January 2019 Arvada, Colorado
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Happy New Year from the members of Ralston Creek Cohousing!
2019 promises to be an exciting year for Ralston Creek Cohousing as we grow in membership and begin the process of designing our living spaces. Another couple has moved from Explorer status to Full Member and we are thrilled! Our ranks now include 7 Full Members and 3 Explorer Members.
On January 19
th
we are hosting a potluck at a member’s new townhome in the
Geos neighborhood
. Tori just moved down from the mountains and across the street from our Gatehouse site. Please join us at her new home to share a meal (we provide all the food), meet our members and see some possible floor plans. A second bonus will be the opportunity to experience the technology that defines the Geos Development along with the quality design and construction planned for the Gatehouse.
A week prior to the potluck (January 12) we will repeat our slideshow at the Arvada Library (scroll down for details of both events).
We have also been researching how to “rightsize” our lives, which has been a very popular topic recently. We have been reading the book
,
Rightsizing Your Life: Simplifying Your Surroundings While Keeping What Matters Most
and thinking about how to live in smaller spaces while maintaining and even increasing our quality of life. This spring we are planning a discussion panel on this very topic, so stay tuned for more details.
See below for details of how to get to know us and how you can get in on the
ground floor of this exciting project!
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Don't miss our next informational event!
Curious about cohousing and Ralston Creek?
Here's your opportunity to hear about our vision and plans for building
Slide Presentation
Saturday, January 12, 2018
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Our slide show gives you a chance to learn about the vision of Ralston Creek Cohousing and get your questions answered. You can come in person or virtually at
Google Hangouts
.
Those who come in person can drive over and tour the Gatehouse site along Ralston Creek in the Geos Neighborhood afterwards.
For more information, call 303-704-2168
If you have trouble connecting via Google Hangouts, please call the above number.
Arvada Public Library
7525 W. 57th Avenue
Arvada, CO 80002 United States
(303) 235-5275
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New Year's Resolution Get Together
Sunday
January 19, 2018
12:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Start the new year right and resolve to get to know the Ralston Creek Cohousers! Join us at a member’s home in the Geos neighborhood right across the street from where The Gatehouse will be built. We’ll have a potluck put on by the full members. We can tear up our regrets from 2018 and make our 2019 resolutions. And, we’ll have a tour of Geos after.
RSVP to malinche@bakersdozen.biz, 303-704-2168
for location.
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Does the picture above look familiar? Maybe its not that bad where you live, but have you ever thought about how much "stuff" you have? And how much time it takes to manage all that stuff? We have been thinking and talking a lot lately about downsizing our current homes before we move into The Gatehouse and how we will manage living in smaller spaces when we do move. We are convinced that cohousing is the answer to downsizing because not only will we have our own private spaces, although smaller, we will share in the creative spaces in the common house that we get to design. But that doesn't mean we aren't having difficulty deciding what to keep and what to remove from our lives! Recently I became aware of the website and blog
Becoming Minimalist,
which explores the many reasons to divest ourselves of "stuff" and how to do it. The author, Joshua Becker, has also written a book,
The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life
.
I encourage you to check out
The 10 Most Important Things to Simplify in Your Life
on the website.
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Blog post by Explorer Member
Mary Conner
So, why cohousing?
Now that I’m a member of a cohousing community in development (Ralston Creek Cohousing), folks are asking how I got into it. Truth is, I’ve been intrigued with the concept of cohousing long before I ever heard the term. Here’s where my ideas came from, best I can remember:
- As a tween, I watched The Waltons and noodled about how smart and supportive their multi-generational common house was; the older folks were able to contribute and also have the support they needed, the parents had many helping hands, and the children had the security of more adults to rely on. Living in an extended family seemed far more balanced than the nuclear family models all around me, which tended to result in too much responsibility being carried by the mother.
- As a teenager, I read In This House of Brede (see Diana Rigg's great performance), and I was deeply moved by Phillipa's letting go of her glamorous professional life and dreamy apartment in order to join the deep sisterhood of a cloistered Benedictine community. I seriously considered becoming a Franciscan sister.
- I commuted far to college and was socially isolated, but I stayed in graduate housing at UT Austin for my master's degree. Living with other graduate students from all over the country and the world, I learned how suite-style living with shared common spaces made for easy and ample companionship, and the shared meals in the dining hall were a wonderful way to enjoy that diversity of people. I was aware that it worked so well because we were all graduate students, so we shared a lot of traits (such as introversion), values, and interests. We were a tribe.
- When I joined my first software startup company, several of the founders shared a large house, and several of the single programmers lived there as well. I envied the easy, fun lifestyle they shared. And the longer I worked in software shops, the more I realized that I enjoyed them because of the type of people who tended to work there, much like graduate school, and wouldn't it be nice to extend that environment outside of work hours? to live with your tribe?
- I reconnected with an old coworker who, depressed, had quit his job and traveled broadly. Seeing him years later, I found him greatly transformed, and I learned that he had been living communally in the local Zen center for over a year. I was amazed at the benefits he'd gotten from Buddhism and from living intentionally. I wanted what he had.
About that time, cohousing surfaced. An email search reveals that I first mentioned "cohousing" eight years ago, hoping to interest my folks: I found out about
cohousing.org
from a brilliant scientist whose blog I admire:
http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/05/odds-of-cooking-grandkids.html"
. Now I knew what to look for, but it was several years before my own path got serious. Then life happened: I divorced and empty-nested in the same year, so I stepped up my search for new intentional ways to live.
I started seeing and sharing articles about cohousing in Scandinavia, and I signed up for newsletters for
cohousing.org
and
ic.org
(Fellowship for Intentional Community). It was there that I learned about a Cohousing Association regional conference being held in Boulder, Colorado. Wanting the excuse to visit family in Colorado and wanting to tour and test my notions against actual cohousing communities, I splurged and attended the conference. Definitely worth it!
While in Colorado, I stayed at my brother's brand new house in a net-zero (carbon-free) development just south of Boulder, called the
Geos Neighborhood
. I learned that Geos had space allotted for a future condo-style cohousing unit, called
The Gatehouse
, just down the street from him! The community is still in the forming stage, so I joined to get in before all of the apartments were spoken for.
I'm very excited about the growing energy around making cohousing work in the United States, for more than just well-heeled retirees (although they deserve credit for driving this forward, as they look for alternatives to the sad senior housing experiences of their parents). I hope to contribute what I can to its success, as well as enjoy the experience of it! Anyone else?
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Site tours of the Gatehouse location are available by request.
Send us an email at welcome@ralstoncreekcohousing.org
Read our classified ad on the
National Cohousing website
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Path To Membership
We invite you to participate in building your dream community.
Ralston Creek CoHousers have a two-step process to membership.
- Come to some events and get to know us. If you are interested you can become an Explorer.
- As an Explorer you will be invited to join us for meetings, social events, and one-on-one conversations, all with the goal of you getting to know us, getting all your questions answered, and allowing us to get to know you.
- If you are interested in moving forward to Full Membership we can tell you more about it.
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Ralston Creek Cohousing 303-704-2168
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Stay connected with us through social media!
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