Harvesting Learnings from Cooperative Living
My sharing today is in some ways more personal than usual. It’s about a big big part of my life, that (surprisingly, as I think about it now!) I haven’t explored much in the writing I do here.
But/and it feels important to share, both because of big shifts and changes unfolding for me (thank you for witnessing!), and, also, because it’s quite relevant to the work I do in the world: of supporting folks in healing and conflict, so they can move towards their thriving and beautiful contributions to collective liberation!
As is true for many of us, the work I do/the support I offer others is absolutely an outgrowth of places where I was needing more support and skill and resource myself along the way.
For years (and still!) :) I was finding myself in various organizing/movement/collective/community spaces where conflict and lack of capacity and inadequate process/facilitation and unclear roles/structures/agreements/decision-making commitments etc etc etc were seriously getting in the way of doing the work we so badly wanted to be able to do together.
Not least of these was the Prairie Wolf Co-housing Cooperative, which I am a founding member owner of.
All of this is super live for me, as the two other remaining member-owners of the Collective and I are in the middle of laying this project to rest after 14 years!
Turns out living in community and trying to co-own property and share households in ways that are anti-capitalist and liberatory is really hard!
So I came to NVC and to somatics and to facilitation tools in their various forms because I needed them. I deepened into study and practice in all of these areas because I wanted to be able to show up better in all the spaces I was in.
I came to nonviolent communication specifically (or NVC - one of frameworks that deeply shapes my teaching and conflict support work) because I was needing support. I started studying and practicing and stretching to embody NVC because I was actually finding it immensely helpful in my own ability to show up more resourced, more centered, more accountable and more connected to my own body/self.
One thing I learned was that I needed SO much more empathy for myself, and deepening into that practice was at the core of being able to show up more resourced and with more empathy and compassion for others in all these ways and spaces.
And so in a way, it was through being part of the Prairie Wolf Collective co-housing cooperative, alongside various other community organizing spaces, other experiments in intentional community, and adjacent collective farming projects, that I honed my own skills around facilitation, process design, consensus, collective ownership, cooperative models, transformative justice and the list goes on!
And I’m so grateful to have grown and received these tools and skills and competencies along the way, and to now be able to offer them to others as my role in movement and organizing and community is shifting and evolving (and of course always will be - just in a big one right now as we transition out of this cooperative structure!)
Although this giant experiment in co-housing has been one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, as we move towards sunsetting the project I’m also so immensely proud of us. I want to take time to savour all that we have learned and practiced and share some of the juicy nuggets with you.
I think in many ways, we have understated the radical nature and uniqueness of our experiment, being so absorbed and occupied in the day to day life of the community and all it took to sustain. In the midst of it all, I don’t think we’ve always been able to fully see and appreciate ourselves and know how bad ass we really were/are.
We also did not often have space to do as much story-sharing, writing, connecting with other intentional community networks, etc as many of us would have liked along the way. This is a regret and a grief. And, I’m glad to get to make space for some of that reflecting and integrating now!
As members and residents, we spanned ages, generations, class, race, immigration status and so much more, and we were in a deep experiment of moving at the speed of trust and through consensus to create processes and systems that actually held all of us with equity and care, and embodied more of the world we long for - and allowed us to create shared housing for ourselves that we could afford.
Along the way, we also supported others in our neighborhoods to do likewise through local housing justice organizing we were a part of.
Wow, there are just so many pieces of the story, and really we could probably write a book!
But for today, putting a pin in all of these other threads, and returning to reflecting on some of the places I really want to celebrate and honor as we come to this close…
Some of what I’m grateful for and really proud of us for includes:
Refining over the years our processes - for meeting, for consensus decision making, for clarifying roles and expectations and accountability - to the point where we now feel like (well, I was going to say a well-oiled machine, but in case those are obsolete when someone is reading this some future post-oil day, how about…) an in-balance ecosystem, humming along.
That we talked a lot about money, our money stories and class experiences, and had an elaborate sliding scale mechanism through which we tried to adjust what money we were actually each paying in, in relationship to our various forms of access, and tweaked this often to try to best meet our collective needs.
That for 14 years we have had monthly work days (plus sooooo many more than monthly in the first two years of renovating our two buildings) and truly felt the buoying support of so many friends showing up to lend a hand. Wow. Truly could not have done it without wider community. And through us asking for help, people with skills got to make a joyful and meaningful contribution. And dang, many of us (myself included!) got to learn how to run electrical lines, hang drywall, knock out load-bearing walls, repair archaic plumbing, install chimneys and so much more! These are also skills for resistance and resilience!
That we were able to adapt and evolve over time - to the coming and going of members and renters, to integrating learning from other intentional community projects we spent time in, to having mutual trial periods with potential new members - and ultimately, that we were able to take in some incredibly hard feedback and really do our best to face into it with centered accountability, which led us towards significant pivots in our purpose/practice as we tried to be genuinely responsive.
That we took the time it took (and believe me this wasn’t always easy - patience is NOT my virtue, and in the last year and a half+ of actively moving towards laying the collective to rest, I was frequently feeling antsy and wanting to move much faster than others were ready and able to - and yet still I am glad we didn’t go any faster. I’m deeply grateful that we could again move at the speed of trust through some incredibly complex decisions (including moving to change our operating agreements, while trying to honour the founding intentions of the project, even though many founders were no longer around, and navigating the transferring of property that had significant financial impact, as well as redistributing money to former members as a way of honoring their various contributions even though this was not a previous commitment/requirement - big and sticky stuff!).
We did so much hosting and cultivating culture and community - house shows, interns, earth based rituals, workshops, community events, queer space, community gardening, potlucks and pub nights and parties and community organizing meetings and more - and may all of this continue!
And all of this was not without missteps or harm or imperfection - there was a lot of that, a lot of hardness, a lot of conflict actually - there are relationships that continue to be strained or have just become distant; there were multiple times where we needed to call in external support, to have third parties hold space and mediate and help us listen more deeply through really hard places and not seeing each other.
And I’m proud of us for all of that, too - for practicing what we preached, and seeing the value and necessity of calling in support when times got tough, while also skilling up ourselves so we are more resourced in these moments, more able to lean into the potential for conflict to be generative.
We have so much to celebrate. Hmmm, I’m just taking a breath with all of that.
And yet still it’s time to close - and that’s another thing to celebrate. That we knew when it was time. That we are releasing and letting go of something that is still good, while we still have good relationships with each other . That we are able to see that this current iteration of the experiment has come to its natural end, and it’s time to release and make space for whatever is next. It’s about seeing this not as a failure, but a trusting of emergence, of iteration, of experiment, of the endless nature of change.
And we’re still going to be intentional neighbours - none of us is going anywhere in the moment. We’ll still be living right here in South Central Elkhart, sharing garden space and compost piles and clotheslines. In some ways, not a lot will change. But also a lot has and will!
Whew. There’s a lot here. Thanks for reading, and witnessing me in this life transition point, and all the ways this journey has shaped me and the work I offer to the world.
I hope you and the spaces you are a part of can also be finding the support needed to move through the sticky places, to be more resourced to show up well to the important work you are up to, to pivot when it’s time. We need you!
And if I can be of support in any of that, please do reach it. It would be an honour to get to offer out of all that I have received through my own experimenting and practice.