In 1971,  war tax resisters in the San Francisco Bay Area formed the People’s Life Fund (PLF). Each Tax Day, the PLF makes grants to community organizations working for peace and justice. 

Please join us for the 2017 awards.  We are very proud to announce that East Bay Cohousing (EBCOHO) will receive a grant as part of the 2017 cohort of thirty two grant recipients! 

We are in great company; the People of Color Sustainable Housing Network and Permaculture Action Network are also recipients this year. Our friends at the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) and Bay Area Community Land Trust (BACLT) have been prior recipients of PLF grants.

PLF has offered us $1500 to support our efforts to develop a local revolving loan fund that will support permanently affordable homes in cooperatives and cohousing communities.  

The project will help very low-income senior homeowners who wish to stay in their homes and to who wish leave a legacy of affordable housing for the next generation of community activists.

For the past year, we have been talking with Bay Area community land trusts, identified potential socially concious lenders learning from other cooperative loan funds supporting cohousing and ecovillages from Los Angeles, Portland, and New England. The grant will help us consult with partners, build a working legal and economic model, and kickstart a fund.  

We were led to this project (and the grant) through our Berkeley Cohousing neighbor Alice Green.  Inspired by herlife of peaceful, deep green voluntary simplicity, we have been helping her fulfill her dream to remain in her home in cohousing.

In 2014, we gathered over 10,000 signatures in a weekend with an online petition that Alice and Raines personally presented to officials at the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, DC.  (see photo above!), resulting in a new definition of cohousing that includes Aging in Community, not just Aging in Place.

HUD's change made it possible for seniors in cohousing to qualify for a federally insured reverse mortgage, but that left Alice stuck with having to do business with extractive corporate lenders that would sell her home at market rates, losing the affordability that is core to her values. That led us to pursue alternative community-based paths for financing, preserving permanent affordability, which this grant will help us develop. 

Here's the rough schedule for the evening:

5 - 6 PM - Live Music  
6 - 6:30 PM - Potluck meal (please bring something to share) 
6:30 - 8 PM - Granting ceremony by the board of the People's Life Fund

Join us for all or part, as we join many recipients in doing what the federal government can't or won't, creating new options for cohousers and communitarians, with local initiative and control, for permanent affordability and access.