Cohousing-L Mailing List: CoHousing Conference

[Kevin Wolf (kjwolf]

We just received the call for presentations for the October Co-Housing 
conference.  I help develop conference in my consulting work and think that 
this conference offers a wonderful opportunity to 
help all of us co-housers.  I would like to put a proposal out to this 
on-line community for discussion.  It may be that the organizers of the 
October event do not feel it apporpriate to take the result of our 
discussion into designing the 1994 event.  I think our on-line discussion 
could be useful for the 1995 conference or might spark some other means 
to advance it.  

Donno Spreitzer and I think that a gathering of representatives of 
different co-housing communitys would be a great time to have groups of 
us tackle some of the more difficult problems we face and see if we can 
reach a "consensus" on:

        The problem
        Its causes
        Best solutions, preventions etc

The results of these "meeting" workshops could be summarized in a page 
and published - on line certainly and possible in print.  

Based on some of the discussion in this list, I would offer the following 
"problems" and ask that others add to the list.

- Kids in community meals
- sweat equity
- getting members to start a new community
- how to best do "retrofit" co-housing
-  financing

In the conference groups I work with, we are moving more and more to 
excellent facilitators moderating a panel of "experts" and/or the workshop 
participants as a whole.  One thing that I am sure the October co-housing 
conference will have is a lot of experience faciliators.  

Depending on the depth of the topic, a workshop/meeting could last from 
as 90 min to 3 or 4 hours.  If these types of breakout groups happened in 
the morning, they could report back to a plenery session of all 100 
participants in the afternoon.  (Some people would not be interested in 
certain topics and could do personal visiting when that subject was 
brought up at the plenery.)

One thing I realized from this list (and knowing the Muir and N St  
communities fairly well) is that we all have many of the same problems.  
Our collective experience, put together in a good process, could provide 
summaries that would help the overall movement.  Buidling community does 
not without work and becomes easier with experience.

---
Kevin Wolf
724 N St
Davis, CA 95616
phone and fax: 916-758-4211