Cohousing-L Mailing List: HOW LARGE A CORE GROUP NEEDED FOR SITE DESIGN

[Mary Aplin (Joysee1]

In response to that post: from our limited experience starting with a core
group of 5 families that really didn't grow for the first year and is now 19
of 24 households bought  in, and a close to final site plan with probable
"groundbreaking" in 4 - 6 months... and yeah, I know we're still babies in
this process...

We accepted early on that the site plans you first  sketch and the decisions
that you make will probably change in the process of forming community-- I
suspect that most communities have gone through at least 3 or 4 incarnations
of their site plan before it was finalized, and have had more than a few
amendments to bylaws between the first time you all sat down around
someone's kitchen table for the first time, and the groundbreaking. 

But we needed to make those initial kitchen table decisions to give
definition to the community.   The professionals can give you a better rule
of thumb, but for us it worked to get our process in line and get started
with site planning with the assumption that founders are a foundation and
not a whole structure, and that the site plan can evolve (but needs to
evolve from something!) What's kind of funny to me is that looking back on
it, our current (close to final) site plan, after multiple iterations and
inputs, has a lot of similarities to the crude one about 6 of us sketched
out 3 years ago as a concept.  " Whatever you can do, or dream you can do,
begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."  
(and be prepared to be grateful when genius shows up in new members - we
have certainly had that experience!)

Warmly,  Mary