A Family Story and a Blessing Way

Raising a Family in Cohousing, Part 1

By Tiffany Yelton Bram

Cohousing is often touted as ideal for families. As a mom in a developing community, I thought it would be good to capture how cohousing shapes our family and how family shapes this community.

Let's begin at the beginning. My name is Tiffany and I moved to Portland, Oregon, at the start of 2006. I lived in Seattle and my husband-to-be lived in Portland. Since my family lives in Oregon and my husband loves Portland like a friend, I made the move here.

The first thing we did was to find a nice place to rent to give us time to think about how and where we wanted to live. Alex, my hubby, had been following a listserv about cohousing in Portland and he told me what he knew about it. Intrigued, I agreed to go to some of the meetings that different forming groups announced on the listserv. I went to a cohousing social on my own and met the folks starting Daybreak Cohousing (then Sunrise Cohousing). I told Alex that he had to meet them too.

I trust my instincts about people. My feelings about the Daybreak folks were immediately positive. I could see the dream they shared but, more importantly for me, I could see the plan they described and felt that they knew how to put that plan in action. We asked to join them.

Alex and I jumped into our new cohousing adventure. Soon we developed friendships with our cohousing group. We not only worked together on the project but we ate together, went to plays, white water rafting, camping and picnicing together.

Time passed and Alex and I talked about our future family. We are a bit older (in our 40s) and planned to adopt a child. But wonderful surprises happen and in December 2007, we found out we were pregnant. I was so happy and so scared. So we waited until we got through the first trimester and then shared the news with our cohousing community. The happiness shared with us was amazing.

And here is where the magic of developing these relationships struck me. The women of the community wanted to celebrate our pregnancy with a blessing way. I wasn't sure what this was and I was uncomfortable being the focus of attention. But I was so touched that they wanted to do this for me that I said “yes” and accepted the gift of the celebration. The day of the party was lovely. We gathered at one home and ate, shared stories of being children, of having children and memories of our mothers. Then I did something I hadn't done before. I shared all of my fears. About the health of the baby, the delivery, my ability to be a mom, the loss of my own Mom three years before. And my friends held all of that fear for me, held me and let me know that they understood. I got a lot stronger after that. Sharing this big life change with people who will be close to us in our life as family helped me build bonds I hadn't even known that I needed.

Now fast forward a bit: our son, Max, was born in August, 2008. He is terrific. Before every meeting, I tell him that we are going to go see our Daybreak friends. He often kicks his feet upon hearing this—one of his happy movements.

In future blog posts I'll write about our developing family, what we want for our life as afamily in cohousing and what enfolds.

By Tiffany Yelton Bram

Sharing Suppers

Creating Community in a Forming Cohousing Group, Part 1

by Sterling Newberry

At various times, we at Daybreak Cohousing have felt the strain of so much work to do in developing our future home. We realized early on that we needed to be especially conscious of building in pure social time as a balance to all our work, and to ensure that our extended family relationships grow along with the infrastructure.

Early on we instituted pot lucks before our community business meetings, and agreed not to talk about business during them. This works much of the time, but not always. It is challenging to come up with viable social activities when so many of us live in different parts of Portland. We often remark how much easier (and less polluting) getting together informally will be after we move in. I’d like to talk about some ways we are addressing this now.

In this issue, I’ll talk about our Sharing Suppers. The sharing suppers are scheduled, twice monthly affairs. One or two people volunteer to host them, and the agreements about what to do are very open. We set the dates ahead of time, attempting to place them such that they are not too close to other community activities.

Hosting is a very open concept. You are just taking responsibility for organizing the Sharing Supper. Your involvement can be as light as offering your home and asking people to bring food potluck-style to doing major portions of the cooking (perhaps inviting people to come over and help cook). We’ve had food themes, a game night, and a sing along. And invitations to meet at a restaurant with the host making the reservations! You could organize a picnic if you like. The key thing is for people to share food and fun together, and not be doing the work.

We’ve had good success with these gatherings, whether 4 or 5 people attend or as many as 20. As with most other Daybreak activities, we also invite our prospective members to participate. After all, this is a good way for them to get to know us socially (and vice versa) and helps them to make a good decision about whether we are the right community for them. Next issue I’ll talk about Group Invitations.

By Sterling Newberry

Learning from others while not attempting to duplicate.

As one of the co-founders of Daybreak Cohousing, I spent a lot of time in the early stages researching what communities who had come before us had done to build their communities, both physically and as people. The Get It Built Workshop by Katie McCamant and Rick Mockler of Cohousing Partners gave me a solid overview and foundation in the overall process and I highly recommend it. I found a wealth of generosity and information on Cohousing_L and in talking with folks in our local communities here in Portland, Cascadia Commons, Trillium Hollow and Penninsula Park Commons.

While not wanting to re-create the wheel, I was impressed and overwhelmed by the variety of solutions available to any given situation. There was a lively interchange about keys and children’s access to the Common House on Cohousing_L that opened my eyes to the possibilities. Each community had a unique, often very different approach to this situation. And they all worked well for their particular community. This taught me a valuable lesson early on. Trying to duplicate what works for other communities, may not work for our community. What has proved most helpful for us is to consider the range of solutions other communities have found helpful and use that as a starting point for further brainstorming and then settling on a solution that seems to be a fit for our particular community. We’ve found we often end up with a hybrid from the examples of other communities (maybe with a few of our own twists added in).

For example, most communities have some form of regular orientation sessions throughout their forming phase. We have found that formal orientations in which we are giving a presentation doesn’t fit our style. We found that regular twice-monthly gatherings, at Daybreak we call them Socials, specifically ‘structured’ so existing members and those interested in learning more about us can mingle informally and chat one-on-one or in small groups gives folks a better feel for us as people, helps them get their specific questions addressed and is more fun for us.

Thinking about Community

We've spent several years building our community of people. And maybe we haven't talked about US enough. These are the people that are making it possible for the buildings to go up. We are thrilled to see our 'home' emerge. And we love to talk about all the things we do and are to be a community now. We are excited to be working together as we prepare to move in! And we have a lot of work in front of us. Come along.