Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Themed, affinity, or specialty cohousing

[David Heimann (heimann]

Hello,

	Another specialization on cohousing is Jewish cohousing, which 
Roger Studley from the Berkeley Moshav posted about on March 16-17 is a 
thread about "'Specialized' Cohousing".  In that thread, Roger gave 
details about how a specialty theme works, specially a Jewish one.  Also 
Sharon Villines emphasized the necessity of having a solid theme for the 
specialty to coalesce around -- e.g., Jewish cohousing has Judaism, with 
all its tradition and body of knowledge (and an active organization of 
Jewish intentional communities, see Robert Tabak's October 31, 2016, post 
to this list), whereas an artist cohousing does not and hence makes it 
more difficult to organize.

	Someone also mentioned Camelot Cohousing which, similar to the 
aforementioned Silver Sage Cohousing and Bartimaeous Community 
developments, partnered with a non-specialized cohousing community (Mosaic 
Commons) in building their vision (they remain active and you may want to 
check with them to see if they're still living their specialty of 
medievalism).

        Good luck, and all the best!

Regards,
David Heimann
Jamaica Plain Cohousing


Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2017 06:17:04 -0500 (CDT)
From: Fred H Olson <fholson [at] cohousing.org>
To: Cohousing-L mailing list <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Themed, affinity, or specialty cohousing
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I would argue that cohousing communities will often have shared
interests that naturally arise out of the interests of the members.
And that shared interest may play a role in who decides to join.
That is, people become aware of and self select in part because
they are attracted to communities with members with whom they share
some interests or at least a general perspective.

This relates to the difficulty of some kinds of diversity that has
been noted in threads on that topic.

Whether that shared interest rises to the level of being a "theme"
will vary and probably seldom be a defining characteristic.
And the shared interest may be rather general.

One community that, as I understand it, had a shared interest in
community organizing is / was On Going Concerns community in Portland
Oregon. They have not been very connected to other cohousing
communities much. They are not in the directory --
http://cohousing.org/directory . I do not know how the community is
doing - I do not have any contacts there. I did visit them years ago.
I think they were on a tour or were open to visitors related to a
cohousing conference years ago. I have this little page about them:
http://mn.cohousing.org/retrofit/ongoing.htm

Can anyone give an update on them?

Fred

--
Bassett Creek Cohousing, Minneapolis  http://mn.cohousing.org/bcrk/
Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
     Email:        fholson at cohousing.org      612-588-9532
My Link Pg: http://fholson.cohousing.org