Newsletter April 2024
It has been so much fun talking with and getting to know so many people who are interested in community living! Over the last month or so, we have heard from single folks, couples, a wide variety of families, younger people, older people, and everywhere in between. It’s started with online gatherings, a potluck, and playing at the playground together and grown to conversations outside these events. It’s just the beginning and there’s so much more to come in creating a community together!
Upcoming Events
THIS SATURDAY, April 13th 11am-1pm - Join us at Highland Park Playground (1227 Montreal Ave, St Paul). Bring a lunch and chat while the kids play! Open to everyone.
Sunday, April 21st noon-4pm - Potluck at the Herzog House (email tcfamilycoop@gmail.com for address). Open to everyone, very family friendly.
Sunday, April 28th 1:30-2:30pm - Online Info Session (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84929400383). Open to everyone.
STARTING IN MAY - Attend “Starting A Community” online training and meet weekly to discuss. See more info below.
Property Search
Last fall we began interviewing architects, developers, and a builder to begin moving toward finding property and starting to build. After a few months it became clear that we could not raise the money needed to start this by ourselves, and we decided to find a few families to begin living in community with while we continue to build toward our dream of a 12-15 unit apartment building in St. Paul.
The last several months we have continued to look for apartment buildings or very large houses that could accommodate several families. Our realtor has taken us to view several properties. As we have gotten to know families who might be potential community members, we have listened to their needs and shifted our focus a bit to find a property that can accommodate our various needs.
We have located two properties that are a bit unusual, but may meet a number of our needs. So they are under consideration. We have also focused our search on apartment buildings with a minimum of 6 units, preferably 7 or 8 units, most of which have units with 2 or more bedrooms and a couple of smaller units. If you are interested, please let us know and we will send you out the specific properties that we are exploring.
Training: Starting a Community
For a few months now, we have been meeting together with others interested in forming an Intentional Community. We'd like to take the next step: talking together more in depth about issues that make a start-up community come together in a healthy and sustainable way. Completing this training together with group discussions will give us a common language and understanding of issues that are important in coming together as a community. We will be giving shape to our Community as we work through this training.
“Starting a Community” is a self-paced training by Yana Ludwig, designed by the Foundation for Intentional Communities. “Learn how to design for inclusion, governance, membership recruitment, and legal and economic structures in the Starting a Community course.” The training has 15 modules that provide learning through videos, experiential activities and resources. Yana Ludwig is a delightful and extremely knowledgeable presenter. This self-paced training is available for purchase at ic.org (Foundation for Intentional Communities) for a sliding fee that starts at $99. Go to the website to learn more about this training and others that may interest you.
Twin Cities Family Cooperative will be hosting discussions, either weekly or some other time configuration that works for the group, depending on feedback from people who are interested in doing the training together. The first week we will steam and discuss the first two modules: 1) Overview and 2) Founders. If this interests you, we will ask you to purchase the training and commit to the following 11 weeks of studying and learning together.
The plan will be for each person to spend up to 30 minutes watching the module/s for the week and doing the exercises, in preparation discussions. One option is to meet weekly. Think about what day works best for you, Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. and whether you would like to have the discussion in person or on zoom. If we meet in person, we could decide to share a meal together and the children could play together so the adults can talk with limited interruption. We estimate our discussion would be 60-90 minutes, depending on how many people are participating.
Another option would be to meet for several hours of discussion after completing several modules. We would still complete modules weekly and use some form of asynchronous discussion such as on Discord or using google docs to share our thoughts between the longer in-person or zoom meetings. Think about what times and dates would work for you and if you could arrange child care.
We hope you will consider joining us. We look forward to deepening our relationships and the practical work of moving forward.
