Newsletter August 2024

Building a community that brings a more equitable society, better quality of life, and a harmonious life with nature.

August seems to be a busy month for many as summer is wrapping up. There are camping trips to go on, children getting ready to go back to school, and the weather this summer has brought lots of fresh from the garden or farm food to enjoy.

Upcoming Events

August: none, but we’re working hard on bylaws, getting property, and so much more!

September:  will be noted in the September newsletter and posted on Facebook.

In the meantime, if you want to connect, email tcfamilycoop@gmail.com. We’d be happy to connect in person or online.

Property Update

We’re late getting this month’s newsletter out because we were hoping to be able to give an update on purchasing a property. In terms of the 325 Dayton property in St. Paul, the bank is requiring us to make a larger down payment than we were planning on so we’re looking for additional funds and seeing what options are out there. 

Another thing we are doing is looking at a couple different possibilities of building on the property. While the building is beautiful and gives options for some of us to start living together, the land itself and the ability to build on it may prove to be its best asset. We will be having several architects look at the property and give us their ideas about our options for building apartment units.   

Bylaws

We’re going through the tedious (but important!) task of creating our bylaws. This will bring us a step closer to incorporating as a Cooperative Corporation. It is also an opportunity to think together about what our community is aiming to do and how we will organize ourselves to achieve those goals. It will contain information about how new people can become members, how our particular consensus decision-making process works, and how our commitment to conflict resolution will be lived out. In fact, the bylaws themselves reflect many of our core values.

Cooperative Culture - What is it?

Yana Ludwig talks about the difference between Mainstream Culture, Counterculture, and Cooperative Culture in her book “The Cooperative Culture Handbook: A Social Change Manual to Dismantle Toxic Culture and Build Connection.” She describes how North American culture is rooted in individualism and competition, and how Counterculture strives to undo that, but often swinging to an extreme without boundaries. Ludwig shows how both of these approaches are detrimental to intentional communities, and posits a third approach, Cooperative Culture, one that supports true social, economic and ecological resilience. We will seek each month to talk about one or two of the 26 characteristics that Ludwig describes.

Common Ground within Differences

As a newly forming Intentional Community, it is gratifying and fun to enjoy the honeymoon of connecting with people who share the vision. We share ideas about the benefits of living in community, of children playing and growing up together, of living responsibly with nature and our environment, of sharing the work and our resources. And the list goes on. Then we hit the reality that we have differences; different ways of doing things, different needs and desires, different abilities, etc. And it’s easy to slip from glossing over or suppressing our differences (counterculture) to judging our differences and seeing them as a threat (mainstream culture). Yana Ludwig suggests a thirdway, finding the  common ground within our differences and seeing them as positive, with the possibility of leading to creativity and innovation. Ludwig talks about being able to challenge our own assumptions and approach a difference with curiosity as a way to develop the skill of finding common ground within our differences. 

One of the ways we have in our vision embraced difference is in terms of financial resources. We are seeking to find a way to bring in the financial resources to pay the bills in such a way that families can live with the space resources that they need, rather than the size of one’s unit related to one’s wealth or lack of wealth. This is challenging, and we don’t plan to have a “common purse.” We’re still in process and don’t yet have the “right formula” for figuring this out. But this is a difference we are seeking to embrace and willing to do the work, figuring out how to live from a place of abundance in this new way.

Our Vision

We are an intergenerational community, raising families together: committed to connection with each other, environmental sustainability, and living in harmonious relationship with the land. We share governance and work by consensus decision-making. We are queer-affirming, gender-inclusive, multicultural, and multigenerational individuals, couples, and families. We value the spectrums of the human experience and each individual’s diverse abilities. We strive to live out of a place of abundance, working to dismantle the systems of racism and oppression in our society. 

If you would like to be removed from our email list, please email and let us know.