Northwest Intentional Communities

We've been working on a tuneup of our consensus process at Winslow Cohousing. I've started to think that consensus is a fairly radical and utopian idea -- that does not make it wrong (in fact quite the opposite), but it does means it has to be treated with respect.

Here is an email thread thread that talks about this (the earliest posts are at the bottom, if you prefer to read in chronological order):

On February 26th 2009, Odysseus Levy wrote:

These are some pictures from the recent ceremony to welcome Fred into official grandfather status

At the Findhorn community (in Scotland) they like to start classes with Angel cards. An angel card is simply a little white card with a word written on it. The class leader would pull a card from an Angel card deck and announce what the word would say. For example, they might say, "Our angel for this week is Compassion".

I couldn't resist posting this. At Winslow Cohousing we have put a little over an acre of forest into a land trust. We have been musing over what (if anything) we should do with this property. Bill (one of our members) asked why we were thinking of building anything at all. We have another small chunk of land (we call it the Knechtel property) that would be better suited for building something. This is Allen's answer.

Hi Bill,

I appreciate your question. I'm going to respond but I don't think
there is a short answer that puts the question to rest. I'm just trying

Grace Kim (who is on the National Cohousing Board, and is an architect) writes:

I am helping a UW architecture professor with a student project for this winter quarter.
They would be designing an urban cohousing project in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
It will be a mixed use project (commercial uses on the ground floor) and will incorporate low income housing (we are working with a local non-profit housing developer to be the hypothetical owner of a number of the units that they would then be responsible for keeping filled with appropriate renters).

Recently, Faith, a 17 year old in our community died of cancer. It had been a year coming so it was not unexpected but it still hurt deeply.

Her mom chose to do a home hospice. They set up her room with that big four poster bed that she had always wanted, set up a big screen tv, got the room decorated, and then her mom nursed her to the end, at home, with help from the community.

We have a member at Winslow who suffered a stroke. One of our community members, Allen, wrote a poem that talks to that. Please read to the end (it is worth it):

One day my friend, the wife of my friend,
phoned to say she could use some help.
My friend had slipped out of his wheelchair
onto the floor and she couldn't get him back into it.
And could I maybe find some more neighbors as I came?

I went along, knocking on doors on my way.
I found Barbara and David who interrupted their cooking to come.
When we got to my friend's place Roger was there already.