We're busy folks here at Pacific Gardens. Every week is filled with meetings, gardening, maintenance and cleaning chores, proposals to be developed, agendas to be crafted, and forms to be filled out. The list never grows shorter. It's easy for us to get overwhelmed with our responsibilities, so much so that sometimes we forget what it is that we have achieved in creating this community.
This week we got a wonderful reminder from a new resident, Glenn, who told us he knew immediately that he wanted to live here when he saw the word "cohousing" in our ad for rentals. He had been interested in intentional communities for a long time, and had followed the progress of several groups that wanted to build cohousing developments.
What impressed him most was that we had actually done it! He knew of at least five or six proposed cohousing projects that never got off the drawing board, and yet, our little band of dreamers and idealists and activists had managed to create this beautiful building, after many years of effort.
We invested the money from our savings, pension funds, and sales of homes and property, hired architects, construction managers, code consultants, marketing assistants, arranged for construction loans, researched energy-efficient heating systems and environmentally-friendly building materials, and spent hundreds of hours in meetings.
And then three years ago, we got our occupancy permit, and here we are! As I sit here in my office, I can hear the children in the atrium. Outside my patio window the dew glistens on the flowers in Susana's garden and on late-ripening tomatoes in the veggie plots of our other enthusiastic gardeners.
The story of us is pretty amazing, as Glenn reminded us. On Saturday we'll be setting out our stall at the annual Harvest Festival held on Wesley Street in Nanaimo from 10:30 am to 3:30 pm. If you're in town, come on by and we'll tell you more!
Kathryn
Showing posts with label intentional communities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intentional communities. Show all posts
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Monday, April 27, 2009
An engaging workshop
The first workshop in the Community Facilitator Intensive Series was a heart warming and meaningful experience for me.
It was the first time that I'd participated in an event with members of other intentional communities. In this case there were representatives from six cohousing communities and two ecovillages in Coastal British Columbia. It was wonderful to hear about life in other intentional communities and to witness it first hand in the case of our hospitable host community, Creekside Commons in Courtenay, BC.
The purpose of these workshops is to teach meeting facilitation skills. That, in turn, is intended to build the capacity for consensus decision making within each participating community.
During the three and a half days that we spent with them, our host community had two meetings. In advance of those meetings, members of the host community briefed us trainees. They explained to us what the issues were, how long they'd been wrestling with them, and what they'd done so far in an attempt to resolve them.
We trainees, in turn, chose meeting formats that we thought would be most constructive for each issue, and we created agendas for each meeting. The facilitator, time keeper, vibe watcher, scribe and minute taker for each meeting was one of us external trainees.
In case you don't know what a vibe watcher is, it is someone who monitors the moods of meeting participants and alerts the facilitator to an emerging issue if it escapes the facilitator's attention. A scribe is someone who jots down key points on a flip chart that is visible to meeting participants.
The two community meetings resulted in a rich cross fertilization of ideas. The host community had a chance to try meeting formats that were new to them. There was one in particular that they liked a lot and said they would use again. They also had the benefit of external facilitators and other meeting aids who felt compassionate towards them but who were not personally invested in their issues.
For the trainees, it was a high privilege to witness members of the host community discussing their challenges at an authentic level. It was comforting to hear from the members of established communities that they had grappled with the same issues around the two year mark (which was the age of our host community). Those of us who belonged to forming communities or communities under construction gained insights into what it would be like to live in community. From the point of view of our training, it felt much more relevant to work with real issues being debated by real people in real time than it would have felt if Tree had created hypothetical scenarios.
The drive back to Nanaimo with Roz, my fellow Pacific Gardener who had participated in the workshop, was delightful. She wisely chose to take the slower but more scenic route that hugged the coast, rather than the quicker but more mundane inland highway. On the way home, we unpacked the meaning that the workshop had held for each of us.
I am deeply grateful for this experience.
It was the first time that I'd participated in an event with members of other intentional communities. In this case there were representatives from six cohousing communities and two ecovillages in Coastal British Columbia. It was wonderful to hear about life in other intentional communities and to witness it first hand in the case of our hospitable host community, Creekside Commons in Courtenay, BC.
The purpose of these workshops is to teach meeting facilitation skills. That, in turn, is intended to build the capacity for consensus decision making within each participating community.
During the three and a half days that we spent with them, our host community had two meetings. In advance of those meetings, members of the host community briefed us trainees. They explained to us what the issues were, how long they'd been wrestling with them, and what they'd done so far in an attempt to resolve them.
We trainees, in turn, chose meeting formats that we thought would be most constructive for each issue, and we created agendas for each meeting. The facilitator, time keeper, vibe watcher, scribe and minute taker for each meeting was one of us external trainees.
In case you don't know what a vibe watcher is, it is someone who monitors the moods of meeting participants and alerts the facilitator to an emerging issue if it escapes the facilitator's attention. A scribe is someone who jots down key points on a flip chart that is visible to meeting participants.
The two community meetings resulted in a rich cross fertilization of ideas. The host community had a chance to try meeting formats that were new to them. There was one in particular that they liked a lot and said they would use again. They also had the benefit of external facilitators and other meeting aids who felt compassionate towards them but who were not personally invested in their issues.
For the trainees, it was a high privilege to witness members of the host community discussing their challenges at an authentic level. It was comforting to hear from the members of established communities that they had grappled with the same issues around the two year mark (which was the age of our host community). Those of us who belonged to forming communities or communities under construction gained insights into what it would be like to live in community. From the point of view of our training, it felt much more relevant to work with real issues being debated by real people in real time than it would have felt if Tree had created hypothetical scenarios.
The drive back to Nanaimo with Roz, my fellow Pacific Gardener who had participated in the workshop, was delightful. She wisely chose to take the slower but more scenic route that hugged the coast, rather than the quicker but more mundane inland highway. On the way home, we unpacked the meaning that the workshop had held for each of us.
I am deeply grateful for this experience.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
The adventure expands
This is a short break during a three and a half day workshop in consensus decision making that I'm doing at Creekside Commons in Courtenay, BC.
For me the rewards of this experience are off the charts. I'm learning so much from observing the dynamics of our host community, and from accessing the combined wisdom of eight intentional communities in coastal British Columbia. Besides that, it's just plain fun.
I rather suspect I could get used to this cohousing gig. :-)
For me the rewards of this experience are off the charts. I'm learning so much from observing the dynamics of our host community, and from accessing the combined wisdom of eight intentional communities in coastal British Columbia. Besides that, it's just plain fun.
I rather suspect I could get used to this cohousing gig. :-)
Saturday, January 24, 2009
A friend I have yet to meet
Today some of my fellow cohos and I will be showing a visitor around Nanaimo, I'll have him over to my house for supper, and then one of our other cohos will be billeting him at her house tonight.
Our visitor lives in the United States, but is in Vancouver on a short-term work assignment. His family has a long history of involvement with intentional communities. So, when he was preparing to come up to this area, he put out his feelers to find out what sorts of intentional communities there were around here. I guess his Google search must have brought up Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, because he contacted us.
It just goes to show what a useful tool the Internet is.
But the Internet takes you only so far. It can serve as an introduction to people in distant places. Yet the Internet cannot meet your ferry, chat with you, take you on a walking tour along the harbour and through downtown, feed you, and so on.
The cool thing about being involved with intentional communities is that it gives you so much in common with folks in the movement. You pretty much know, in advance, that you will be kindred spirits.
Or at least that's my theory. I am off to test it right now and to find out if, indeed, a stranger is just a friend whom I have yet to meet.
I'll let you know tomorrow how it went.
Our visitor lives in the United States, but is in Vancouver on a short-term work assignment. His family has a long history of involvement with intentional communities. So, when he was preparing to come up to this area, he put out his feelers to find out what sorts of intentional communities there were around here. I guess his Google search must have brought up Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community, because he contacted us.
It just goes to show what a useful tool the Internet is.
But the Internet takes you only so far. It can serve as an introduction to people in distant places. Yet the Internet cannot meet your ferry, chat with you, take you on a walking tour along the harbour and through downtown, feed you, and so on.
The cool thing about being involved with intentional communities is that it gives you so much in common with folks in the movement. You pretty much know, in advance, that you will be kindred spirits.
Or at least that's my theory. I am off to test it right now and to find out if, indeed, a stranger is just a friend whom I have yet to meet.
I'll let you know tomorrow how it went.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Embracing the work(shop)
When Tree Bressen led Pacific Gardens Cohousing Community in a consensus decision making workshop in September 2008, she said, "Joining a cohousing community will be the longest and most expensive self development workshop you'll ever do in your life."
She went on to model for us a receptive attitude towards life in an intentional community. That is, when there is a bump in the road, we have the opportunity to treat it like a workshop exercise. We can observe it, ask ourselves what's going on, figure out if there is some learning we can extract from it.
Since Tree introduced that concept to me, I have found it very helpful to approach everything like that. In fact I believe that has contributed enormously to the happiness I described in a previous post.
But, while the saying that Tree quoted was cute, I have come to disagree with it. I now would say that life is the longest and most expensive self development workshop you'll ever do!
Cultivating an attitude of curiosity about my life and everything that happens in it -- whether it's supposedly good or supposedly bad -- has felt very supportive to me.
She went on to model for us a receptive attitude towards life in an intentional community. That is, when there is a bump in the road, we have the opportunity to treat it like a workshop exercise. We can observe it, ask ourselves what's going on, figure out if there is some learning we can extract from it.
Since Tree introduced that concept to me, I have found it very helpful to approach everything like that. In fact I believe that has contributed enormously to the happiness I described in a previous post.
But, while the saying that Tree quoted was cute, I have come to disagree with it. I now would say that life is the longest and most expensive self development workshop you'll ever do!
Cultivating an attitude of curiosity about my life and everything that happens in it -- whether it's supposedly good or supposedly bad -- has felt very supportive to me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
