Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Other--can coho include for-profit activities

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

For starters, unless something has  changed, the term cohousing is no longer
a registered trademark, thus you can define  it anyway you want. There is
lots of variation in what cohousing looks like and there will be lots more
in the future. So don't let "The official cohousing organization" try to
define your cohousing community for you, its yours to create however you
want. There is a long history of people being uptight about what cohousing
is and isn't and you are free to ignore them. I do.

I know a couple of cohousing groups, including Arcata Marsh and Pioneer
Valley have commercial space as part of their cohousing groups. I also
recall a couple others have setup so that members get paid for work, for
example I am pretty sure that the family that runs the farm at Eco-village
at Ithaca runs a community supported business, and there were a couple of
other such examples I am not remembering where. So employment or business is
not necessarily a impossible thing to have within cohousing, but it is very
difficult to setup both a community and a business at the same time. I think
trying to do both at once would end up failing. However, if you could
attract existing business owners to become members of the cohousing, you
could easily then design and build space in common to support those in some
way. You need to be careful here though, I have heard of a couple of groups
that built space to support a members business who then left, and the space
goes unused. So you want to be sure you could lease such a space to
non-members in such a situation.

It is also very unlikely that one business could support 24-30 households
anyway, so a variety of business opportunities would be the best approach.
It would make perfect sense for example, if there was  support within a
membership, to build a business space onto the commonhouse which would then
be leased by the businesses within the community. In this way, businesses
could share resources and the community as a whole could use the lease money
for parties and other fun things.

Depending upon the situation, having onsite employment  could be a huge boon
for a cohousing group. The important thing I think which differentiates
cohousing is that working in such a business should not be mandatory, but an
option available. Many intentional Communities with onsite business
arrangement require members to work in the community business. This is what
I think is the critical difference between the two.

Rob Sandelin
South Snohomish County at the headwaters of Ricci Creek
Sky Valley Environments  <http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm>
Field skills training for student naturalists
Floriferous [at] msn.com


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