Cohousing-L Mailing List: Role for national co-housing organizion in disaster prep?

[Donald J Westlight (westligh]

Hello all,

We've been talking in our community about disaster prep, and it turns out that 
there are some things which might be done at a national level more effectively.

I can think of three:

(1) Maintain an archive of "cohousing best practices" for disaster 
preparedness.  [personal-case and community-case are different.]

(2) Provide out-of-state communications by pairing up co-housing projects 
across the country.  Each community would agree to provide a voicemail box, and 
one or more people to regularly check the box and update the message with 
status information of people in the affected community.  This would be 
pre-arranged, so that everyone would know in advance who (out of state) to call 
to leave word.

(3) Shelter destinations: e.g. if a co-ho community in a neighboring area/state 
faces catastrophic problems, send them (or some of them) to us, or vice-versa.
This one might be more tricky to set up and coordinate, but I think we 
co-housers might have sufficient resources to take care of our own.


I'm curious if anybody else out there thinks along these lines -- if there is 
sufficient interest, perhaps we can hash some of this out in this forum.


Don Westlight
Cascadia Commons Cohousing
Portland Oregon