Growing Community

By Charles Durrett with Joanna Winter and Bernice Gonzalez

M c C a m a n t & D u r r e t t A r c h i t e c t s

How to Find New Cohousing Members

©2013 McCamant and Durrett Architects

By Charles Durrett with Joanna Winter and Bernice Gonzalez

M c C a m a n t & D u r r e t t A r c h i t e c t s

Growing CommunityHow to Find New Cohousing Members

Habitat Press PublishingISBN 978-0-945929-00-0No part of this document can be reproduced without the written permission from McCamant and Durrett Architects ©2013

By Charles Durrett with Joanna Winter and Bernice Gonzalez

M c C a m a n t & D u r r e t t A r c h i t e c t s

Growing CommunityHow to Find

New Cohousing Members

Thanks to Rudi Widmann, architect with The Cohousing Company/McCamant & Durrett Architects and MBA in Sustainable Management, for his valuable insight into marketing and Bernice Gonzalez, Planner with The Cohousing Company/McCamant & Durrett Architects, for her contribution in editing and updating this guide.

Thanks also to Oakleigh Meadows Cohousing for their creative ideas and their request for the marketing workshop that kicked off this book. Thanks to all the other cohousing communities who have shared their strategies for finding their great new neighbors.

And of course, to Katie McCamant, who with sage aplomb helps many groups figure out how to get this work done and move into a beautiful, giving community.

Acknowledgements

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Table of ContentsGrowing Your Community....................

It Takes A System...............................

Get Off To A Great Start.....................Create A Timeline · Track Your Success · Designate A Contact Person · Set Up Teams · Leverage Your Assets · Think Long And Short Term

Getting The Word Out.........................What People Want · Your Elevator Pitch · Let People Know · Capitalize Print And Social Media Resources · Practice Guerrilla Marketing · Consistency Is The Key

Inspiration Form Innovators.................

Tested Ideas To Get You Started.........Flyers That Reach Out · Writing A Press Release · Web Pages That Engage · Checklist For Starting A New Cohousing Community

PROLOGUE:

INTRODUCTION:

PART I:

PART II:

CONCLUSION:

RESOURCES:

Planting the seeds of community

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YOU HAVE THE SEED of a cohousing community; YOU, the core members who have the vision and proactive optimism to move forward. You may be landless, or you may already have a site, architectural design or even buildings. Now, it’s time to grow that seed into a thriving community.

Every seed group will have a different goal for the size they are trying to reach. We typically recommend 20-50 adults as the ideal range. You want the community to be large enough to sustain community building activities like frequent common meals, and to ensure that interpersonal conflicts do not have an impact on social function. However, you don’t want it to be so large that you lose the ability for everyone to actively participate in making decisions.

Your ideal size may depend on your vision as a group for the desired closeness you want to have as a community, the available land, the number of units that will make your project financially feasible for your group members, the amount of interest in cooperative living in your larger community, how extensive you want your common facilities to be, what density your site is zoned for, and many other factors.

Most cohousing groups will start small, but need to expand their circle in order to make their community a financial reality. Many community members will join the group in the early stages while others, particularly those busy with large families, will come along later - once the planning and development has clear momentum or the community has broken ground.

This guide is full of strategies that have been used by cohousing communities to grow their circles at every stage of the process. They can be useful in sharing your community’s vision with potential future members.

For those of you well on your way to reaching your community’s goal, please let us know what methods have proven succesful to you. We will continue to update this book with great ideas to help new cohousing communities.

For other topics related to cohousing development, including more details on creating your right size community, please read our companion book, Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities.

Prologue

Growing Your Community

Growing Community

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Charles Durrett is an architect, author, and advocate of affordable, socially responsible and sustainable design who has made a major contribution in the last twenty years to a multi-disciplinary architecture and town planning - one that involves and empowers the inhabitants and enriches the sense of place and sense of community in both the urban and rural settings in which he works. Charles has authored Revitalizing Our Small Towns: Recent Examples from Southern France, The Senior Cohousing Handbook, and with his wife, Kathryn McCamant, coauthored Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves.

Joanna Winter is a planner with The Cohousing Company/McCamant & Durrett Architects. She has a background in sociology and has worked in local government on affordable housing development and policy. She studied intentional communities and community sociology at Grinnell College before receiving a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning at Cornell University.

Bernice Gonzalez holds a Master in Urban Design from the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain where she is a PhD candidate in Public Space and Urban Regeneration. She has worked developing urban design and public space projects for the neighborhoods in the Sant Andreu District in Barcelona, Spain. She is currently a Planner at The Cohousing Company/McCamant & Durrett Architects.

About the Authors

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Ordering information:

Available online at Amazon.com

Or send a check for $15 + $3.99 shipping and handling (per book, within the U.S.) to the address below:

McCamant & Durrett Architects241–B Commercial StreetNevada City, CA 95959

More information:

charles.durrett@cohousingco.com(530) 265-9980http://www.cohousingco.com