Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Do you know of cohousing that has evolved in existing neighborhoods?

[Kathleen Walsh (kathleen]

Many years ago, Sunset Magazine published an article on a group of neighbors 
who lived on the same Portland, Oregon block who removed the fences separating 
their properties and formed a "cohousing-like" community based on monthly 
potluck dinners and informal permission to access the open land between their 
private homes, especially by their children---I believe they called themselves 
"An Ongoing Concern", cleverly inserting the name of one of the streets 
bordering the block, Going Street.

Another group of Portland neighbors formed a de facto "street collective" by 
creating and sharing a handbook describing commitments to pooling resources and 
fostering healthy connections in regular potlucks and action meetings focused 
on building community resiliency—actions like creating emergency planning 
agreements and buying certain products used in emergencies collectively.  
Street boundaries were used to define their Ainsworth Street Collective, which 
was a sub-set of the larger Cully neighborhood.

The members were folks who lived within the defined neighborhood boundaries who 
established a collective identity and purpose.  I don't think any financial or 
labor requirement was a condition of membership.

I believe the original handbook was written by one of the neighbors as a thesis 
project in urban planning or a related field—the concept did move forward 
initially through the work of a few Burning Souls, then grew capacity as time 
went by.  It seems the pandemic may have dampened the flame, but the potlucks 
are starting up again.

Kathleen Walsh
Portland, Oregon
________________________________
From: Cohousing-L <cohousing-l-bounces+kathleen=positivity.biz [at] 
cohousing.org> on behalf of Kate C via Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] 
cohousing.org>
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2023 7:49 AM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Cc: Kate C <katetx2001 [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Do you know of cohousing that has evolved in existing 
neighborhoods?


Laurie,
Other than the age focus, this sounds similar to the Village communities . 
Here’s one article. Maybe they’d be a source of information about setting yours 
up. It’d be very cool to connect your neighborhood “Cohousing” with a nearby 
Village providing a wider multigenerational extended family.

Kate
Sent from my iPhone
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