Details

Handle (@______ so people can tag you in the platform)

wendyreidfairhurstgmail-com

First Name

Wendy

Last Name

Reid Fairhurst

Bio

I have a keen interest (and need) to make cohousing affordable and accessible. We started our cohousing community on the island of Newfoundland back in 2018, but soon learned that to follow the typical model in North America would result in a community that most of us founders could not afford to live in. Further, we started to encounter many of the same barriers as other groups, especially around financing a land purchase and formally collectivizing our resources. This led me to go back to school at the age of 39 to do an MBA specific to Social Enterprise and Social Entrepreneurship. This was followed by the last 4 years continuing education through an Interdisciplinary PhD specifically looking at how to make cohousing more affordable and accessible across Canada in particular, but also with relevance to projects in US. My hypothesis is that social enterprise as a new way of doing business provides key insights for how to pursue projects that are fundamentally about social and environmental impact, but also rooted in economic realities and the simultaneous need for financial sustainability. We continue to work through the cohousing process developing Killick Ecovillage on the far east coast of Canada, using the project as a testing ground for innovative ideas around alternative tenure and social finance. Everything we create through Killick gets shared onto a national Knowledge-Sharing Platform and CLH Ecosystem Support Network to help other groups skip a lot of the effort and resources we had to put in. We set up a nonprofit social enterprise called Reclaim Community CDO to manage this online platform and continue to develop and test innovations towards empowering community groups to play a key role in solving the global housing crisis.