Cohousing-L Mailing List: True stories of an aging do-gooder by Alan O'Hashi

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

True stories of an aging do-gooder: How cohousing can bridge cultural divides 
by Alan O’Hashi. 

I guess those who know Alan will know that this is a very personal book. It’s 
about the experiences in his life that led him to cohousing and influenced his 
adaptation to cohousing. He lives in Silver Sage and is on the board of the 
Cohousing Association. His experience is so varied that he addresses many sides 
of cohousing as well as telling a good story. 

My favorite image is of himself as a Japanese American feeling like a raisin in 
white cohousing oatmeal.

He raises lots of issues but I want to put them in separate emails so it is 
easier to identify and focus discussion. One perennial issue is the lack of 
ethnic diversity in cohousing, it’s all oatmeal. Few raisins or even nuts. In 
all honesty, in many parts of the country are not ethnically diverse so 
creating an ethnically diverse cohousing community would mean importing people 
from miles away. I don’t think communities should beat themselves up for not 
doing this.

But Alan has a lot of discussion about this including a suggestion that may be 
the number one helpful suggestion of the decade. For buckets of Oatmeal to go 
out trying to convince a happy Raisin to jump in is likely to make the Raisin 
feel like a decoration just for show. Not something that is integral to the 
meal.

Alan tells the story of a person looking for an ambassador, someone who could 
introduce an ethnic group to cohousing and a cohousing ambassador to the ethnic 
group. In fact this is creating the most frequent source of new members — 
friends of friends of friends. It isn’t enough to say, well you need to have 
more ethnically diverse friends. True, but how many years do you want to add to 
the populating of this community? And given the  small percentage of people 
interested in cohousing, how do you find the new friends that will also be 
interested in cohousing. And in the mood to pack up and move. The timing and 
access have to be finely tuned.

Finding an ambassador increases the reach and spread of information without 
appearing to be looking for decorations. We want one of those, one of those, 
and two of  these if we can get ‘em.

As I’m writing this, I’m also thinking about what would happen if the Oatmeal 
started by explaining their own ethnicity. Oatmeal may look all white but just 
as there are many kinds of raisins, including nuts, Oatmeal is not just a bowl 
of white mush. These are the origins of my granddaughter measured from her DNA, 
in order of percentages:

England, Wales, Northwestern Europe, Cameroon, Congo, Bantu, Sweden, Germanic 
Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, Norway, Greece, Mali, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, 
Italy, Ghana

While many people would identify her as Oatmeal, many others would identify her 
as a Raisin.  How they view her will also be influenced by the story she tells. 

I think we don’t actually know how diverse we are already.

Alan’s book is on Amazon in print and ebook versions.  The printed copy has a 
unique format — it follows the new paragraph style of one sentence. Easy to 
read with lots of white space.

Thank you, Alan,

Sharon
——— 
Sharon Villines
http://affordablecohousing.com
affordablecohousing [at] groups.io
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