Cohousing-L Mailing List: Household composition in North American CoHousing (fwd)

[gpye (gpye]

Recently, I responded to Joani Blank's survey on the make-up of coho 
communitites.  It brought up a question that might be useful to some on 
the list:

Our group is several families with kids (one will have first child in 
October).  Then, we have one single mother and one couple with no kids 
(and not planning on any).  

So, we're not having the problem of finding families with kids.  I've 
heard that groups without many kids really have trouble attracting 
families with kids.  What we do have, though, is a problem with energy.  
Kids take lots of energy and we do have a lot of difficulty getting 
everybody together for meetings.  The only reason I have lots of energy 
for the cohousing-list and other activities is that my child's not born 
yet.  It'll be very interesting to see what happens after that.  

It seems like a Catch 22 that  I want to be in cohousing partly so that 
there is more of a community to interact with while raising a child (and 
friends for the child of course), but having a child seems to make it 
more difficult to have the time for meetings and all the details that 
have to be accomplished with developing cohousing.

How do you find the time?  Would be interested to know if groups 
which *do* have lots of children have more trouble getting parents to serve 
on committees, etc.  Any creative solutions (especially for the 
development phase)?

Ginger W. Long
Mimosa Grove Cohousing (Mogo Coho)
919-544-6362
gpye_Long [at] ncsu.edu

"No matter where you go, there you are."    --Buckaroo Banzai