Cohousing-L Mailing List: Seeking Examples of Cohousing Implementation Plans

[Diane Craig (ddcraig]

Hi Chris. We are a self-developed community in Gainesville, FL and about to
complete our first two homes out of 24 total.  This was a huge job and we
still wonder how we pulled it off.  We did not hire any long-term
consultants except a civil engineer. At least for us, and I'm assuming this
is pretty standard based on the responses, you are so busy building the
community that you really don't have time to document the whole process in
one place. You would need to read all the minutes and supporting
documentation to see how it was done, and talk (for hours) to several of
our key people in our community (who played role of meeting
facilitator/outreach coordinator, architect, project manager, financials,
etc.).  You can create a plan but be prepared to throw it out or change it
dramatically, and sometimes by the day or hour.

Like you I wanted to talk about governance and organizational structure
after move-in very early in the process, but there are just so many
pressing issues and decisions that have to come before it is too
overwhelming to even think about governance and structure as well. For sure
we discussed it here and there but never put effort into creating a formal
plan. I guess if someone had decided they wanted to take this on it might
have happened.  But I'm not sure anyone in our group would want lengthy
discussions about governance when there are so many lengthy discussions and
decisions about things that have to happen to actually get to the point
where we actually have a community to govern. Our weekly meetings were
already 3-4+ hours long as it was (thankfully they are shorter now but
still about 2 hours or more). Moreover, we now have all of our lots sold so
the entire community can participate in designing a plan for our future
together.

Our first two single-family homes will be done by end of March, our common
house will be done late summer/early fall, and the last of the homes should
finish around January 2019. We are just now talking about forming a work
group to tackle governance and all that entails. Step 1 is to look on this
Cohousing listserv and research what other communities are doing and pull
out our notes from the Durham Cohousing conference.  Then create something
that fits our unique needs.

Diane Craig
Gainesville Cohousing
Gainesville, FL