Laird on Tap

Welcome to my world of virtual consulting.

Now that I've had a chance to get into the rhythm of home quarantining, and to digest the reality that travel is a distant dream (as an at-risk senior it's not prudent for me to venture away from home sooner than there's a reliable COVID vaccine available), I've been putting serious thought into what I can deliver at a distance.

Here's what I've come up with so far:

I. Conferences
As gathering folks together in numbers for multiple days is especially contraindicated right now, community networks are scrambling to develop ways to deliver useful product safely. Understandably, everyone is thinking webinars, and I'm currently in dialog with three networks about being on their menus:

1. Foundation for Intentional Community
Elders and Intentional Community • May 27 • 4-6 pm (Eastern)

I'll be doing a 15-minute presentation at the front end of this, laying out the pros and cons of choosing a senior-oriented community (where everyone is 50+) or an intergenerational community. It's a more complicated choice than you might imagine.

2. Coho/US
The Heart of Community • May 30 • 12-6 pm (Eastern)

I'll be doing a one-hour presentation (2-3 pm) on Consensus Challenges—the places where groups tend to get stuck. For populations steeped in competitive culture (which is just about everyone), the transition to cooperative culture tends to be predictably bumpy. I'll lay out the roadblocks and potholes on the road to utopia… and what you can do about them.

3. Canadian Cohousing Network
TBA

This burgeoning network is mulling over what to offer and when. I've given them a host of possibilities but I don't know yet what will be selected. Visit the Canadian Cohousing Network website for updates.

II. Facilitation
I sat in, from home, as an observer on a cohousing community's two-hour Zoom plenary last weekend, affording me an initial taste of what this might be like, and I was buoyed to discover that I could accurately read the undercurrents of a complicated conversation without any visual clues about how the speaker was landing with the audience. 

This is an affirmation, I believe, of how I can bring my decades of experience into play. Having "been there before" I was able to recognize what was happening even without a full range of input. While it's still better having everyone in the same room, it doesn't mean that important work must be postponed until that can happen.

Thus, I'm now willing to offer my services as an outside facilitator—literally outside—maybe not in the same time zone. However, that's only one side of the equation. Now we'll see what demand exists for disembodied facilitators. (I know there is need, but that's not the same as demand.)

III. Training
Since 2003 I have been delivering a two-year facilitation training program where a group of students (typically 10-12, but occasionally more) concentrated in a geographical area gather eight times for intensive three-day weekends, spaced approximately three months apart. I have delivered this program a dozen times in its entirety, with an additional two programs currently underway. 

Understandably, the pandemic has interrupted the current programs and I am in the process of figuring out how to continue the work without gathering in the same room. (Who's zooming who?) I'll be experimenting with this in both training groups in the coming weeks and I'm excited by the challenge—there are even advantages to changing up the formats and doing things differently. I like to think of the training programs as teaching improv, where the trainers adapt to what's happening. In that context, this is just another opportunity, both for the students and the instructors.

IV. Mentoring
Although this has never been a large part of my portfolio, it's been a steady one and something I've been doing for more than 10 years—almost all of which happens via phone or email, augmented in recently by teleconferencing, such a Google Chat or Zoom. Although this is not a service I have particularly marketed, it is highly personal and usually quite enjoyable. I'd be happy to do more of it if there was interest and the fit seemed right.

If this possibility appeals to you, send me a note.

Together, we'll figure this out.

Musings About Economics

I was surprised to discover that in the last decade economics has become increasingly interesting to me as a social change agent.

My surprise is not so much that economics should have a seat at the table when discussing the elements of sustainable culture—that made eminent sense to me right away. The shock is that I might be sitting at the table, helping to articulate the economic elements of the better world we're all aspiring to manifest. I never saw it coming. 

Today's offering is a collection of 10 interestingly-shaped pieces of the economic puzzle. While I cannot promise that they can be assembled into a compete picture they suggest a different relationship to economics. See what you think.

1. The Big Canvas
For more than half my life I've identified cooperative culture as my lode star. As someone who wants to make a positive difference in the world, I screen all of my work through the fundamental question, Is this in service to building a more cooperative world? Mostly I've devoted myself to pursuing this through promoting and understanding community, and how individuals relate to it.

That's a plenty large enough field to play in, and there's no danger of running out of meaningful work. For decades it was compelling to focus strictly on how people functioned in a community context. Where did they fall into the ditch, what skills were essential to getting out of the ditch, how to work conflict constructively, how to balance "I" and "we," how to work non-rationally—stuff like that was my milieu and the bulk of my consulting work has fallen within those lines of inquiry. I've even been around long enough to help shape what the questions are.

Gradually, however, I became aware of larger questions. In particular, what is right relationship between social interactions (the heart of community) and resource consumption (ecology) and how we make a living (economics)? What does an integrated package of sustainability look like?

As I became aware of the three-legged stool of sustainability—ecological social, and economic—it was immediately apparent that all three legs were not equally robust. The ecological thrust has been most prominent (the first Earth Day was 46 years ago, and I can even recall a conversation with my high school science teacher in the late '60s about the pros and cons of a new text book that approached biology through an ecological overview—a radical concept at the time). For many today, sustainability is tantamount to ecology. The first and only images they hold are of solar panels, spotted owls, and recycling barrels.

In recent decades though, there has been quite a bit of progress made in bringing into wider awareness my leg of the stool: social sustainability. I've invested heavily in understanding the nuts and bolts of cooperation. I've learned how it breaks down and how it can be salvaged or repaired. I've traveled all across the continent offering everything from workshops in cooperative theory to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Satisfyingly, over the span of my professional lifetime I've witnessed a decided uptick in awareness of social sustainability.

That brings us to the poor stepchild that is the third leg: economics. It's the one that's least written about and least well understood. In contemplating this, I believe a huge factor is that the progressive elements most inspired by a sustainable future have a marked tendency to suffer from arrested development. In particular, they have not gotten past the biblical admonition that "money is the root of all evil."

Sustainable economics necessarily requires one to get comfortable with the concept of fair exchange, but it's damn hard to navigate that territory if you find money—the primary medium of exchange—to be inherently grubby and soul crushing. To be clear, I'm not offering paeans to money; I'm saying it is what we make of it, and it's not going to work if all economic exchange is smeared with the oleaginous face cream of prostitution and exploitation.

2. The Big Canvass
Terry O'Keefe and I are going to be delivering a workshop at next May's National Cohousing Conference (May 19-21 in Nashville TN) entitled "Community as Economic Engine." In preparation for it we're working with the Coho Association of the US on an economic survey. 

We'll be finding out how many communities currently partner with their members to enhance their economic situation. Overwhelmingly, non-income-sharing groups (about 90% of the total) wash their hands when it comes to helping members meet their economic nut. Terry and I think they can—and should—do better. In addition to banging the drum, we'll roll up our sleeves and suggest ways to do it.

3. Carrier as Belwether
Last week President-elect Trump did some serious jawboning with Carrier, the huge HVAC company in Indiana. They were poised to close down gas furnace manufacturing operations in Indianapolis and move nearly 1000 jobs to Monterrey, Mexico, where Carrier could pay workers $3/hour instead of $25/hour—realizing a neat $65 million in annual savings. It would have been a no brainer except for the fact that Trump had made a big deal out how he was going to put a stop to this very thing—outsourcing US jobs to foreign countries.

Given that Indiana is a very red state (and the home of Vice President-elect Pence), Carrier's proposed move would have left a very red President-elect (take your pick between embarrassed or angry, though the latter seems easier to access from what I've seen).

In the end, Trump succeeded in getting Carrier to rescind their move. But what really happened? No new jobs were created; rather, Indiana Governor Pence saved jobs (in his state) by offering Carrier unspecified "major concessions" that compensated them enough to forego their putative labor savings. And it does not take an MBA from Wharton to connect the dots between this deal and the sensitivity of United Technologies (Carrier's parent company) to retaining its favorable position at the trough regarding lucrative contracts for jet engines and other defense-related equipment.

Because Carrier has annual gross profits of $4 billion, the Mexico move only represented a gain of 1.6%, which they were willing to put on the table in exchange for concessions and public relations credit (it's interesting to speculate on what value Carrier assigns to not being in Trump's cross hairs).

When the smoke clears what have we got? We can be sure that Carrier protected its primary mission: making money for its shareholders. And Trump came through on a campaign promise to stop outsourcing. But what does protectivism have to do with "making America great again"? Are manufacturing start-ups now more likely to site plants in Indiana than Mexico? I don't think so. How long will it be before another major company gets the bright idea to announce plans to move operations out of country, trolling for another round of "major concessions" because Trump needs to avoid the embarrassment of failing to keep an uneconomic campaign promise?

Trump held up the hands of time for 1000 jobs in America's heartland, but it is hardly a blueprint for a robust economy. Progressives need to stop ceding economic territory to an energetic vampire like Trump.

4. Intersection of Economic and Social
In our efforts to articulate a better world (not just complain about the injustices of the one we've got) little attention has been focused on how the social and economic can, and should, be allies. Fortunately, there is considerable overlap between the two. The skills needed to resolve differences creatively in consensus are essentially the same ones needed to sort out thorny issues in economic diversity.

We need to be doing a better job of integrating the various parts of our lives into a cohesive whole, not straining the seams. Suppose you have a dream job in the city that pays top dollar, coupled with an idyllic house in the burbs with a great school for your kids—but there's just one problem: these two gems are interconnected by a brutal, bumper-to-bumper 90-minute commute twice a day, five days a week. How integrated is that (and how's your blood pressure these days)?

5. Intersection of Work and Value
When people complain about their struggles to find work, I've learned that what they really mean is their struggles to find good work. And "good," I've learned, distills down to values match. Though salary, flex-time, security, benefits, and a boss who respects you all come into the conversation, the bottom line is whether the inherent nature of the work—the actual good or service produced—is consonant with what you value in life. 

Thus, the fundamental economic challenge can be boiled down to this: how can I be paid a decent wage for doing work that I believe in? Once you understand this, life becomes simpler. Yes, it's more difficult if you are risk averse and non-entrepreneurial (because it can be too scary to try living on less income in order to have a better values match, and there are fewer options if you have to depend on others to create a job that will work for you) but everyone has choices.

We are not raised to think this way. For that matter, we are not raised to contemplate what are values are, much less how to assess job opportunities for a match with them. Instead, we are taught to prioritize income and marketable skills, and then use the money to buy what we want. The model we are offered is that if each person maximizes their potential (makes as much money as possible) all boats will rise on the flood. But that's way too simplistic. Income in a vacuum is too often vacuous (read spirit killing, which can be very expensive).

To be fair, jobs are available in a spectrum; not just sorted into categories of good and evil. And there can be a world of difference between jobs that are value-neutral (perhaps domestic cleaning) and those that are value-negative (say, marketing inferior products). The power in this analysis is appreciating the full value of a good match—where work is life affirming, rather than a necessary evil that allows you to pay the rent and buy groceries. Once you taste work that is value-aligned it spoils you for settling again for something less. When your heart is in it, it doesn't feel like "work." Your battery doesn't drain as fast. You recover more quickly and you're a joy to be around. It's addictive (in a good way).

6. Disassociation of Money from Security
One of the biggest lessons I learned from community living was how to get a better handle on the concept of security. As a young adult I didn't think much about it. I focused more on opportunity and how to be a positive influence in the world. In an effort to recapitulate the combination of stimulation and support that I experienced in dormitory living as an undergraduate (at Carleton College, 1967-71), I stumbled onto community living at age 24 and never looked back.

When, through a combination of intimate misadventures, I would up leaving intentional community 40 years later, I looked up and discovered that a lifetime of being economically generative had left me with very little money in the bank. I had been living in income-sharing situations since 1974 and had not been accumulating anything in my name. While I was safely under the economic umbrella of partnerships (first my intentional community, Sandhill Farm, and later my marriage) I lost that protection when those associations ended.

My initial response was to simply go out and make more money. While that started off well, my vulnerability caught up with me when I got sick last winter and discovered I had cancer. While my bank account was starting to swell, I hadn't gotten very far before work was derailed and I was facing horrific medical bills—a complete financial reversal. Fortunately I was already on Medicare and had purchased a strong supplemental policy that provided a substantial cushion. 

For all of that however, I was still financially exposed and completely without the protection of my prior partnerships. As someone who had been active in the Communities Movement, I had been writing and presenting for years about the advantages of group living, especially if you redefined security in terms of relationships rather than bank accounts. Well, my cancer inadvertently afforded me the occasion to field test that theory.

Perhaps the most humbling experience of my life was the unabashed outpouring of love and support I received once word got out about my battle with cancer. I was completely bathed in caring energy—even from people I didn't know but whose lives had been touched by a workshop I once gave. This, I came to appreciate at a visceral level, was what it meant to redefine security in terms of relationships. No amount of money in the bank could substitute for what that meant to me, or the role it played in my being able to push the cancer into remission. It has been a team effort.

The cherry on top was that when I put out a discrete call for help with medical bills (through this blog last July), 30 friends responded and the gap was closed. Yes, money made a difference. But that was the medium; friends and relationships were the foundation.

If you are able to make this transition, it is incredibly freeing when it comes to how you budget. You need less income when you are not salting it away against a rainy day. If you can afford to work for less it widens the horizon in your search for work with an excellent values match. Depending on your circumstances you can even consider volunteer work. This is a quality of life issue, where bedrock is happiness.

7. Marriage of Entrepreneur and Non-entrepreneur
Although it took me about three decades to see this, it's useful to absorb the following reality about a typical cooperative group: in almost all cases there will be a significant minority of members who identify as entrepreneurial, and a clear majority who identify as not. This is an important insight because the profiles of these two groups don't align easily.

Entrepreneurs are risk tolerant and tend to not depend on the approbation of others to feel good about themselves. They are comfortable in their own company and tend to prefer low structure (read minimal red tape).

The majority are the reverse, and one of the main challenges  achieving group health is figuring out how these two disparate groups can play well with one another. It can be a bitch.

To add to the joy, community founders, almost by definition, tend to be entrepreneurial as pioneers. It takes a certain kind of craziness and audacity to envision a successful intentional community—much less attempt one—and no small amount of chutzpah to pull it off. That said, once a community is established it depends on a steady diet of settlers joining the experiment in order to sustain it, and settler qualities tend to be non-entrepreneurial. Talk about fun. (Did anyone promise that community was easy?)

Why hasn't more attention been given to this? Both are always going to exist and we need models for how they can be allies instead of irritants.

8. Integration of Entrepreneur and Community
Another angle on this same dynamic has to do with how the group relates to its risk-takers. Ironically, even though intentional communities are radical social experiments, they tend to be obsessed with their own stability, which leads to the development of a generally conservative atmosphere—not so much regarding politics as internal experimentation.

The upshot of this is that groups tend to view their entrepreneurs with a jaundiced eye (while we love them as our very own, we wish they wouldn't come up with so many boat-rocking ideas). Precious few communities have directly addressed this issue—perhaps because they don't understand that it's happening; perhaps because they're afraid it will lead to a witch hunt. 

As we know, however, that we resist persists. By failing to tackle the issue of risk management head on, the result is that it's decided in the trenches. Entrepreneurs adapt by either conducting end runs (under the theory that it's easier to get forgiven than to get permission) or by taking their energy elsewhere.

9. Difference Between a Good Idea and a Good Business
A lot of folks fail to understand that having good product sense is not the same as having good business sense. While having a superior product or service is a definite advantage, it doesn't guarantee black ink at the end of the year. The business world is full of cautionary tales about how the better product lost because it was outmarketed (think Beta versus VHS; or FireWire versus USB). 

To what extent are cooperative groups helping their members with business advice? Answer: not nearly enough. This problem needs to be worked from both ends. Entrepreneurs need to swallow their pride and ask for help (what do you mean it doesn't count if you get assistance?); cooperative groups need to get over thinking that helping to develop values-based business plans as contamination with filthy lucre (who, after all, is pure in this vale of tears?). The point of this is to help everyone. Not only will the entrepreneurs be rewarded, but as their businesses succeed they'll be better able to employ non-entrepreneurs, who want good jobs.

10. Local Answers not Federal
Circling back to my third point about Carrier, I believe that economics—just like politics—start at home; not with government subsidies. While markets can be as wide as make sense (and with today's information-based products that can be as far as broadband ethernet can reach, which is just about everywhere), the foundation of right exchange is local. Instead of doing everything myself (or doing without), I trade to you what I'm good at or have in surplus and get in exchange something that you're better at than I or can afford to share. If we both give good value we're in integrity and both of our lives have been enhanced. Everyone sleeps well at night. It's that simple.

Small towns die when they lose their economic base. When local stores are franchises and not locally owned (think Walmart), profits are siphoned off to out-of-town shareholders and wages drop to legal minimums. People are no longer working for Uncle Fred, Grandma Gutierrez, or Ole Johansson—all of whom care about whether your daughter is sick or your dog just had triplets; they're working for Lord Farquaad or his moral equivalent. The good news is that this trend can be reversed. Buy locally. Give a damn.

If the viability of our businesses was rooted in our home communities—instead of leveraged off of investment tax credits and accelerated depreciation allowances—we'd be inflation proof and wouldn't give a hoot what the wage rate was in Guadalajara.

It's something to think about.

Dancing to a Different Drumbeat

A fortnight ago I participated in the national conference of the Cohousing Association of the US, held July 15-17 at the downtown Marriott in Oakland CA. It marked only the second time that this mostly annual event has been hosted at a commercial hotel. Prior to 2011 it had typically been held on university campuses, which are often eager to rent out their facilities in June when the bulk of their student body is elsewhere.


While I've always enjoyed the feel of off-season college campuses, with their casual ambiance, funky decor, and no long lines at the cafeteria, I have to admit that I've appreciated the greater professionalism of a venue that's primarily dedicated to hosting events. When it's a sideline—as it necessarily is at universities—it's always a little hit or miss whether they have their shit together around equipment, security, or even finding the person who knows stuff when you need them.

Last year, for instance, I loved that it was possible to simply pull up to the hotel entrance and unload countless boxes of books onto a stable cart that could be easily wheeled into the lobby, onto a convenient elevator, and from there directly into the room where I'd be setting up the conference bookstore. (This in contrast with our bivouacking on the main floor of the student union at UNC Chapel Hill in 2006, where we had to schlep every box by hand more than 100 yards just to get to the building entrance. Ufda.)


This year, while the Marriott support staff was front and center doing what they could to make our stay memorable, we encountered a vexing venue variable I hadn't encountered before: noise pollution. 

When you're paying a premium for a premium venue, you expect premium treatment. We didn't get it. To be sure, a major facility such as the Marriott can accommodate multiple clients at a time, and the exhibit areas are cleverly designed so that sections can be partitioned off and used simultaneously in a bewildering variety of configurations. So, while Coho/US was hoping for attendance near 400 (we got 349), that wasn't anywhere near Marriott's capacity and they gladly accepted an Herbalife promotional event concurrent with ours when the opportunity came up.


While there was plenty of room in the lobby and elevators for both groups to maneuver between sessions, it turned out that it's Herbalife's habit to pump up new recruits with a steady, pervasive bass drumbeat that they intermittently call upon from morning to evening for 30-60 minutes at a time—which is apparently an essential element in eliciting the proper entrepreneurial frenzy. This company is a big time distributor of nutritional and dietary supplements that has successfully recruited 2.3 million individuals worldwide to be independent distributors of their goodies. Thus, even though Coho/US had contracted with Marriott first, Herbalife was a big fish and we were a small one, creating delicacy for the Marriott staff in how they responded: they owed us, yet wanted repeat business from Herbalife.

The Marriott folks could instantly appreciate the problem when Herbalife's bass line (it evoked for me the mines of Moria in Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, as the main characters gathered around Balin's tomb) easily penetrated the thin folding walls that separated our portion of the East Exhibit Hall from theirs (causing the Friday night plenary speaker to pause in his delivery to let the unusual Bay Area thunderstorm pass over—only to discover that the atmospheric disturbance was emanating from inside the building, and not likely to end during his talk).


When approaching Herbalife with the request that they tone it down proved ineffectual (hey, we've been doing this for 30 years and know what works), the Marriott staff went to Plan B: more acoustical separation. Overnight—and at no cost—they moved all of Coho/US's stuff from the ill-fated kettle drum of the East Exhibit Hall into the Main Ballroom, which was a nicer venue anyway (think Academy Awards, in contrast with the airplane hangar that was the East Exhibit Hall). While that shift didn't eliminate the boom booms altogether, they were more contained—excepting in some of the breakout sessions, where rooms were too close to the pulsing vibrato, causing some participants to give up in frustration.


In short, it was tense coexisting with the 500-pound Herbalife gorillas who couldn't keep their hands off the djembes.

• • •

The energetic highlight of the Coho Conference was the Saturday night banquet, which included an up-tempo benefit auction and the honoring of Katie McCamant & Chuck Durrett for a lifetime of work developing and promoting the concept of cohousing. Part of the ceremony was a string of testimonials from people who know Katie & Chuck well and it was touching that the final speaker was their daughter, Jessie, who secretly flew in from college to be the frosting on the cake. Both surprised parents were in tears—and nearly speechless. It was a lovely moment.


After the banquet ended, most of us (including me) went to bed—there was still Sunday to go and I needed to recharge my battery. The hard core however, repaired to Katie & Chuck's hotel suite where an impromptu gathering continued the celebration of their achievements, friendships, and inspirations into the wee hours. 


The party didn't break up until hotel staff knocked on the door and asked them to quiet down. There were guests in nearby rooms who were having trouble sleeping through the racket, and they should be more considerate—those Herbalife folks down the hall needed their rest for Sunday's big finale.

[May I have a drum roll please… ] 

• • •

OK, so I've had my fun with the delicious irony of people who make a lot of noise being intolerant of others who make noise.


There is another side of this that is not so funny. The Coho/US crowd was overwhelmingly white and middle class. It happened that the Herbalife crowd was overwhelmingly Latino. (I say it this way because I'm sure that there are other Herbalife conventions where the racial and ethnic mix is completely different.) Where we were a jeans and shorts crowd, they were dressed sharp—women in heels and makeup; men in ties with pomaded hair.

We were pretty different from each other as a group and that made it far easier for us cohousers to see the Herbalifers as "other." This is all the more interesting when you take into account that in community we're expressly trying to learn to see and work constructively with differences. In Oakland that weekend, we didn't do so well. 

If you take a step back, the Herbalife bass intrusion wasn't that big a deal. It only rarely actually interfered with hearing. Sure, it wasn't considerate, but who wants to go through life angry because everything isn't perfect? Coho/US had a great conference—they had good attendance, they raised a lot of money, and people had a terrific time. Why give so much energy to an irritant?


How hard would it have been to have imagined the positive reasons for the steady bass beat? Music is a good fit with Latin culture, and camaraderie is something to be purposefully cultivated in managing a successful event. What Coho/US did with a gourmet appetizer buffet and easy access to alcohol, Herbalife did with bass percussion. What's so different? 


As I was packing up the books Sunday afternoon, I spent a lot of time passing through the lobby where the Herbalife folks were congregating for charter buses back home. Observing all the laughter, hugs, and group photos, it was clear that they'd had a good time as well. It was just a different good time than ours.


I think we still have some serious work to do in being OK with different. And that's not a joke.

My Summer of Sustainability, Part III

Sometimes all roads seem to point in one direction. This summer I've been having that experience with the concept of sustainability: assessing where we are now, what will be possible in 30 years, and how do we get from here to there.

The basic premise I'm working with is that humans are rapidly exhausting our supply of accessible resources, such that something has to give. That is, it is not even remotely possible that we can continue for another generation the materialistic lifestyle we're become accustomed to in the US—unless we're willing to forcibly deny the equitable distribution of what's left and to tolerate massive suffering elsewhere in service to the status quo. Rather than continuing the charade that underlies the bumper sticker "How did our oil get under their sand?", I've started looking at two questions: a) How to create a vibrant, satisfying lifestyle that uses only 10% of the resources that the average American is currently consuming; and b) How to peacefully navigate the social challenges that such a massive shift will require.

These questions affect me both on the personal level (how will I live, and what am I called to do to help society to a softer landing in the decades ahead) and on the professional level (what role should FIC play in education and preparation; what is my role as a process consultant to better prepare groups to handle what's coming).

When thinking about sustainability, I like the metaphor of a three-legged stool: there's a ecological leg, a social leg, and an economic leg—and you won't have a very stable piece of furniture unless you have three stout legs. I am interested in what it takes to develop strong legs, and also the integration of the whole, so that the stool will be a tool.

As this is a big, all-encompassing topic, I'm going to tackle it in a six-part series, roughly in the order in which I've been bumping into this conversation over the past two months. Here's the outline:

I. Proposal to build a working model of sustainability
II. The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World by Ted Trainer
III. Sustainability and Cohousing
IV. EDE Course at Dancing Rabbit in 2012
V. Increasing sustainability offerings on campus
VI. Transition Towns

• • •

Sustainability and Cohousing

Cohousing is a kind of intentional community—one ring among many under the Big Top that is the Intentional Communities Movement, that the FIC strives to represent in an even-handed way. It is a particular design model that features clustered housing, a small footprint, parking on the periphery, housing that faces each other, a central common house that all members have access to, and slightly undersized units (with the idea that the occasional need for larger facilities can be more economically handled by relying on what's held in common).

Like most kinds of intentional community, cohousing groups are resident controlled, and have a strong commitment to both the environment and the quality of life for residents. There are perhaps 140 built cohousing groups in the US today with an additional hundred or so in various stages of development. It's a growing segment of the movement.

Going back to its inception in the late 1990s, the Cohousing Association of the US (Coho/US) has been holding national conferences. Since 2008 these have been annual events, held the weekend nearest the summer solstice (last June it was in DC; next June it will be in San Francisco). For years now their custom has been to offer pre-conference intensives in addition to the regular Friday-Sunday cornucopia of workshops, panels, and keynote addresses.

In 2010 Laura Fitch (from Pioneer Valley in Amherst MA) and Bryan Bowen (from Wild Sage in Boulder CO) put together a pre-conference offering on Sustainability. They proposed to offer this again in 2011, as a two-day workshop, and Ma'ikwe and I explored the possibility of collaborating with them on the delivery.

While the offering was ultimately cancelled (not enough registrations) the four of us sat down together for half a day on the Thursday morning before the conference opened to discuss in depth how we saw the topic of sustainability and its relationship to cohousing. Ross Chapin from Langley WA and Greg Sherwin from Boulder Creek Cohousing joined us as well. We had a stimulating conversation on the roof deck of Eastern Village, a cohousing development straddling the Silver Spring/DC border.

Laura & Bryan are both architects and the previous offering they put together understandably emphasized Green design and construction. While these are deservedly legitimate elements of sustainability, Ma'ikwe and I were advocating that more attention be given to the social and economic aspects, as sustainability is a broad topic.

Happily, Laura & Bryan were fine with this expansion of what could be covered. Even more impressive was that all six of us were willing to accept the analysis that the US population needed to aim for something like a 90% reduction in current resource use over the next generation in order to not exceed the limits of accessible resources (or condemn wide swaths of humanity to a life of misery because we were taking more than our share).

This was a watershed conversation in the context of cohousing, which is the portion of the Communities Movement that is most accessible to the mainstream—because it looks the least different from what people already know and typically asks residents to make the fewest lifestyle changes. While intentional communities as a whole are overwhelmingly progressive and Green in their politics and values, within the Movement cohousing presents as the materialistic end of the intentional communities spectrum.

Thus, when a cohousing project is built such that operational energy costs have been slashed in half (which is not uncommon), it's a good news, bad news situation. The good news is that that represents a terrific savings and an important step in the right direction. The bad news is that isn't nearly enough and we shouldn't be spending too much time patting each other on the back.

To be sure, some cohousing projects are achieving greater savings in resource use than some non-cohousing communities. However, in broad strokes, Ma'ikwe and I believe that there is an important role for intentional communities to lead the way in modeling how to manifest a high-quality life based on only 10% of current US resource consumption and we are not expecting dynamism of this magnitude to come from cohousing—unless that segment is willing to risk its carefully cultivated reputation as a reasonable choice for mainstream Americans.

Happily, there is no need (or benefit) to getting into a pissing contest about who's the most sustainable. We need a multiplicity of approaches, and everyone doing what they can to build a better world. It is important and valuable if cohousing only continues doing what it has already demonstrated great skill at: enticing dissatisfied mainstream folks into trying community living for the first time—it's my sense that the vast majority of people who get their first taste of community living in cohousing would not consider any other option at the outset.

This is a huge benefit. Perhaps it will be the ecovillages that pioneer what it means on a practical level to live on 90% less resources, and somewhere ahead we can establish a viable bridge between the new construction condo associations of cohousing and the strawbale, mud-plastered, and earthen floor adobe abodes of our future.

[Note: I'm not predicting that all future housing will be adobe; I'm only trying to graphically illustrate the distance that remains to be bridged. The lifestyle changes required of us will not be small.]

It does no good to ask anyone to take a larger step than they are ready for. Our job is to build a road from where we are to where we need to be, such that no one is afraid to step forward. The point is not how few the steps are; it's whether all the steps are visible and accessible.

Laura, Bryan, Ma'ikwe and I plan to cook up a robust and comprehensive pre-conference offering on Sustainability at the 2012 conference, based largely on the EDE curriculum created by the Global Ecovillage Network. Amplifying what I mean by that will be the focus of my next blog.

Or you can contact Coho/US now and see if you can register early for the Sustainability course—for all I know, operators may be standing by...