Cohousing-L Mailing List: Community Budget Data Solicitation (again)

[R Philip Dowds (rpdowds]

Cohousing Friends —

COHO COST OF LIVING DATA SOLICITATION.  Back in November, we announced that the 
Cohousing Research Network (CRN) and CohoUS are collaborating on a “cost of 
living in cohousing” research project.  Since then, we’ve received useful and 
interesting responses from more than a dozen communities.  Who knew, for 
instance, that annual per-unit dues could vary from one coho to another by a 
factor of five or more?  Our intent is to continue collecting detailed 
information on community budget and finance, and make a report at the CohoUS 
national conference in May 2017, Nashville.

HOW YOU CAN HELP.  For this research project, we’ve not designed any long 
questionnaire or laborious form requiring you to make unique calculations.  Our 
methodology is much simpler:  Just send us your stuff.  The same stuff your 
community and its members rely upon for budget and finance matters.  In 
particular, what would be useful to us are …
Your most recently adopted annual budget agreement, as consensed by your 
community before the beginning of the fiscal year.  For most of you, this will 
be the same as the calendar year, ending in December 2017 (thus, FY17).  We’d 
like to see the whole proposal you processed and adopted, including 
schedule/timeline, text narratives, tables of numbers — whatever it was you 
considered during the budget adoption process.  We do NOT need to see any 
information about the fees or dues assigned to individual units.
If you have one, any EOY (end of year) financial report you obtained for the 
previous fiscal year (probably FY16 ending in December 2016).  Again, take out 
any unit-specific information.
When we have this material in hand, we will translate the data into our own 
analytic model, lump it together with other data, and analyze it to expose 
patterns and develop conclusions we think will be useful to all cohousing 
communities.

CONFIDENTIALITY.  Anything you send us will be guarded in strict confidence.  
Only the conference panelists and members of the CRN Steering Committee will 
have any access to your original files.  Your community’s detailed information 
will NOT be shared with consultants, vendors, or even the Board of CohoUS, and 
none of our public reports will be in a form where the particulars of your 
community can be identified.

QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS?  We continue to contact many of the communities in our 
cohousing directory, but we encourage you to reply to us now.  If you are ready 
to volunteer information, you can e-mail to costofliving [at] 
cohousingresearchnetwork.org <mailto:costofliving [at] 
cohousingresearchnetwork.org>.  Or, if you have questions or comments, please 
get in touch with either of us.  Thanks in advance for supporting a project 
that should benefit you and your community, and many other intentional 
communities as well.

Sincerely,

Philip Dowds
Coho US Board (Treasurer)
rpdowds [at] comcast.net <mailto:rpdowds [at] comcast.net> / 617.460.4549 
<tel:617.460.4549>

Angela Sanguinetti
CRN Director
cohousingresearchnetwork.org <http://cohousingresearchnetwork.org/> / 
angelasanguinetti [at] gmail.com <mailto:angelasanguinetti [at] gmail.com>