Our Community
Grandparents and babies, teenagers and adults, the generations living and working together: this is our strength. Children playing away from traffic in woods and open greens with adults nearby, people visiting with neighbors: this is our common vision. We share the desire to live near neighbors we know in a small community.
Our Values
We are sensitive to the diverse needs of our members and have adopted values statements from time to time. These include mutual respect in honoring differing beliefs and viewpoints, having a minimal impact on the earth, and creating a place in which all residents are equally valued as part of the community.
Community Meals
Sharing meals as a community is a core principle of cohousing. Most residents find that sharing the effort of shopping, cooking, and cleaning to get the convenience, community interaction, and the variety of home cooking is one of the sweetest reasons to join a cohousing community!
Winslow Cohousing has always had success at organizing a high number of community meals (few cohousing communities offer more; many offer less).
Participation is optional and on an “as available” basis. Community meals — almost always dinners — are offered five nights a week, Sunday through Thursday. All who wish to take part in the meals system take turns either cooking or cleaning. Whether coming home from work or getting out of the house, common meals are a welcome break from the everyday dinner planning, shopping, cooking and cleaning routine.
Ownership
As a cooperative housing corporation, members own shares in the corporation and have a proprietary lease for a specific home. Besides a home, you also have a share in ownership of the Common House, the grounds, and other common facilities.
Governance and Participation
Consensus Decision Making
We are committed to another core concept of cohousing: we make decisions by consensus. Yes, there is a fallback to a vote “if” consensus “can’t” be reached, but — so far so good — after 25 years we’ve never yet had to fall back on mere “majority rules.”
The downside is that the path to big changes is usually slow. The “change makers” work a process on educating and listening long before a decision can be put to the community for adoption.
And that is also the upside; with more people fully understanding the issue and having the opportunity to be fully heard, we have fewer regretted decisions and our community’s decisions are usually robust.
Governance
We have monthly general meetings for governance discussions and decision-making, alternating between the second Saturday and second Sunday of each month.
Self Management
We value being self-managed for most tasks. We hire specialists to keep our structures and land in a high-performing mode that will serve us long into the future, but we choose to learn and perform most maintenance work ourselves.
To stay on top of this important maintenance work, all adults belong to one of five clusters: Administration, Process and Communication, Grounds, Maintenance, and Common Facilities. We each contribute several hours a month to get the work of the clusters done.
In addition, everyone takes a turn in picking up and cleaning the common house on a Saturday morning (typically once every four months).