Raines Cohen is the Organizer of the Week for January 7 - 14, 2008

Happy New Year! This week we're visiting with an Organizer who's lifestyle and lifework is promoting a more sustainable society through the resurgence of utopian village and small town neighborhood values - cohousing.

Cohousing is a type of collaborative housing in which residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods. Think commune on steroids!

There is a wealth of information here. Our Organizer's 'topic' description closely mirrors the Meetup mission of using the Internet to get people offline...helping neighbors come out from behind the television and get to know that person or family living right next door.

Without further ado, I am pleased to introduce you to The Meetup Organizer of the Week for January 7 - 14, 2008 Raines Cohen and East Bay Cohousing.

Thanks, Raine!

1. Cohousing has been described as changing the world one neighborhood at a time. Please give us a brief overview of this growing phenomenon.

   This grassroots movement, creating our own neighborhoods, started in Denmark and has been in the U.S. for not quite two decades. Future neighbors (at least a couple dozen households) find each other and invest together to design and create a cohousing community, where they own their own homes (usually condos) with large shared areas (a "common house", kind of a typical condo clubhouse on steroids, with its own kitchen and big dining room) and shared resources like laundry and lawnmowers. Everybody has their own kitchen but we do meals together a few times a week, rotating the cooking.

   Parking is pushed to the edge so we can have a greener, pedestrian-oriented neighborhood where we can bump into, watch out for, and support one another. We run our own Home-Owner's Associations (HOAs) by consensus, so we focus on building community, neighborly relationships that help make things greener. There are nearly 100 built in the U.S. and more than that under development; it's the fastest-growing sector of the intentional communities movement. So far you'll find them mainly in college towns with clusters near Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Denver, Tucson, Ann Arbor, Ithaca, Raleigh-Durham, and Washington, D.C., but rapidly spreading all over.

   
   

2. How did you become interested and involved with the cohousing movement originally?

   I've been a community organizer for more than a quarter-century, starting in Junior High School back near Boston when I helped launch and grow computer user groups: the New England Apple Tree, Newton Apple Kids, Boston Computer Society; I helped start the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group (BMUG) while a University of California Berkeley student, and loved the feeling of connection and mutual support. I lived in student co-op housing and found myself drawn back to living in community a decade later. I joined a cohousing neighborhood under development and moved in three years later, in 2000. I ended up helping to put on a national conference and joining a couple of national nonprofit boards promoting community, as well as doing regional organizing to help people find each other to form new neighborhoods.

   
   

3. How long have you lived as part of a cohousing community? Pros? Cons?

   I've been part of developing cohousing neighborhoods since 1997 and living in two since 2000; first in Oakland, CA and for the past five years with my now-wife in a small one in Berkeley, CA.

   It is a lot like a small town or village: you know your neighbors, and they know you, through conversations over dinner and physical proximity. If you need to borrow something, whether it's a cup of sugar or a car, you know who will be around, who will have it, and who will be willing to help. You don't have to drive for or schedule playdates or social outings, and coming home to fresh-cooked meals a few times a week is sure fun. I learn a lot from my 6-month-old neighbor, as well as my 77-year-old neighbor. Of course, they know what I'm up to, so I've voluntary given up a little privacy, trading it off for greater quality of life.

   While some people who've never heard of cohousing before think of it as being like roommates, coops, or communes, really it is more of an "intentional neighborhood"... and I do find myself explaining it a lot. I don't have to spend as much time and money on maintenance and yard work as an individual home-owner would, but I put more effort into building relationships and meetings. training on conflict resolution and group process so we can effectively live together in community.

   The cohousing development process is a financially risky, time-consuming process, like any other Real Estate venture. It can be heartbreaking to find that longtime friends you've gotten to know through the site-search process will be unable to move together with you on a particular site, or that a particular site you've worked on for a long time is not feasible, or a city council won't approve a development; but if you have confidence in the overall process and in people generally, you'll be able to make it through to the next week when everything somehow comes back together again.

   
   

4. East Bay Cohousing is a successful, longstanding Meetup group. To what do you owe this longevity?

   The group was up and running using other tools before we started using Meetup, so it had strong identity and sense of mission from the get-go, and we've tried to understand and use Meetup's unique,evolving tool set to keep it growing. We don't schedule meetings just to fill out the calendar, but try to rotate different types of activities and we bring attention and attendees to other people's events rather than doing it all ourselves. We focus on leadership development rather than soup-to-nuts service delivery. We try to make it financially and time-wise sustainable, without high-dollar costs for events that would scare people away, but between passing the hat in general and finding free and cheap meeting places and charging more for classes, it's no problem covering Meetup fees and other operating expenses.

5. Many of the tools necessary to live in a cohousing community mirror the skills needed to organize a successful Meetup group. Please share three vital points that have helped you create a cohesive welcoming Meetup community.

   While Meetup's organizer tools make it extremely easy to operate on "autopilot" and just keep doing the same thing in the same place as last month, I find it works best to take control and keep on customizing: I update my group description and about pages (and sometimes, even the categories) to reflect recent, annual, and upcoming events. I try to open up the group to include other events, like tours and slideshows that others are organizing (even though it can be a lot of work to make sure that our RSVP's feed into someone else's parallel registration process and our members don't get confused). I use alerts and searches to find people and events that belong on our calendar, and use the "Add Note" feature to fill it out; I intentionally turn off automatic notices on some events and consolidate listings into a single email.

   It's all about the people: I keep an eye on new member notices and post customized welcoming "Shouts" on profiles, and suggest connections with people and places, not all just in the group. I design meetings with processes that have not just explicit goals (i.e. learn about modular green housing options) but also implicit social goals (i.e. get the participants an experience of cooking together and learning from mistakes). I use other social networking / event services like FaceBook, Craig's List, Yahoo Groups, Tribe, and even Twitter to (appropriately) cross-promote events and make sure the right people hear about 'em through trusted connections.

   Real-world organizing and outreach is as important as online; humility is key. Everywhere I go, I wear an "ask me about cohousing" button. I look for opportunities to speak in front of groups that might get people involved as well as other speakers I can put in front of audiences. I slow down and listen, and make it clear that I don't have all the answers. I think about evocative questions that will help people see the value in what I'm doing, rather than a hard-sell. I embrace the power of stories and focus on creating safe spaces for people to be able to hear one another's stories.

   
   

6. I've noticed you're part of many other Cohousing Meetups throughout the world. Do you interact with each other?

   I join and follow a few other intentional communities, real estate, investment and environment groups (on MeetUp and YahooGroups and now GoogleGroups and blogs) in order to learn from and keep up on what they're doing, and I try to cross-promote events where appropriate, trade tips, and build visibility. Demand far exceeds supply, and each group has its own geographic and project focus, so we don't see it as competitive.

   Regionally, we host events that reach across different cohousing groups and reach out to other types of communities. Nationally, we work together through the Cohousing Association of the U.S. (Coho/US) and Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) and hold annual conferences to share best practices. I've also worked with other regional groups to help get them to work together to participate in events like regional Green Festivals.

   
   

7. Please share with us your favorite and/or defining Meetup moment.

   Oooh, this is a tough one. I think what's really got me excited lately is seeing someone who was active in our group four years ago and who dropped out get involved again much more seriously than before. It helped remind me to step back and look at the big picture, the longview, that by being a resource here over time we are helping people keep on moving to the next step on their path, whatever it may be.

   
   

8. What's on the horizon for East Bay Cohousing in the years to come?

   With the Real Estate market potentially turning and the movement growing, new 0pportunities are opening up to do projects faster than before, so we will be offering more regular learning opportunities to get people together and up to speed, ready to move fast when sites come on the market. We'll probably do more get-to-know-one-another events (perhaps modeled after "speed dating") and do more games simulating the process of building and living in community.

   We'll also be trying to do more activities like common dinner and workday exchanges for and between the existing cohousing neighborhoods in our area, since we have more here within a few miles of each other than anywhere else in the U.S., and the U.S. city (Oakland, CA) with the most built communities.

   A big growth area in cohousing is in age-specific "senior cohousing"(aka "elder cohousing" or "active adult") neighborhoods, with Baby-Boomers with grown kids looking for alternatives to isolation or institutionalization, where they can enjoy the second half of their lives and maintain independence through interdependence. We already started a second MeetUp group with a larger geographical area (Bay Area vs. East Bay) focused on "Aging In Community": http://seniors.meetup.com/64/

   
   

   Be sure to share your congrats with Raines in the Organizer's Forum!