Join us for the opening day of The Virtual Cohousing Conference hosted on our brand new learning platform The Cohousing Institute (beta). This FREE hour-long Zoom will include:

• Keynote with Trish Becker-Hafnor
• “State of the Movement” Virtual Keynote featuring Diverse Cohousing Voices
• Virtual breakouts to network and connect with other learners and leaders
• Overview of the Virtual Conference Offerings
• Orientation to the Cohousing Institute platform

Community by community, cohousers envision a new kind of living environment, and put in the hard work to bring it about. We learn to care about, and care for, the shared home of our cohousing neighborhood beyond our individual homes. What if we considered all human and other-than-human life as our neighbors, and all of earth as our shared home? Cohousing is already part of the paradigm shift required to live a more connected and sustainable life. Imagine if we applied those same skills that we learnt creating cohousing to envision a just and sustainable life for all, and become active citizens to help regenerate a flourishing living planet.

The Community Living Team or ‘party planners’ are a vital part of a healthy community. This session will talk about the goal of this team, what skills are helpful to have in people on the team to fill various roles, and how to create a vision and a plan to carry it out. Examples of various events will be presented with varying levels of detail. Then, for fun and action, we will break into small groups for brainstorming and begin to create possibilities to present to your own community!

Using three recent urban cohousing communities as case studies, the audience will gain an understanding of how the intentional actions of individuals acting in consensus of the group successfully created a resilient urban community and new home. Comparing and contrasting the three different paths through urban community building, planning, financing, and design the attendees will see the hurdles and successes of each project. The session is planned to be interactive with ample time for questions and discussion.

This presentation will focus on ways to work effectively with design professionals to avoid added cost. It will also identify ways to affordably design units from a space planning aspect to the selection of materials. Finally, it will ask the question, what elements of the process are anti-affordable?

If you’ve been keeping your interest list in a spreadsheet, on your newsletter email platform, or maybe even on pieces of paper, this session is a must for those focused on the marketing and recruitment of members. Efficiently managing and tracking the interaction with your contacts is key to successful recruitment. Doing so will also save you time and money. In this session, Shelly will demonstrate what a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can do for your marketing and recruitment efforts, what to track, best practices and how you can easily set up a system yourself specifically for cohousing.

What lessons can we learn from French cohousing as we look toward the future? In France, cohousing is often more-dense and urban than is typical in the United States. Retrofitting old buildings and giving them new life via cohousing is also common practice. This is partly due to its particular history, culture, and construction context, but also anticipates global trends of increasingly dense populations and desire for a smaller footprint.

What role do privilege, bias, and microaggressions play in creating an inclusive cohousing community? In this workshop, we'll define these terms and talk about the experiences of marginalized groups.

Cohousing communities are typically general in orientation, and designed for anyone who wishes to live there. An exception to this is senior communities, but other types of specialized or affinity group cohousing are starting to emerge. This panel discussion will engage presenters who have experience in these efforts and communities -- such as those organized to support LGBT inclusion, Jewish life, neurodiversity, and people with varying abilities/disabilities. We anticipate a robust conversation, and attendee questions and contributions are highly encouraged!

Bad meetings aren't something to endure but something to change. This session will show the most common ways in which we get off track, and how to notice and get back on track again. Faster and more focused meetings rely on agenda planning, clearer framing of agenda items, accountability to our agreed-upon goals and topics, and straightforward decision-making processes. This session will highlight what we can do before, during and after a meeting to use our time together wisely. After all, we move into communities because we want to be and feel connected - let's have meetings that feel connecting!

Gainesville Cohousing is fairly new, so we have a lot of projects each year. In 2021, the initial project requests totaled $19,000. In the beginning, decisions on what to fund were fairly easy because we came in under budget when building. As those funds dwindled and project fund requests continued, we implemented a project planning and budgeting process for each of our community groups to encourage them to set goals and focus their work. This session will examine our approach to formulating an annual budget, and the process used to gain community approval and increase awareness of how money is spent.