Build a Rich Living Experience Together
Cooperative-Housing Launchpad provides a starting point for those interested in creating single-home households with other like-minded people based on cooperative culture and principles. Additionally, we help people find vacancies at already established households.
Cooperative culture refers to a style of living together, an alternative to the competitive and independent society we grew up in. It is based on values of sharing, communicating, and creating agreements to achieve strength and abundance through working together.
Build a rich living experience together
Cooperative-Housing Launchpad provides a starting point for those interested in creating single-home households with other like-minded people based on cooperative culture and principles. Additionally, we help people find vacancies at already established households.
Cooperative culture refers to a style of living together, an alternative to the competitive and independent society we grew up in. It is based on values of sharing, communicating, and creating agreements to achieve strength and abundance through working together.
What's a Cooperative House?
First, let's take a step back and look at the term Intentional Community, this is an umbrella term that encapsulates a broad range of living arrangements. This ranges from Cohousing which is a type of large-scale residential project (typically costing millions of dollars to develop) to smaller Shared Housing arrangements with a group of people sharing a single-family home. Then of course there are all sorts of variations in between, such as Ecovillages, Co-Living, Kibbutzim, and others. Below are a couple of examples images for illustration.
Our focus is on Shared Housing that practices Cooperative Culture.
- Shared Housing simply means that a group of people live together under one roof (single-family home)
- Cooperative Culture refers to a style of living together, an alternative to the competitive and independent society we grew up in. It is based on values of sharing, communicating, and creating agreements to achieve strength and abundance through working together.
There are many names that this sort of arrangement goes by. We refer to these as Cooperative Homes (or Shared Homes interchangeably)
Incorporating communal living - some cooperative households build on top of this general model and incorporate strong communal living characteristics, heavily centering around shared values, beliefs, and some even choose to incorporate income sharing between members.
Co-ops as a legal structure - cooperatives (or housing co-ops) are also a type of legal ownership structure. When we refer to cooperative homes we refer to the spirit of cooperative culture, not the ownership structure. But some households can have both cooperative culture and a co-op legal structure.
Cooperative Home Examples
Duma Community
Eugene, OR
Walnut Street Co-Op
Eugene, OR
The Hive PDX
Portland, OR
Blueberry
Portland, OR
Synchronicity LA
Los Angeles, CA
The Hearth
Oakland, CA
Syntropy Co-Op
Madison, WI
Omega House
Minneapolis, MN
The McGregor House
Cincinnati, OH
Sophia Community
Chicago, IL
Bitternut Homestead
Syracuse, NY
Other Great Resources
Please check out these other great resources pertaining to Intentional Communities, Cohousing, and other related topics.
Community builders and seekers,
The Communal-Living Launchpad is presented and operated by NICA (NW Intentional Communities Association) and volunteers. We exist to make visible the many models of successful, intentionally cooperative ways of living that exist, and support the efforts to build community wherever you are.
In community,
