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
