At the end of May, I facilitated a half-day intensive on Racism and Racial Equity in Portland at the National Cohousing Conference. While cohousing communities are overwhelmingly white, I see more and more people in the communities movement recognizing the need to address racism. In our conference session, we discussed the history of racism in... Read More

Joe Cole joined us this evening for a thought-provoking presentation on Addressing Racism and Working for Racial Equality in Community Building. Joe started with a long view of history, noting that the competitive culture of domination is recent, only 5000 years. Prior to that human cultures were collaborative, demonstrating that a cultural values of sustainability,... 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

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

For most families it is easy to imagine the benefits of sharing a cohousing community with other families with kids the same age. Naturally the kids will play together, the parents will have peers moving through the same stages together, and carpooling to activities is likely. I want to take a moment to write about... Read More

Public Presentation Addresses Senior LGBT Housing Crisis Durham, NC— Village Hearth Cohousing invites anyone interested in solving the senior LGBT housing crisis to a free public presentation on Friday, August 25th at 4:00 p.m. at Southwest Regional Library in Durham, NC. The presentation will feature architect and cohousing expert, Charles Durrett (McCamant & Durrett Architects)... Read More

Cohousing communities, ecovillages, co-ops, and other Intentional communities of all kinds are a response to problems in society. They are a recognition that some of the essentials that make community what it us, mutual support, love and caring, sharing lives and livelihood in a meaningful and satisfying way, are lacking in the world. Not all... Read More

Not all topics are created equal. In the context of cooperative culture, some topics are much tougher to get at than others. Here are half a dozen that I encounter regularly. These are by no means all, but they’re representative. If your group consistently handles any two of these well, you’re way ahead of the... Read More