Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Attracting KIDS!

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

>WHAT CAN WE DO TO ATTRACT MORE KIDS/FAMILIES??

1. Provide childcare at your meetings and advertise that fact well.  
The words "childcare provided" sends a big message to parents that this 
is a kid friendly place. It also enables parents to participate fully.  
Assess childcare costs to everyone, not just the parents.  IMHO this 
makes a group commitment to the kids and is a sign that the group as a 
whole supports the parents.  We actually hire two people to do 
childcare  for each general meeting which costs about $400 a year, 
which is in our annual budget. (We pay premium for, and expect and get 
excellent child care).

2. Advertise in local parent forums.  Do you have baby diaper service 
in your area?  Our baby diaper service has a monthly newsletter, in 
which people can advertise.  If there is a local parents forum 
advertise in that.  The local co-op preschools in our area have a 
newsletter which will take advertisement and short articles.  Search 
out organizations which cater to kids or parents.  I wrote an article 
for our local parenting newsletter which became a feature story of that 
issue and got us lots of attention.

3.  Make the benefits to children and families part of your recruitment 
materials.

4. Be sure in your site planning you include a play area for kids, and 
kids space in general.

5.  When you get a few tentative parents coming to meetings, hold a 
special parents forum to talk about the kids, their special needs, your 
hopes and dreams as parents.  What this does is make people realize how 
isolated they are now, and how wonderful it will be to have lots of 
other parents to bounce parenting pressures and issues around with.

6.  Start a childcare swap setup right away.  In this way, my kids come 
to play at your house for 4 hours, then your kids come to play at my 
house another day for 4 hours.  You don't have to live together to make 
this work out nicely, and again it makes people release how wonderful 
it will be when you all live next door to each other and can do this 
swap easily and effortlessly.

7. Create special activities for kids such as a valentines party, a 
kids day, or a field trip somewhere.  Make opportunities for kids to be 
a part of the group by contributing ideas about kid centric features, 
etc.   Be inclusive of kids, not exclusive and the parents will be 
attracted.  Recognize each child's birthday, and don't ever miss any.  
We used to do a monthly birthday party where we celebrated all the 
birthdays which fell on that month.  Now we celebrate each kids 
birthday at dinner.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood