“I don’t want to be a used car salesman.” This is the response I most often hear when I ask forming cohousing groups to describe their feelings around using sales techniques in their membership recruitment.

And I get it. We tend to stereotype sales people as sleazy movie car salesman: they pounce aggressively and they don’t listen. They leave us feeling coerced. We picture the guy to the left.

The Regional Cohousing Conference this weekend in Boulder, CO will bring cohousing professionals, those seeking cohousing and existing communities all together - there to share and gather knowledge to bring back to their established/new/in-process communities.

Hear from Bryan Bowen of Caddis Architects (and resident at Wild Sage Cohousing) on why you should be excited for this weekend!

"The Conference is a great place to share ideas, to learn how to fine tune your community's best practices or even how to start a new community."

While there is an abundance of information on our Coho/US website about the variety of cohousing communities, as well as the option to post inquiries to the Cohousing-L list serve, nothing compares to spending time at a community. Whether you are forming a community and in the process of learning all that you can, or living in an established community and wanting to observe how others do things, this is time well spent.

I sit here on the Pacific Coast of Mexico watching the sea awaken in the soft pastels of the changing morning light of sunrise. The waves, stirred by a night of winds from the north rise and fall, then crash into transformative white foam, obscuring the boulders that define our boundary between land and sea. It is a continuous rhythm that defines the pulse of the experience of this place.

It’s the first question newcomers ask when introduced to consensus (or consent) decision-making: What if you just can’t agree? My answer is usually, “That’s when the really good stuff happens!” It is too. It’s when we are pushed to be thoughtful, collaborative and creative and find solutions no one has thought of yet. Most of us have experienced that, but sadly most have us have also experienced gridlock. Whether we’re locking horns or passively standing our ground, we get stuck, feelings get hurt, process grinds to a halt and cohousing isn’t quite so wonderful anymore.