Our first host location
Participants traveling from The North Bay and the Sacramento region or beyond will get to stay in newly-refurbished shared rooms and the newly-created Common House guestroom at Golden Gate Cohousing.
Betsy Morris and Jack Sawyer in front of the fireplace in the Golden Gate Common House
The first gathering in the two-year quarterly facilitation intensive series. Originally scheduled for last September, we have now confirmed the host communities and enough students to start the series.
It was a challenge for us to find a cohousing neighborhood in the core of the San Francisco Bay Area that had both the interest in the series and the capacity and willingness to host the first session. Many communities are too small to have enough people to spread the work/member hosting or don't have guest rooms or have common houses to small for the group plus their members.
So we found an innovative approach: split the duties and the benefits between two nearby neighborhoods.
Our first host community was Golden Gate Cohousing, a new community forming around a move-in ready site in Northwest Oakland. We will have the rare opportunity in the series to facilitate a process of group formation and visioning, helping find a model that works for both the site and the people.
Because Golden Gate Cohousing is new and doesn't have established members yet, nearby Triple Point Cohousing split the hosting, providing us with delectable food (you have got to taste their soups and chocolate chip cookies) and benefiting from one of our facilitation sessions.
Both communities have common houses too small to host a group plus the class, so we did some of our activities, including plenary sessions that the group does hands-on facilitation in, at the nearby Center for Sustainable Living, a new live/work community and educational center (dare we call it an Ecovillage?) created by the Sustainable Living Roadshow folks.