Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Is cohousing a consumer product?

[Steve Welzer (stevenwelzer]

> Has this group hired a cohousing project manager?

The New Jersey group had that in mind. We never accumulated enough money to
do so.

Money. We asked for grant-writing expertise but no one came forward. We
held fundraising social events and raised as much as $500 on a given night.
We hosted Chuck Durrett for a “Getting It Built” workshop and made a little
bit of net profit after paying his fee and renting a venue.

Naturally, we periodically tried to directly solicit funds from members.
The results were: a thousand dollars from a couple of households, $500 from
a couple of households, $100 from a number of households, $50 from many
individuals. The balance in our credit union account got up to about $10K.
That’s not enough to hire any professionals. When the pandemic hit we all
but folded up and we gave that money to a non-profit that promotes
ecovillages and bioregionalism. Personally, I started working with a group
in another state (Altair in Pennsylvania) that at least had the resources
to buy a parcel of land.

Despite all the longstanding interest and enthusiasm among the members of
the “EcoVillage New Jersey” Meetup there are no prospects for a community
to get built in our state. The task is daunting and expensive. A
cohousing-sympathetic developer simply replicating Eno Commons or Cambridge
Cohousing or Blueberry Hill or Eastern Village (etc.) could make a tidy
profit and make a lot of people happy, but the movement seems to frown on
that paradigm (at least, on the East Coast). One developer said if we
raised $300K they’d talk seriously with us. As mentioned, we never raised
more than $10K. The per-hour fees of the cohousing consultants were way
beyond our means.

Steve Welzer
Altair EcoVillage project participant