First stop: Boulder, Colorado

Chrysallis Labor Chart

Prepping for the Boulder Food Rescue 

Bike Parking

  It's been a long trip so far.  A 16-hour drive from Austin to Boulder, with sandstorms, snow, tumbleweeds, windmills, and cows that we could never quite manage to get on camera.  Boulder is a small, flat town with lots of bikes, bordered by huge snow-topped mountains (being Texans, we got really excited by those!).  We first got B-roll of the town, then headed to Nomad Cohousing to meet our first subjects.  Nomad is a community of about 30 people, 10 of them kids, nestled on an acre of land in the middle of the city (such as it is). We got some fantastic interviews with the residents, including a popular architect, two sustainability coaches, and a whole bunch of kids!      We learned that the central tenet of cohousing is the architecture: houses are commonly arranged facing each other around a central courtyard, with a common house for gatherings and weekly meals.  This facilitates interaction and creates an old-style neighborhood with a ton of community and sustainability benefits.
  Next, we visited Masala co-op, a lovely little mixed-age house with chickens and gardens and a great mix of people, and then captured an interview with Wonderland Hill founder Jim Leach.  Wonderland Hill is the largest cohousing developer in the United States.  Jim gave us some great information on the history of the movement and the work that's being done today.  The next day, we went to a gathering at Chrysalis co-op which benefited the Boulder Food Rescue (a completely awesome organization which collects extra food from grocery stores and brings it to co-ops and homeless shelters) and then headed out to LA.
  After this first section of the trip, the question I have is - if community living has so many benefits, why don't more people live in it?  Co-ops and cohousing have been around since the 1960s and '80s, respectively, but they're still a pretty small proportion of American housing, especially when compared to communal living in other countries.  If you think about it, living in community is far more natural than living alone.  Maybe it's our American mindset of individuality and entitlement - definitely community living does require work and sharing.  For me, the most important question of this film is how to bring more people to this amazing way of life.


-Sara

Manley Co-op and the Mop Slap

Front porch swing at Manley

Ah, what a joy it was to be at a co-op. Even with most of its members out of town for spring break, the Manley house posse graciously took us in and shared stories and laughs with us.
After our informative and beautiful time that was spent at L.A. ecovillage, the crew was even more pumped to visit another community.

Jeff, the executive director, immediately gave us the guest room to store our loads of belongings, and without a hitch we began a tour of all 4 houses under the Santa Barbara Student Housing Co-ops. Each house is as diverse as their members from Biko House with its “people of color” themed house to Dashain, the most “co-opy” of all the coops (dubbed the House of Seitan).


The time in Santa Barbara was encompassed by an interview with Jeff, who’s time spent on the board at the Madison coops and coops in Costa Rica prepped him for the massive responsibility that is SBSHC as executive director.

Jeff Bessmer, Sara, and Joe take a break during our tour

The most fun I had was when we sat down with the few members who stuck around at Manley, and shared coop traditions with one another. Nothing like sharing the infamous mop slap technique (courtesy of 21st Street Co-op in Austin) that is used quite often on coopers deemed “uncooperative” (hey, it’s better than getting kicked out or fined). Let’s hope that we didn’t influence any policy changes at Manley House.

-Ivy

http://sbcoop.org/?q=node/23