April 29th was the National Cohousing Open House. Last year we said we’d do it and since we hadn’t moved in we did construction tours. So this was our first occupied Open House. In honor of celebrating our first year of residency we created a 20 page book that tells the story of our community’s creation from 2010 to 2016. If you want to see it you can use this link to view it on Shutterfly. We then blew up all the pages and made a large timeline on the Common House wall, which you can see in the images below. We used Eventbrite to schedule 30 minutes tours every half hour throughout the day. By days end we’d toured about 50 people. We feel this community outreach is a good way to spread the word about cohousing while building our mailing list for the time in the future when a unit may become available.
The following weekend founding community member and Schemata Workshop principal architect Grace Kim hosted a cohousing workshop for a group of about 20 people attending the CNU Conference. Of course they were all given a tour as well.
For some reason the activity level for tours has been quite high for the past month. In addition to the above large groups, we had a couple from Victoria, BC who are forming a group up there, two University of Washington Students, a couple from Florida who are very cohousing-curious who just dropped in, and several other visitors. Then for the Living Futures Conference we hosted a member of Murundaka Cohousing in Melbourne, Australia for 10 days in our guest room. It was fun to learn about Heidi’s community and how they do things there.
