Cohousing-L Mailing List: List your community for National Cohousing Open House Day:April 27 (Saturday)

[Raines Cohen (rc3-coho-L]

Cohousing Communities: now's your chance. National Cohousing Open House Day
is coming up in just 4 weeks, on Saturday, April 27, and odds are, we don't
have your community on the list yet. It doesn't matter whether you are
living in community, building, dreaming or talking -- this is a great
opportunity to get some free publicity and help us build the movement.

The list of (so far) 30 participating communities is up for your review at:
http://cohousing.org/openhouse2019/communities

Feel free to share that page (but please don't print it yet, as we expect
LOTS of changes over the next month); an e-zine will go out by tomorrow,
highlighting the opportunity.

So now's your chance to fill out your event info on a simple form, and
we'll transform it into a listing on the page, with hours and description,
a link to your community website or (if you give it to us) the page for
your specific Open House event, plus a link to your address on Google Maps.

If you want to add your the info there, the simplest way is to submit the
form, which is linked on that page, and then within a day or two I'll
update the list, adding your entry.

Its OK if your forming group is meeting in a different place than your
community location (like Bay State Commons, which will be building in
Malden but is meeting at a cohousing community in Cambridge).

It is totally fine to do an open house day if you don't have any openings
right now; hosting an event is a great way to encourage neighbors to spruce
up, to build relationships with the extended community, and to be able to
tell people "don't just stop in anytime, come on open house day," so you
can feel more comfortable limiting tours and visits. Plus, you can build a
waiting/interest list of potential future renters and homebuyers, who are
"pre-qualified" because they already have been to the community. Extra
bonus: you're building awareness of the movement, helping new groups get
established, and garnering the political support that will be crucial to
creating new opportunities.

It is totally legit to do an event if just 1 or 2 homes will be available
to visit, or even if you just host a brief event in your Common House or on
your future site. Show a movie! Host an "(un)common meal" in which visitors
cook together in your Common House kitchen. Get it over with by doing an
early-morning event. Lots of groups have taken different creative
approaches. A few are doing events not on the day itself, like Hundredfold
Farm's community-visit overnight camp-out, the following weekend. You don't
necessarily need the whole community onboard if one or two members are
hosting it like any other private event, or if a committee can take it on.

One of our next steps, beyond recruiting additional groups to participate
(can you help spread the word to other communities?) is to work on helping
groups connect and coordinate, scheduling either joint events or open house
times that make it possible for people to get to more than one, publishing
regional maps, and the like. And we're running a social media campaign as
well.

Once you register, we'll be sending you some materials to help spread the
word locally, and to help log in participants.

Thanks so much for considering joining in the fun this time around. If
there's some reason why you're not participating, we'd love to hear about
that, too - please let us know so we can make it better meet your needs in
future years.

Raines Cohen
Coho/US Volunteer and Cohousing Coach / Cohousing CA community organizer
at Berkeley (CA) Cohousing