once a week, our neighbors gather to harvest veggies from our local community supported agriculture (CSA) farm. It is a worker-share arrangement, so each member contributes a couple hours of time each week or  pays in a larger sum to receive a… Read More

As the American economy recovers, the average new home size has reached an all-time high of 2,300 square feet. This is part of a cultural shift where many Americans are shying away from children sharing bedrooms, and bathrooms are becoming more plentiful and sophisticated. Homes have more than doubled in size since the 1950s, meanwhile… Read More

I am thrilled to announce that board member Alice Alexander has agree to serve the Cohousing Association of the US as our new Executive Director. In addition to being a co-founder of the Durham Central Park Cohousing Community in Durham North Carolina, Alice has a tremendous amount of experience working within, and managing non-profit organizations…. Read More

I asked Daniel if we could post this here because it’s about a great deal more than wifi. -cat The best advice I can give around wifi is to be careful about how you talk to one another about it – treat those with differing experiences or thoughts respectfully while having the discussion. Our community… Read More

Terri Huggett, Daybreak Cohousing 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…. 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

Tiffany Yelton Bram, Daybreak Cohousing Raising a Family in Cohousing, Part 1 Cohousing is often touted as ideal for families. As a mom in a developing community, I thought it would be good to capture how cohousing shapes our family and how family shapes this community. Let’s begin at the beginning. My name is Tiffany… 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 entrepeneurs 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

By Terri Huggett, Daybreak Cohousing 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… 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

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 “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

Cohousing is a hoot – it really is. When I walk onto the site after a hard day at work and chat with a couple of the 37 kids, or see cutie one-year-old August smiling in his mother’s arms, well, it makes my life worth living. When I walk into the common house an hour… Read More

By Diana Leafe Christian If you’re looking for a forming cohousing community, learn to “read between the lines” in directory listings and websites. • I observed in my book Creating a Life Together that only about 10 percent of forming intentional community groups succeed, and about 90 percent fail. And while the statistics for cohousing… Read More

The best size and number of households seems to be one of the big challenges facing cohousing in America. Cohousing communities in Europe have shown over and again that the optimum size is not too big and not too small. Create a community that is too big and an institutional feel and sensibility will result…. Read More

By Diana Leafe Christian Friday night (7/25), I gave a talk at the “Community Seeker’s Fair” which kicked off the NICA Gathering here in Portland (described below). I talked about characteristics of people who tend to do well in community: confidence and assertiveness, humility (they’re not mutually exclusive), a willingness to pitch in and work,… Read More

By Diana Leafe Christian This blog entry is in response to Craig’s Forum comment on June 4th in the “Researching Your Community” Forum about “Do-ers” and “Be-ers” in cohousing. I think most cohousers are good-hearted, compassionate people. And I have a working hypothesis that cohousers (and people in intentional communities in general) apply compassion in… Read More