Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Why doesn't cohousing get more national news coverage?

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Munn Heydorn asked:
> Is there a single, coherent, effective PR voice for
>cohousing?  Who or what organization can write or encourage such articles?
>Does some organization or person currently track and keep a record of
>published articles?

At the Boulder Conference there was a break out group at the burning 
souls meeting to establish a national organization. Also was a break 
out group talking about PR.  I am not sure if either of these are 
actually being followed up on.

The Cohousing Company has a collection of articles which they have been 
sent.  They also end up by default being a clearing house for cohousing 
contacts since they (Katy and Chuck) wrote the book.  Perhaps in a 
couple years when there are more successful built out communities there 
will be more examples to write about.

In that most people have not heard of cohousing is not surprising, 
after all there are only 16 communities with maybe  450 people living 
in them. Small potatoes at the moment.  When our numbers reach into the 
thousands, then the national press core will be more interested.

I write abit about cohousing for local stuff.  I have seen other 
similiar articles in other places.  I have also seen articles in the 
Wall St. journal, World and News Report, Mothering, etc.  We need a 
feature writer to hit the home magazines like family circle, redbook, 
etc.  The NPR story happened because I ran into an NPR corespondent at 
a friends wedding and happened to mention community dinner.  He got my 
email, sent it to Sarah Sorenson and off it went.  There must be other 
connections out there for us - Family members who know someone, etc.

I agree that a consistent message for cohousing needs to be developed 
and distributed.  We do have an interesting story to tell and the 
Cohousing book, especially the new version does tell it pretty well.  
One of my projects has been to buy a box of the old books ($40 for 30 
books from the Cohousing Company) and send them to people like the 
state housing authority department, the Seattle housing authority 
director, the governor, etc.  Costs me about $3.00 each to do this, may 
just be a waste of my money (Ok, so I stopped drinking Latte's to do 
this), but who knows?

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood