We held a Public Presentation on cohousing and the Kawartha Commons project on Wednesday March 6th from 7-9pm at the Peterborough Lions Club Community Centre, 347 Burnham St, Peterborough, ON.
Perspectives on an emerging community.
Cohousing is a mutually supportive yet independent-living custom-built neighbourhood where people design, build and manage housing for themselves in a village-like setting. It is the perfect balance of privacy and community. Social connection is nurtured and community cohesion strengthened.
Many people in Peterborough would love to live more lightly on the earth within a diverse, vibrant caring community, especially if this provides the opportunity to age in place. Cohousing does all this.
It is similar to condominium living with small, independent living "apartments", but is based on the idea of an "intentional community" with substantial shared resources including a "common house" including a kitchen and dining room for regular shared meals. The nucleus of this community forms before the development is even designed, in order to determine the common objectives for living in an active community.
At the event there were three brief presentations, each a different perspective on cohousing, followed by a Q&A. A reception followed.
Kris shared her extensive research and experience visiting communities and learning about cohousing.
Al talked about what Kawartha Commons has achieved so far, and discuss the financial realities.
Welcome to the website for Kawartha Commons, the Peterborough Cohousing group! Although the concept of cohousing has been discussed by many of us for a number of years, the group as currently configured began meeting on December 27th 2017 (with a party, naturally – we are all about social interaction, after all). This was followed by a workshop in early February, and meetings began in earnest in late February. We currently have business meetings once a month, and also hold "Discovery Circle" learning sessions once a month. Together, we are learning about how cohousing works and what is involved in creating a community.
You can find more information about our group and what we do by using the menu items at the top of this page. You can see a brief description of what cohousing is, as well as a page with information about some of the visits that members of Kawartha Commons have made to more than a dozen different cohousing communities across North America, and you can see a breakdown of some of the events we have had and new ones that are upcoming.
You can also read some helpful documents and websites we've found about cohousing and how different communities are approaching it on our Resources page. And if you want to see some of the progress we've been making, you can read a summary of the minutes from some of our most recent meetings. We also recently produced a colour brochure that gives an overview of the cohousing movement and the goals and aspirations of our group, which you can see here.
One of the things we've been investigating as part of our cohousing journey is a new form of governance that seems to work well for such groups, known as Sociocracy. It focuses on consent-based decision-making instead of consensus-based (which is difficult for large groups) and also puts a major emphasis on listening and non-violent communication. There's more info here: What Is Sociocracy.
News: We've started a fundraising drive for anyone who is either thinking of joining the Kawartha Commons cohousing project, or merely wants to support the group because they believe in cohousing and want to see it come to life in the Peterborough area. If you fall into either one of those groups, please see our donation page.
Six of our members attended the Northeast Cohousing Summit in Amherst Massachusetts from September 21-23, 2018. They returned with lots of new ideas gathered from the conference sessions and cohousing community tours, and especially from the full and half day intensive workshops. They shared these insights at our first learning session, held on Sunday October 14th, at Activity Haven in Peterborough. You can find out more about that session, including detailed reports on each of the workshops that they attended, on this page.
Our group had a public event at The Mount in Peterborough on Tuesday, June 19 that was attended by about 70 people interested in the idea of cohousing. Scott Donovan opened with a short presentation giving an overview of the concept, then Kris Robinson Staveley talked about some of what she has learned by visiting almost a dozen cohousing communities in the US and Canada, and Elaine Rutherford described what it was like to live in the Windsong cohousing community in BC for 15 years.
Finally, Al Slavin spoke about some of the things that got him thinking about cohousing as a potential future, and then the group shared some snacks and refreshments. You can see the presentations by Al, Scott and Kris embedded on this page and you can see some photos of the event here.
"Organizing around the name Kawartha Cohousing, the group is hoping to design and build a living facility that will be owned and managed cooperatively, though it will include private rooms in order to balance residents' needs for privacy as well as community. If the group is successful, it will be the first housing development of its kind in the city, and one of only a handful in Ontario.