1) EXTENDING OUR WELCOME PARTICIPATORY MULTI-HOME COHOUSING

SPENDING MONEY LOCALLY

ABCDE is focused on rebuilding community through the complementary assets or strengths of citizens. The drawing above from the Asset Based Community Development ABCD Institute shows how 1$ intentionally recirculated in commerce & industry becomes 7$ on the income tax statements of 7 people. Recirculation isn’t understood or well implemented in individual estranged competitive races down freeways and corridors.  Multi-home domestic economies (Cohousing) who master Human Resource Accounting procedures are able to keep dollars, time and energy recirculating some thirty times.  Indigene Community focus is based on ‘indigenous’ (Latin = ‘self-generating’) multi-home ‘domestic’ economy takes this re-circulating focus into clustered multi-home apartment and townhouse complexes as did our indigenous ancestors for the bulk of sustainable human history.  Domestic economic planning using this principle of recirculating human energy through community capital accounting provisions is able to recapture community control in universal participation and progressive ownership as well as minimize foreign commercial and industrial excess.

GROUP ECONOMY-ECOLOGY

When families or groups buy together in wholesale quantities, then cost, transportation, packaging, marketting, waste and management are greatly reduced way beyond present inactive Kyoto environmental targets.   We all want a clean environment but we are not putting our resources together to make it happen. We have become dependent on centralized governments that are incapable of mobilizing these resources. Recycling becomes possible at group economies when everyone is consciously responsible. Local infrastructure such as composting of food waste, space devotion to storage or reuse, gravity-fed food dispenser management of bulk foods, grey water reuse, repair of clothes, repair of household furniture, equipment, tools as well as the time to perform these functions are made possible only when we work and invest together.  Structured communication between Founder, Worker, Supplier and Consumer stakeholders through Associations allows for design to ef-fectively serve all cycles of economic activity.  Caucussing'  (Iroquois meaning 'grouping of like-interests') among stakeholders organises those who are working in each specialty into Production-Societies where mem-bers develop standards and develop representation and communication with the cohousing corporate board. 

MUNICIPAL ‘COMMUNITY SERVICE REGISTER’ (document)

With 100 residents working together, then the Catalogue of Human Resources, Investment and Exchange is expanded to the rest of the larger community or municipality and region, thereby expanding the specialties available and serving more of the communities needs from a local holistic and full-cycle economy.  When we focus on our real needs and well-being then we have adequate human and physical resources to accomplish healthy livelihoods, transforming the larger region's economy to serve real human needs.

Municipalities (Latin ‘munus’ = ‘gifts or services’) implement ‘Community Service Registers whereby the family and community based labours of taking care of young, handicapped, elderly, social services, environmental research and development into ecological operation for material flows such as: compost, metals, paper, plastics (soft & hard), furniture, machinery, water, humanure, air, tree-led food and material production, transportation of goods, materials and people are accounted for and accredited as credits for municipal taxes.  Household whether rental or owned who may pay between 1 – 3,000$ per year in city taxes could earn within this range of accreditation from contributions as support for efforts and incentive to community involvement.

Professional services are expensive at 100,000 – 300,000$ / person / year, institutional and segregated based with fragmented specialised approaches to service which need holistic whole-person continuity of care with recognition and accounting for everyone’s capacities. Clustered apartments and townhouse groupings have significant resident numbers, specialisation of services-within and place-centered holistic general knowledge.

CONFLICT RESOLUTION

All communities and individuals develop differences in perspective and priorities for what is most important.  These differences of perspective are healthy and lead to greater understanding and  integration of complex living factors.  We employ a technique called 'Both-Sides-Now, Equal-Time Recorded-Dialogues' by which individuals may sit down together and explore their differences or similarities point-by-point using a voice or video recorder and time-recording.  Everyone has a 'dialectic' (both sides of an issue) right to be heard first within their caucus and then progressively at various levels with other stakeholders.  The video, audio or written transcript recording becomes a gift to others in community who are living the same dynamics.

CO-HOUSING = MULTI-HOME PLANNING

Multi-home planning across families respects both individual and family needs for privacy, separate distinct spaces in which to meet our needs and realise personal fulfillment as well as social-economic recognition of our individual and collective skills, disciplines and resources and our need to connect, interact, invest and exchange together. We need simultaneous options for being apart & together.

LETTERS OF INTEREST

We’re pulling together those interested in developing ownership in Participatory Cohousing buildings, some as present renters, some with equities and some as present owners.  Would you contribute a ‘letter of interest’ for buying or renting a condominium style cohousing unit?  We need unique ‘community-participation’ motivated letters for multi-home apartment blocks and townhouse style clustered developments.  Letters will be shared with development agencies, local-governments and financial institutions to demonstrate a market interest for ecological cohousing across a broad spectrum of interests.   Renters & owners contribute:

1.            Present Renters by stating in a letter-of-interest that they wish to devote their present level of rent to the condominium-style mortgage of a dwelling apartment or townhouse unit.  Remember that Rent = mortgage + management-fee + expenses + profit to others.  When we collaborate with other households, we can recapture rent as ownership savings, equity and ‘capital’ (Latin ‘cap’ = ‘head’ or decision-making capacity). Renters state that they would rather be owners, contribute, receive accounting-for and are accorded credits for contracted ef-forts.  Living in cohousing proximity, opportunities develop internally and externally to contribute skills, training and resources that we presently have isolated in our detached homes. Presently earnings are usually spent ex-ternally to corporate economies and we never see them again. Group rental households organising as a legal body (eg. Non-Profit) and recognising / accounting for capacities-contributions are able to commit strengths / needs such as rents (housing), food, clothing, warmth, health etc. to ownership streamed through active relati-onal economy planning. Eg. 21 households x 800$/month rent = 16,800$/ month = 210,000$/year in rents, well enough to engage a bank mortgage on a 35 unit 2 – 3 million dollar property / building, renovation or new build.

2.            Present Owners and others with equities will be able to invest amounts of their choice to condo mortgage and ownership.  Present owners are isolated in detached nuclear family homes where children, elderly, handicapped and middle-aged have limited intergenerational interaction or access to multiple community resources.  When we develop injuries, handicaps or age related limitations we easily become segregated in institutions.  Clustered participatory cohousing with Catalogues of Human Resources and community accounting recognition in web-based Community Investment and Exchange Systems has the capacity to facilitate intergenerational inter-active creating, giving & receiving.                      

3.            Renters & Owners grouping purchases in Relational Economy (documents) eg. Community Kitchen develop buying power saving money on bulk. 35 families(100 individuals) buying together are able to save 1/3rd = 100,000$ / year on 300,000$ food purchases/ yr. Resident specialists in computers, child-handicapped-elder care-mentoring, clothes repair, office work, accounting, bicycle repair etc. have complementary contribu-tions to make and benefit from. Residents in significant numbers form Consumer Associations in support of local stores and professionals. Eg. A group of 100 families (300 persons x 3,000$/ person / year of food) ap-proaches a supermarket or grocery with 900,000$ worth of food buying power with an offer from members to invest-in and patronise the store in effect providing and stocking the store’s shelves. Stores in turn are able to use surpluses to invest in mixed multi-level orchard food production. The store gives recognition-incentive with Point-of-Sale Frequent-Buyer-Programs through Bar-Coded member cards whereby personal and family pur-chases are recognised and accredited percentages of yearly purchases as shares. Depending on investment levels, consumers are accredited differentially and are able to use these credits as discounts on purchases.

TOGETHERNESS VERSUS LONELINESS

Dorothy Day wrote, "We have all known the long loneliness, we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community".  Much about our present economy is a reaction to loneliness, feeling disen-gaged or not valorized for our gifts.  'Education' (Latin = 'To lead forth from within') in schools can focus more on curriculum (everyone learning the same cultural myths) rather than helping youth discover, choose and em-ploy their inner gifts. Hard and soft drug industries (cigarettes, coffee, alcohol etc), video, computer-games, throw-away consumption, tourist-junkets and leisure-consumption disengage us from our gifts.   Business, in-stitutions and industries try to mold individuals part of central production machines, ignoring  livelihood wis-dom. As insatiable consumption exploits and demands finite resource extraction world-wide, we spy-on, lobby and protect our control of foreign resources and our Gross National Product has become largely  armlaments and war.  Indigene Sharing our Livelihood through Community Ecological-Economic Participation 65 pages, describes  active participatory systems of giving and receiving including governance.

INDIGENOUS VS EXOGENOUS

As ‘exogenous’ (Latin = ‘other-generated’) society displaces ‘indigenous’ (Latin = ‘self-generating’) cultures from urban and rural abundant decentralised mixed multi-level orchards, the resulting landless build cities and economies based on the exploitation of natural resources and each other resulting in a continuing inequity or disquietude  of human relations. As we cut down trees and create scarcity and unproductive human labour in ‘agriculture’ (L ‘ager’ = ‘field’) water, soil, air, food and materials become scarce.  Please refer to Indigenous Welcome and Orchard Food Production Efficiencies as well as the Indigenous Circle of Life.

COLONY, COHOUSING & INTENT

As exogenous alienation increases, over millennia activists have planned peace and cohousing community for the enlightened to bring people back to community, land and nature.  The formation of Russian Dukobour (‘Spirit Wrestler’), German Mennonite and English Quaker (collectively referred to as ‘Anabaptist’ meaning ‘adults choose their religion or baptism freely when upright or of-age’) intentional communities are examples.  These communities understood that the institutional state was incapable of transforming itself and moving to peace economies.  They knew “to become the change that we want to see in the world”.  At first intentional communities formed in urban settings and then when a seeming tightness and restrictions of the urban setting and status-quo administrative intolerance, families moved to subdivide rural lands, first close-by to cities and then to rural colonies worldwide with even multiple moves from rural to rural settings.  Other communities of Shakers, Mormons, ‘back-to-the-landers’ and in fact the whole colonial movements of empires over millennia have been undertaken with this disquietude in spirit.  Exogenous self-righteousness force takes land posses-sion and displaces indigenous peoples, invent stories about their supposed ‘savagery’ (silva = ‘forest’) and ‘nomadic’ (Greek ‘nomas’ = ‘to pasture’) natures.  While indigenous tree-based peoples haven’t traditionally domesticated or pastured animals, they do flee our violent displacement of them and often seek the ‘forest’ (Latin ‘foris’ = ‘outside’).  Many descriptive reference volumes.  I recommend 1491 by Charles C. Mann, 2006.

HISTORIC COMMUNITY EFFICIENCIES

These Anabaptist and ‘back-to-the-land’ movements develop strong economies but unsustainably considering a wide range of both internal and external factors.  The original couple of thousand Dukobours who came over financed by Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karena’ in 1899 and grew by 1950 to build one billion dollars (1975 dollars) worth of multi-family homes, orchards, ecological factories and community infrastructure. Mennonite & Quaker communities showed the same kind of industrious development to become strong economies. Co-operative structured communities with ‘one-member/one-vote’, don’t recognise growing knowledge and capabilities and Dukobours disbanded from their ecological orchard and industry to work in extractive-exploitive-exogenous ‘English’ industries such as Cominco mining and Pulp and Paper as have many of the Mennonite and Quaker communities.  Still few have looked to the original progressive guild & Production-Society ownership models of indigenous peoples.  Mutual-Aid by Petr Kropotkin, 1905, describes collaborative practices among both animal and human societies.  Both ‘monetary’ (Queen Juno-‘Moneta’ originally ‘Mnemosyne’ or goddess of ‘memory’)-capitalism (Latin ‘cap’ = ‘head’ or decision-making acumen) and ‘cooperation’ (originally ‘co’ = ‘together’ + ‘operatives’ = (multiple stakeholders’) are but fragments of once integrated indigenous time-based string-shell accounting economies.  Capitalism and Co-operation aren’t opposites but complements.

COHOUSING FOR EVERYONE

Originally in 1969 an urban refugee fleeing the constraints of institutional society, I’ve had the privilege of living and working among the 3 Anabaptist and First Nation communities extensively over decades.  While living in a ‘Sobonik’ (‘Sons of Freedom’) rural community of Goose-Creek-Krestova in about 1974, a Dukobour, George Podmorov who had come over in 1899, took me aside and shared his thoughts. He was concerned that the ‘peace’ movement intentional communities had lost an ‘urban-peace-context’ whose struggle had brought them together as a people and for whose resolution has major significance. Many Anabaptists and pacifists today, feel the importance for pacifism in our cities.  When George shared this thinking with me, I didn’t understand its significance, but over the years and decades his wisdom has become clear.

I moved back to my family roots in Montreal in 1980 with this thought in mind, but it has taken me decades to shake off misconception after illusion about realising peace and nature in the urban milieu in capital and coop-eration. Peace within is only possible when achieved for all. Intolerance and abuse by ‘consumer-industrial-exploitive-garbage’ economy against ‘conservation-ecology’ is a cutting edge of social change, requiring a similar forbearance that; indigenous communities have endured over thousands of years from displaced exogenous cousins. Social unease is about resolving the larger social-economic equations we are all part of.   A complementary approach to transformation can allow us to harness strengths to resolve universal disquietude.  Living with ‘inner’ diversity is the same as accepting our society’s diverse callings.

CALCULATING PARTICIPATION

The multiple concepts presented can help apartment-townhouse residents to recognise gifts, pool resources, state intentions, recapture urban or rural multi-home buildings for intergenerational community and calculate economy. Documents underlined in this document including Participatory Accounting Power Point are available on request.  Welcome comes from people, resources and homes, not institutions, handouts or ideas.

Douglas Jack, Sustainable Development Corporation eco-montreal@mcgill.ca 514-364-0599, 9628 Jean-Milot  LaSalle, H8R 1X9,           Eco-Montreal Tiohtiake Green Map www.eco-montreal.mcgill.ca

Tsi Tetsionitiotiakon Sustainability Rooted in Heritage http://cbed.geog.mcgill.ca/WIP.html

Indigenous Welcome and Orchard Food Production Efficiencies  http://dcnstrct.org/indigenous/