Cohousing-L Mailing List: Stories about making accessibility a priority?

[Laura Beck (laurabeck]

Hello everyone,

I was hoping to reach out to the co-housing L  community and ask to hear 
inspiring stories about how other communities have made accessibility a 
priority or have made it a point to go above and beyond just the ADA 
baseline requirements.  Our second neighborhood group here at Ecovillage 
at Ithaca is in the process of designing our common house.  During our 
eight month envisioning process for the new common house, the group 
determined that accessibility was second only to affordability in our 
list of top ten most important qualities for the CH.  Now that we have a 
committee working busily to design the CH, it's time to revisit our 
initial commitment to accessibility and take it deeper.  Understand that 
we have residents with multiple chemical sensitivity, so we are 
exploring accessibility broadly and wish to accomodate varying needs. 
But as the design process becomes more complicated in an effort to 
juggle so many varied needs and limited budgets, some issues of 
accessibility are being somewhat questioned.  I've been asked to help 
research this issue, particularly because it is loosely related to the 
work I do and it is a passion of mine.

Any stories you may have about your common house design in particular 
and accessibility in your community in general would be so appreciated. 
If you don't want to post your stories to the listserv,  also feel free 
to send them to my address at laurabeck [at] ecovillage.ithaca.ny.us.  I 
thought it would be great to share what other communities are doing with 
our group here.  Thanks for your help!

Laura Beck
Second Neighborhood Group (SoNG)
Ecovillage at Ithaca
Ithaca, NY

_______________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list
Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe  and other info:
http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L