Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Celebrating milestones during development?

[Craig Ragland (craigragland]

Songaia's ground breaking party and ceremony included a golden shovel
dance... we bought a bunch of shovels, painted the business end gold and had
fun playing with them to music. We also, of course, "broke ground" - in
advance of the heavy equipment.

Over the years, as I''ve watched that paint wear away, I'm fondly (mostly)
reminded of our early, pre-cohousing days when we were ever so focused as a
whole group on a common goal.

We celebrate A LOT here - as do many cohousing groups and communities - I
suspect its more common among the highly functioning groups.

An important thing we do is to document most celebrations and other events
with photos. We use these in an annual reviews every New Year's Eve, this
blends photos with brief notes of significant events, e.g. Marilyn Retired.
The year's memories are displayed for the next year on our "wall-o-wonder"
in the common house. So, 2007 is up on the wall right now. These photos and
notes will be taken down a few days before New Years, and placed into one of
our community albums - an archive of what we remembered at the end of each
year.

We started doing this years before move-in, so this record goes back pretty
far.

A few years ago, we added an annual DVD to the mix - basically a photo show
to music, with special effects and a little video - its been a lot of fun
for some of us to create. Its easy to do this with software that's included
on the Mac and in Windows these days. This was shared in the Cohousing Film
Fest at the 2008 National Conference.

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Kristen Simmons
<simmonskristen [at] gmail.com>wrote:

>
> Did your group do anything special to celebrate big milestones during the
> development process? Our group might have a milestone soon, and it would be
> nice to do something to celebrate it, since so much hard work went into it.
> Even something ceremonial at a regular meeting would be nice. It would
> also be nice to learn what events other groups celebrated.
>
> Kristen
> Stony Brook Cohousing forming in Boston, MA
>
> --
Craig Ragland
Executive Director
Cohousing Association of the United States (Coho/US)
425-487-3550
http://www.cohousing.org
craig [at] cohousing.org

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