Newsletter September 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.
Summer is ending, some big move-in projects are behind us, and kids are returning to school.
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.
Virtual Tour of Intentional Communities - September 11 1:00-2:00pm
See below for details!
Fall Nature Hike - Saturday, September 13 3:00-4:00pm
Join us for a leisurely hike at Wood Lake Nature Center. We’ll meet in the parking lot a few minutes before 3:00 and start hiking at 3:00. If there’s interest, we can hang out in the play area for a while after the hike. Register here to join us.
September Potluck - Sunday, September 28 5:00-7:00pm
Join us for good food and good company. We’ll provide a vegetarian main dish, drinks, and dishes. Bring your kids, bring your friends, we can’t wait to see you! Please RSVP HERE if you plan to attend.
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.
Virtual Tour of Intentional Communities
Twin Cities Family Cooperative will be the featured community in this online event, a collaboration of Foundation for Intentional Community and Community Finders. We’ll give a presentation packed with information, take participants on a tour of our community, and have plenty of time for questions. Register on the FIC website to join us live!
Free Sale and Meeting the Neighbors
Our Free Sale Fundraiser was a tremendous success! We gave away many boxes of useful goods and met a lot of new people.
The sale got off to a poor start as a thunderstorm struck on the afternoon of Friday, August 15. No one came by during the storm, and we had to keep the sale mostly indoors for the first day, but by Sunday we had welcomed quite a few visitors. Posting on the local Buy Nothing group on Facebook really helped to drive traffic.
After the first weekend, we had a lot of stuff left over, and we were disappointed by the weather but inspired by the positive interactions we’d had so far, so we decided to resume the sale the following weekend. This time, our next-door neighbors stopped by early on Saturday morning to chat and to donate a portable lemonade stand, which Lorelei used as a face painting station for the rest of the weekend. The turnout on both Saturday and Sunday was terrific, and we were able to give away more than half of the things we had available.
I was grateful for the opportunity to see so many things to go directly to people who could use them, rather than passing through faceless profit-seeking middlemen. But more than that, I was grateful to be introduced to dozens of people who live in our neighborhood who are interested in our community project and would like to see us succeed in our mission. A preteen on a bike asked his mother if they could take home a set of dishes, and I had the privilege of walking their box of goods a block and a half to their house while the rest of the family kept browsing. I hope they come back to visit us some day.
The experience inspired me to think a lot more about our opportunities for a local sharing economy that extends well beyond the walls of our own community house. If we build relationships with the people who live in our neighborhood, in how many ways can we make each other’s lives easier and reduce our reliance on mainstream economic systems?
Look for an ongoing series on this topic in our future newsletters. For now, we’re looking into installing a Little Free Library in our front yard to keep helping in small ways and help our new local relationships grow.
Visiting Other Intentional Communities
This past month, we had the opportunity to send members of Twin Cities Family Cooperative to visit two different intentional communities. Beka and the kids went to visit the Minnesota Ecovillage Project near Sandstone, MN. These are folks we have developed relationships with as we both were forming our communities. While we were forming a community in the city, they were starting one in the woods. It’s nice to have people to talk with about the joys and challenges of starting a community. And our family loves it when we can get away to spend some time in the woods.
As a community, it’s important to us to not be focused just on our own community, but to have relationships with other communities and to support each other. Stay tuned next month to hear about Steve’s trip to Twin Oaks!
Cooperative Culture Study Group
SHARING EMOTIONS WELL
Continuing our conversation about Cooperative Culture - What Is It? Based on Yana Ludwig’s and Karen Gimnig’s book “The Cooperative Culture Handbook.” This month Nancie reflects on sharing emotions well.
The authors talk about how the culturally scripted greeting “Hi, how are you?” “Fine, thanks, and you?” lead to hollow sharing of oneself, not true authentic relating. On the other hand, counterculture in an attempt to be more authentic, can lend itself to over-sharing without discernment in the context of the interaction and relationship.
Cooperative culture seeks to encourage greetings that both pay attention to what is authentic in one’s own life at the moment, and discern about the needs of the other person and their ability to receive such sharing at any given time. One part of discernment might include giving a brief statement followed by “is it okay if I shared that with you?” and being able to take care of one’s own needs if the other person is unavailable to receive a deeper sharing. However, when the other person is available to receive one’s authentic sharing, deeper relationships will likely form.
If you are interested, you can join Yana’s weekly Cooperative Culture Handbook Book Club Series on Sunday mornings. Here is the link with more information and registration. You can find other really great courses and resources on the FIC website. Remember, Exploratory Members can use up to $200 of their $500 member fee to take classes and get reimbursed for them.
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 develop internal economic policies that actively push back against capitalist expectations.
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.
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. All past newsletters can be found here. If you would like to be removed from our email list, please email us and let us know.
