Why would anyone want to be a member of Daybreak?

You have to know your neighbors. You have to get to know them and share in their lives, and they will share in yours, and you have to grow older together. You have to work on a team or teams and be cooperative. You have to go to community meetings and struggle through to decisions. You have to help with community events and projects. You have to share meals with others, at least some of the time. You have to help people fix things and they have to help fix yours. You have to listen to children laughing and playing and even get to know some of them. You might have to help someone in an emergency and they might have to help you. You might have to listen to someone’s life stories and they might have to listen to yours. You might have to laugh or cry when you do. So, why would you want to be a member of this community? Why not just be alone.

by Ken Cameron-Bell

Annual Retreats

Once you live in community, it might seem silly to go off for a weekend all together. But just think about how much fun it is to go off with the family to the beach or a mountain cabin for a weekend. The same can be true for the community.

Coho Corvalis made it a priority to go on a weekend retreat this year. For Daybreak, we’ve gone away on two weekend retreats while we’ve been forming and they have been amazing. A fabulous time to build our bonds. For the last two years, we’ve had the retreats in September. This year we’ll be starting to move-in (!) so we’re planning an on-site retreat. Hopefully, we’ll go back to away retreats like Corvalis next year.

When planning the retreats, the retreat team asked the community what we were interested in doing and how structured we wanted out time to be. Typical of us, we wanted some organized and structured time together but also wanted lots of flexibility and free time. I think the teams did a great job finding that balance. And as a group we valued the organized activities intended to support building our bonds and the opportunity to create those bonds just by being together.

Our first retreat in 2007 was at Lost Valley Education Center. It was great staying in a well-established intentional community. Our second retreat in 2008 was at Cedar Ridge Retreat Center. Both had ample room for us and the basic (or not so basic) facilities we valued. The Lost Valley community prepared fabulous vegetarian fare for us and Cedar Ridge gave both omnivores and vegetarians a choice. Since food is a cornerstone of our community, our meals together throughout the weekend we’re important to us. And we didn’t have to cook! Although we did help with the major clean up at Lost Valley. Part of our community time.

The retreat teams scheduled some specific activities each day for the whole community. These often included fun (or heartfelt) get-to-know each other activities: ‘line’ games where the community strung itself from east to west based on where you were born, or strung itself from one to ? based on how many places you had lived; a personal sharing time; an hysterical ‘build-a-story’ time; sing-alongs, and more. And offered a number of optional activities that were offered or requested by community members such as, bocce ball, a knitting class, volleyball, a napkin-ring decorating session, or a permaculture tour. And on our second retreat, we discovered that we were really into games. Particulary board or card games. So besides going for walks around the properties, hanging out by the great room fireplace, chatting on a deck, or just reading a book, we played lots of games. We often had multiple games going at once all in the same room. Settlers of Catan, Apples to Apples, Scrabble, double solitaire, Scattergories, and more.

Oh, and we laughed. A lot!

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