Informal Invitations

Creating Community in a Forming Cohousing Group Part 2

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 the extended family relationships grow along with the infrastructure. This is part 2 of ways we are attempting to address this.

A second way we are building community is through informal group invitations. These are spontaneous and individually organized. Recently, I heard about a public invitation from Cascadia Commons, an existing cohousing community nearby, about a folk music duo coming to perform in their common house. I sent out an invitation over our Google group, and several people responded. We ended up being half of the group at the concert. We not only had a fun social time together with good music, but connected with our fellow cohousers as well.

These activities can be an open invitation to a movie, concert, forum or book or poetry reading. The key thing is that they are not about the work part of building our community. People come up with things they like to do and would love to have friends come along with them. While any one of us might have relied on a preexisting group of friends in the past, and might invite them to this informal group invitation, we also are being conscious about including our Daybreak family. This can have the benefit of mingling our emerging Daybreak family with our other friends or genetic family members as well.

These are less regular and more spontaneous than our Sharing Suppers, and attendance depends more on shared interests then the Suppers, which are centered often on our shared interest in food and being with each other around food.

By Sterling Newberry

Establishing Community Rituals.

Part of the joy and struggle of creating a new community is creating the threads that hold us together. In our society and in our workplace, we often take for granted the structures and rituals that help us identify with each other. Many entrepeneurs have experienced the process of building a business AND a culture from the ground up. Communities aren’t much different.

Many of the activities that unite a community arise naturally as people interrelate. And consciously creating rituals that reflect the community spirit can help too. At Daybreak Cohousing we came together early and often around the joy of sharing and eating food with each other. Many a community can come to a place where we roll our eyes at the mention, or even the thought, of another potluck. And we are no exception. Yet we still revel in socializing together around food. We have a potluck and social time before each of our twice monthly community meetings. Our Development Team has dinner before each of its weekly meetings, whoever is hosting the meeting cooks and we don’t talk business until the meeting. When our Membership Team rotated houses, we used to offer snacks, and we had to be careful to be grateful for a fab spread without getting into a competition.

When it came to creating our first welcoming ceremony for new members, we wanted to keep it simple but also be meaningful. We wanted some kind of symbol that might bind us all together and we settled on the idea of giving personalized aprons to each incoming member. The homespun decorations on the aprons reflect our artistic or fanciful natures. And something we cherish about the incoming member. The aprons reflect our interest in food and sharing that food together. They are simple and playful. And they join us together in the thought of wearing our aprons to cook and clean-up in our Common House. We often bring our aprons to events as a symbol of our togetherness. It certainly is colorful.