Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Individualism and togetherness

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Joani asked:
> Am I too pessimistic to think that those who opt out of the 
dining/cooking will be the
>same folks who rarely come to meetings, who don't know "our" kids too well,
>who share themselves very sparingly with others in the community, who do their
 >share of the work mechanically if at all? I even worry that certain
>expressions of individualism, if practiced by a significant percentage of the
>group, could lead to its eventual demise.

Because we are only in the beginning prototype stages of cohousing in 
America, we will not have an good data, on what I would call community 
sustainability, for several years.  The intentional communities that 
have been around for several decades now, and all those which have 
disbanded, have many lessons to teach us.  In my own inquiries into 
community sustainability the common thread that long term communities 
seem to share is a commitment to a specific shared vision or purpose.

How will Cohousing Communities change when everyone went through the 
struggle to start the community is gone?  How will new people adopt and 
define the culture of cohousing?  Will the cooperative attributes of 
cohousing, such as community dinner, shared resources, child 
friendliness, social design, and neighborhood cooperation and security  
frame the definition of cohousing in such a way that the people who buy 
into it expect and want those things, and want them enough to be 
creators of those processes?  I think so and I think those attributes 
of cohousing have consistently come across in most all the national 
press on Cohousing I have seen recently.  If those were not the things 
you wanted, then why live in cohousing?

In each community there will be individual variations in levels of 
participation at dinner, how involved with kids a person is, how much 
they socially interact with others.  However, the grand sum of 
everyones contributions are much bigger than the parts.  Keep in mind 
that the proper evaluation of cohousings level of community is not 
against some ideal, but rather, how much better cohousing is to the 
regular suburban reality.  I can't imagine the expectations of existing 
cohousing groups would ever fall so low as to mirror the "real" world.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood