It was the last day of the 2011 National Cohousing Conference. Using the World Café Model, conference participants — made up of those who live in cohousing, those who want to live in cohousing, and those who had just heard of the concept — were seated around several tables in groups of 10 or so. One person volunteered the be the facilitator, another the time-keeper, and a third the note-taker. After brainstorming over and coming up with answers to a specific question, we scattered to completely different tables for the next round of brainstorming on a different topic. In this manner we tackled three important questions:
As a world community, as a nation, and in our local communities, we face significant environmental, economic and social challenges.
- What does Cohousing have to offer in addressing these challenges?
- How can more people benefit from what Cohousing has to offer?
- What are we gonna do about it?
Afterward, the answers were synthesized and the entire group reconvened to reflect on what we had learned from each other, and to get ideas on how to share it with others. Craig Freshley of Good Group Decisions tells us what we came up with:
Download/Share/Act: http://www.GoodGroupDecisions.com/NationalCohousingConversation.pdf