Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: communities of communities

[David L. Mandel (75407.2361]

Funny you should mention that, Mike. And here's hope to the correspondent from
Highline Crossing.

We've been moved in almost two years. During that time we've given lip service
to the idea of keeping lists of people wanting to do other cohousing projects in
the area and have an impressive-looking one, but nothing at all was happening.
In fact, it seemed strange to us that since our core group broke away from a
Sacramento cohousing umbrella in early 1990 the umbrella group vaporized. We
even incorporated it as a nonprofit with our original name (River City
Cohousing) while taking on our neighborhood name for the project. But zilch.

Now a few of our members have taken the initiative to hold a couple orientation
meetings a couple weeks ago. Publicity brought in about 25 people, some of whom
had been around before, and a number of them seem enthusiastic about trying to
start something. We're letting them meet regularly in our common house for a
while and time will tell. The head of the architectural firm that designed our
homes has been coming, apparently trying to drum up some business and interested
in a fast track in which he would take a leading role. And a couple of the
organizers from among us seem to smell a job prospect working for/with him for
$. I'm a little concerned by that and would prefer for any new group to take its
time finding its own way and setting goals, which may involve a very different
process (or processes) from the one that more or less worked for us. And I want
to make sure they learn from our mistakes and the pits we fell in. But then if
we knew about all that before we started I wonder whether we would have
undertaken the journey.

Anyway, it feels good to see some more stirrings in Sacramento finally. Any
thoughts on the paradox I've raised? -- that you may still need to be a crazy
dreamer to pull off what we did and if they learn too much from us about what it
was really like they may be discouraged.

David Mandel, Southside Park Cohousing