Cohousing-L Mailing List: How much accomodation for mainstream?

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

>My opinion is that it's truly important for communities to establish in 
>unambiguous way what they believe
>in.  The less ambiguity, the better chance to avoid some types of 
>problems in the future.
>The ambiguity serves the initial and paramount need of selling units, 
>but really sets things up for trouble in
>the long run, because it creates a great likelihood that people with 
>potentially incompatible sets of values end
>up living next to each other.
>
>Best,
>Racheli.
>
I totally agree. I'm closely observing a neighboring Eco Village project 
in its planning phases and they are being fearlessly alternative. Yes, 
they will lose some potential members who can't live without a large 
house and free-ranging pets, who don't value a sanctuary for ceremonies 
in a yurt, or end the meetings with a song, or study permaculture and 
nonviolent communication techniques,  but my guess is that they will end 
up with enough people AND a common culture. 

We set our RoseWind community up with a stated value on "diversity", but 
personally I've moderated that over time, as I see the value of modelling 
a less-mainstream version of things. We did an admirable job some years 
ago of offering information and hospitality to a potential joiner who was 
a nuclear-submarine captain about to be stationed at Bangor, where the 
Trident fleet has 1700 nuclear warheads able to annihilate the world. I 
did tell him he'd need to be comfortable about after-dinner announcements 
of anti-nuclear events, but that "maybe we could carpool" some times when 
he was going to work and others of us were going to protests to get 
arrested there. AND I was relieved when he got stationed elsewhere and 
dropped his interest in moving here. 

I prefer living with people who share some of my basic values. There is 
plenty of diversity anyway, of personal and family-of-origin cultures, of 
attitudes about money, about privacy, about use of commons, and a hundred 
other issues. This does enrich things, but it doesn't derail them. I'm 
not saying I want to be an enclave of well-educated pagan white folks -- 
it doesn't matter to me what race, origin, religion etc people have --  
but (and I speak personally, not for my community) some degree of  
ethical, environmental, and political values in common seems to me to be 
a strength, and an opportunity for modelling an alternative to mainstream 
culture. Each community will find where it fits on the spectrum: there 
have always been intentional communities across the spectrum, but many of 
the successful ones do have a commonality (including far-right groups). 

I'd be interested in hearing about how other groups have experienced 
mixing mainstream and alternative perspectives in a major way in 
cohousing. 

Lynn Nadeau, RoseWind Cohousing
Port Townsend Washington (Victorian seaport, music, art, nature)
http://www.rosewind.org
http://www.ptguide.com
http://www.ptforpeace.info (very active peace movement here- see our 
photo)