Dialogue with Alan O’Hashi on Cohousing

For those drawn to intentional community and cohousing, they will delight in viewing Alan O’Hashi at 7:00 p.m on May 8, 2024, on Zoom. 

A Meet the Professionals speaker event

O’Hashi is a newspaper journalist turned documentary filmmaker, screenwriter, author, nonprofit leader and activist. He works with groups and organizations to help them tell their stories.  For this event, Alan will speak from his experience as a board member of the US Cohousing Association and his time living in Silver Sage Village, a cohousing senior community in Boulder, CO. There will be time for Q and A.

Meet the Professionals:
Alan O’Hashi

Wednesday, May 8, 2024
7:00 to 8:30 PM on Zoom

Registration is required to receive a Zoom link. Limit: 100 participants.

Group Zoom viewing at Unity Church Unitarian in St. Paul, space is limited. 

Alan O’Hashi
  • Cultural competency training and facilitation
  • Cohousing Community Process Consultant
  • Positions held: Cohousing USA Board of Directors; previously Boulder Planning Board, former Executive Director of Habitat for Humanity St Vrain Valley – Longmont, Colorado.
  • Books – “How Cohousing Bridges Cultural Divides,” “Views from Atop My Bedpan,” “Libby Flats” a novel partially set in cohousing.

The Need for Permanent Affordability: Community Land Trusts & Cohousing

Greg Rosenberg’s experience creating cohousing communities and his extensive knowledge of community land trusts (CLTs) offers an exciting approach to creating cohousing communities with permanently affordable housing units.

Meet the Professionals: Greg Rosenberg

Rosenberg discussed some of the economic justice challenges that come with building desirable places to live, and some of the methods to develop mixed-income cohousing. Cohousing, when not price-controlled, can easily become expensive to the point of being exclusionary. This session will highlight the need for price restrictions using resale formulas (eg. through a community land trust (CLT)) to ensure ongoing affordability, and discuss the steps to subsidize home prices and keep them affordable. Two contrasting examples of mixed-income cohousing in Madison will be featured: Troy Gardens (a project of Madison Area CLT) and Linden Cohousing.


Meet the Professionals: Greg Rosenberg

“The Need for Permanent Affordability: Community Land Trusts and Cohousing”

Recorded on May 10, 2023 via Zoom.

Greg Rosenberg
(photo used by permission)

Learn more about Greg at Rosenberg and Associates.

TCCN’s publicity partner for this event is:

Logo with stylized blue "M" and the words, "Minnesota Community Land Trust Coalition. A permanent solution for affordable housing."

For more information on Minnesota’s 13 Community Land Trust organizations go to mncltc.org.

The transformative impact of intentional Community

Event date: Wed. Nov. 18, 2020

Join others to view a prerecorded webchat discussion with Sky Blue and Avi Kruley on the potential of intentional communities to help transform our world.

Humanity is in crisis. The feedback loop between larger society, the communities we live in, and our personal experiences reinforce systems of privilege and oppression that create harm – for people and the planet.

From the safety of your home*, learn what makes a group an intentional community. Are intentional communities part of the problem or part of the solution? How can we do better? This conversation between Sky and Avi will delve into these multifaceted experiments known as intentional communities and their potential to help transform our world.

Register now to view this prerecorded discussion made available through our national cohousing information source, Coho USA.

Head shots of featured speakers Avi Kurley and Sky Blue.
Avi Kruley, Community Wellbeing Facilitator at the Mount Madonna Center in Watsonville, CA, and Sky Blue, Executive Director of the Foundation for Intentional Community

Register in advance to join this special Zoom meeting.

Wednesday, November 18, 2020
7:00-8:00 P.M. Central Time (U.S. and Canada)
Free.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Cheerful diverse friends gathering in modern studio apartment suggestive of an intentional community.

* Due to COVID-19, Twin Cities Cohousing Network has shifted to holding virtual events that bring people together from the safety of their own homes.

Community + Privacy = Cohousing

Can we disrupt the isolation of modern life with a newer form? The word “cohousing” is translated from the Danish, where these clustered, intentional mini-communities are fairly common (and in fact are encouraged by government policies in Denmark).

What defines cohousing? There are some aspects that are bricks-and-mortar: each household owns its own private home–sometimes a detached house, more often a townhome or condo unit–and a share in the yard/gardens as well as a building for optional group meals and other activities, the “common house”.

It is the social aspects that disrupt our society’s typical way of life. People who live in cohousing do so with a commitment to building community among their neighbors, sharing some equipment (such as lawnmowers and snowblowers) that gets used infrequently, and helping each other.