Why cooperative housing should be the cheapest housing…

Why should living in a cooperative be the cheapest housing option?

To increase your cooperative’s inclusivity: Cooperatives often stand for progressive principals. “Being inclusive” is often one of those principals, and that one that members have the most trouble enacting. To make a change, look no further than your fees! By reducing the expense related to becoming a member, you also reduce the classist (wealth based) barrier that prohibits some people from joining your organization. (Within reason,) it is the responsibility of the current members of a cooperative to ensure that all people have the choice to participate in the cooperative in the future…

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Spirituality & Cooperation: Organizing in Boston

In Boston, Massachusetts, a group of seven people are creating the model for the Lucy Stone Cooperative (LSC). LSC seeks to be a presence that gives back to its community through living out Universal Unitarian values. Other issues that LSC organizes around are sustainability, affordability, and cooperation.

LSC is raising funds to purchase property. Through years of planning, LSC has been gaining in member numbers and mission clarity. Some members of the planning team have been working for as long as five years. Others, like Hilary Lake, a former member of Kalamazoo Collective Housing, joined the team about one year ago.

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Get Between the Pages

The Fletcher Collective is hosting a monthly reading group. We meet on the second Thursday of every month. On May 13, we’ll gather in our yellow living room to talk about David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon.”

You are invited. The reading group is accessible, no matter what your confidence level. We take the perspective that no ideas are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in literary criticism. There’s no conclusion to interpretation.

The reading group is participant lead. From the selection of the readings to the format of the discussions, everything about the group is democratically determined. We’re open to anything – you name it: fiction, comics, non-fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction – what we’re especially into is first-rate recommendations. What readings do you want to talk about?

The reading group is moderated by a member of the Fletcher Collective. The moderators role is principally to ensure that anyone who desires to speak gets a chance. To make sure that things get off on the right foot, a member will also come prepared with a few prompts. Bring your own list of questions, too. We’re interested in your ideas about the text. Each perspective, or ‘take’ on a reading gets us closer to full knowledge of a text, and different perspectives are most quickly discoverable when many people are contributing to the discussion.

We’ve had the leisure to use an unguided discussion format. Our meetings have been, let’s say, ‘intimately sized.’ However, as we grow, we may try different styles. I wanted to get an idea of how other reading groups are structured, so I looked for online resources that list different formats for reading group discussions. I didn’t turn anything up. Let us know what your reading group experiences have been like, we’re curious to know what works. Or, if you bump into a website that’s worthwhile on your daily surf, post a link.

I did find general information on book clubs at this website. On this website, I found a list of different discussion styles for the classroom. I think that the formats titled “Posted Dialogues” and “Circe of Voices” look like they’d be amusing and productive if adapted for a reading group.

Poster by James Gleghorn

Re-Roofing the Fletcher Collective

The roof of the Fletcher Collective came due for replacement this year. Often, when a layer of shingles becomes too decrepit, another layer of shingles will be installed on top of the old. Since this repair does not require demolition, it is less labor intensive and messy. However, shingle layers can only be stacked two or three layers thick before it is necessary to scrape everything off. Our roof replacement required that we remove three layers of shingles in addition to the original lumber beneath.

In this post, I present the resources that helped my housemates and I higher our roofing contractor.

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I took this picture of the Fletcher Collective during the shingle installation.