Newsletter January 2025
Building a community that enjoys a rich quality of life for all ages, brings a more equitable society, and a harmonious and responsible relationship with the natural world.
Happy New Year! We have some big goals for this year. Buying a property, growing our membership, and starting to live together. We also plan to continue networking with other individuals and communities, learning together and deepening relationships through online and in-person events, and working on our Community Agreements.
Upcoming Events
In an attempt to not fill your inbox with unwanted emails, we don’t send out reminders throughout the month. If you would like to receive email reminders before each event, email tcfamilycoop@gmail.com and say “sign me up for reminders.” You can specify if you only want reminders about online events and not in-person events.
Online Info Session
A short presentation followed by time to ask questions and get to know each other. Open to everyone.
Thursday, January 9th 8:30-9:30pm (use this link)
Saturday, January 11th 11:00-noon (use this link)
Monthly Potluck - Sunday, January 12th 3:30-6:30pm
We had to cancel our December Potluck, due to illness but we still liked the idea of sharing in each other’s cultural and family traditions. So, if you want, you are invited to bring a dish that has been important in your culture or family. It could be related to a holiday but it doesn’t have to be. Please email tcfamilycoop@gmail.com to let us know if you plan to attend and we will send you the address. Also let us know if you have any dietary restrictions.
Online Gatherings - Building off of our December topic of Sharing Resources Well, this month we will explore what that means in terms of finances and labor. See below for more on our discussion topic. Use the links below to join the discussion. You can email tcfamilycoop@gmail.com to let us know you will be attending or with any questions. Letting us know who will be attending is helpful for us in preparing. Thanks!
Saturday January 18th 4:00-5:00pm - Cooperative Culture
Saturday January 25th 11:00-noon - Community Life
Children in Cohousing - Saturday, February 22, 9:30-11:00am
What would be advantageous for kids and parents in such an environment? What would be challenging? What might senior members have to gain or lose? These are some of the questions that will be discussed in this event, hosted by Twin Cities Cohousing Network. Join Twin Cities Family Cooperative at this online event by registering here.
Check our website or facebook page for events in the coming months. If you can't make it to these events and you want to connect, email tcfamilycoop@gmail.com. We’d be happy to connect in person or online.
Cooperative Culture
This month, our column on Cooperative Culture is being replaced with Thoughts on Finances and Labor Contributions. Our financial and labor agreements evolve from the principles learned from Cooperative Culture and our value of equity.
Please join us in January for our online conversations on these topics. What has been your experience? What are your values, dreams, questions, etc.?
Thoughts on Finances
Prospective members have a lot of questions about community financing. What will it cost to buy in? What will ongoing costs look like? Will we be sharing income?
Before we can make decisions about those questions, we need to consider what informs our decisions. We paraphrase heavily here from a series of articles by Sky Blue, a former Executive Director of the Foundation for Intentional Community, because the values they express challenge mainstream capitalism and provide alternative ways of being in relationship with each other and with money.
We live in a capitalist economy where commodification and transactional characteristics are impressed upon all of our relationships. Mainstream culture encourages us to perceive everything in our social and economic environment in terms of its market value. We habitually assign social status and power to people in our everyday lives based on their wealth, income, or the perceived earning potential of their background and education. This affects power distribution within relationships and promotes a sense of entitlement in people who are assigned higher value.
Community living offers us an opportunity to step away from mainstream economics and imagine new ways to value each other. If the core of individualist capitalist economics is “how can I maximize my personal gains and minimize my personal costs,” we can imagine a way of living that begins with “how do we meet all of our basic needs and value people and relationships above commodities?”
At Twin Cities Family Cooperative, we want to build a community that values all of our members for the human factors that they bring to our relationships without regard for their economic output. Recognizing that we still have to operate within the broader context of a capitalist economy, we would like to develop internal economic policies that actively push back against mainstream expectations, while also making compromises to allow members to maintain their financial autonomy in the near term.
We want to find a balance between the financial independence of individual households and our principles of equity, the value of each individual’s abilities and contributions, commitment to social justice, and the belief that diversity contributes to a thriving community. We want to welcome and uplift community members with a range of income levels, enabling a comfortable standard of living for all members regardless of income, but without placing demands on members’ personal finances that we are not prepared to live with at this time.
Our community will have external financial obligations such as debt repayment, utilities, taxes, as well as shared internal costs such as internet, consumables, and communal meals. Collectively, everyone will need to contribute enough to cover the sustaining costs. Beyond that, finances come down to our collective imagination. Our current thinking is to institute a limited form of income sharing with a percentage of every household’s income collected monthly to meet our basic needs and accumulate funds for future growth.
Labor Contributions
In addition to contributing our finances, we will also contribute our labor. This will not only contribute to the well-being of our community as a whole, but will also benefit each of us individually. For example, we won’t each have to carry out all the daily chores of a household (cooking, cleaning, yardwork, etc). When we have shared meals, not every household has to cook and clean up. When we don’t have to do all the chores, we end up with more time for other activities.
Another benefit is that we can distribute the labor according to what different people prefer doing. Vacuuming for one person may be a relaxing activity, whereas, for another person, it might take an enormous amount of energy. Some people enjoy cooking but hate doing dishes, and others would rather not cook but don’t mind doing dishes. Someone with seasonal allergies can be responsible for shoveling and not lawn mowing.
The community will set the standards of what labor needs to be done and to what standards. All members, including children will participate in the care of our community. Equity will play a role in determining how much labor and what kinds of labor everyone will contribute. An hour's work is an hour's work, whether it's filing taxes or washing dishes.
Our Updated Vision
This month, we wanted to share our updated Vision and Vision Statement. As we have had more discussions with more interested folks, we have had more clarity in what our vision is. This updated vision reflects that.
Our Vision
We are an intergenerational community of individuals, couples, and families. We are queer-affirming, gender-inclusive, and multicultural. We value the spectrums of the human experience and each individual’s diverse abilities. We support each other in raising children and throughout all stages of life. We strive to live out of a place of abundance.
We are committed to nonviolence and environmental sustainability. We believe in the potential for radical transformation of society and see communal living as an element of that change. We strive to make meaningful contributions to society, engaged in dismantling the systems of racism and oppression in our society, including ways that capitalism supports those systems.
If you would like to learn more about Twin Cities Family Cooperative, please visit our website and facebook page, attend our events (online and in-person), or fill out our Interest Form to connect. If you would like to be removed from our email list, please email us and let us know.
