Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Cohousing, Communes, Community--Not for Profit! Please

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Jean.

>Changing from our American individualism to a more
>cooperative way of being is (1) painful and (2) what it's all about.  Since
>it is not commercially viable to market things people find painful, "what
>it's all about" will have to go. That's business.

I hope we can all work together to find ways to make it not painful.  
Actually I think living cooperatively can be very unpainful, especially 
if all you do is buy an already built home in a cooperative community.  
This possibility already exists and grows each year.  We will need to 
market homes in Nyland, Winslow, Sharingwood etc. and all the rest.  
There are levels of cooperation which span a very broad spectrum and it 
would be very easy to adapt some cohousing stuff to other places 
without much pain at all. For example, a bunch of my friends started 
out with a weekly dinner club. They also found themselves sharing a 
bunch of tools, time helping each other etc.  All this inspired from 
what they saw at Sharingwood as valuable to them.  Painful? Not.  You 
don't have to create a whole real estate development from scratch to 
live more cooperatively, it's actually the extreme case to do so. (So I 
guess that makes you and me and the rest of us a bunch of extremists 
huh?  :>)

If you get the interest check out the book Creating Community Anywhere: 
Finding support and connection in a fragmented world. By Shafer and 
Anundsen. There is a lot of good ideas and examples of simple ways 
people can live more cooperatively.

>By the way, you didn't answer my question.  Which was, what did you find out
>about the Shasta group?  Are they building a community?  Or are they selling
>off parcels of land for vacation condos?

The message called it " a gathering for people who are interested in 
cooperatively buying....the description from the mail of the 
property..."  I didn't talk to a real person so who knows?