Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Seeking advice re mentally ill community member

[Raines Cohen (rc3-coho-L]

On Mar 31, 2007, at 8:56 AM, Eris Weaver wrote:

> (I don't know your community, so maybe I'm missing something obvious?)

Eris -

I visited Earthaven last summer before the national cohousing  
conference in Chapel Hill, and it is indeed very different from most  
cohousing communities:

- It is rural, 45 minutes from the nearest city, up some small roads.  
In isolated communities, softer borders with neighbors re  
'membership' are more common
 (but there are differences between communities, I wouldn't want to  
paint them all with the same brush... for instance, Earthaven members  
do have independent incomes, just like cohousers)

- It is massive, spread across hundred(s?) of acres, with less all-in- 
one-place clustering than is typical for cohousing.

- It is not cohousing, it is an ecovillage established with some very  
different values around property, ownership, place, relations with  
neighbors
 (although there is a cohousing-style neighborhood as part of the  
community... cohousing is a building block used in ecovillages, but  
with the community overlays and context it can look fairly different)

http://www.earthaven.org/

- People have largely built their own natural-materials houses  
without bank financing

That said, there is a lot of shared experience from all types of  
communities, including cohousing, that can help. I haven't commented  
because others on this list have done so so eloquently. One aspect  
where cohousing has helped the intentional communities movement is to  
lead the way in bringing in professionals of all sorts to help us  
build and live more effectively in community: be that architects,  
bankers, developers, process professionals, and, yes, even mental  
health professionals. In the same vein, we can learn from ecovillages  
about how to build community businesses, adopt values and practices  
related to living more lightly on the earth, and build international  
collaborations as well as work well with neighbors.

Raines
at  Berkeley (CA) Cohousing
who just learned of a documentary