First stop: Boulder, Colorado

Chrysallis Labor Chart

Prepping for the Boulder Food Rescue 

Bike Parking

  It's been a long trip so far.  A 16-hour drive from Austin to Boulder, with sandstorms, snow, tumbleweeds, windmills, and cows that we could never quite manage to get on camera.  Boulder is a small, flat town with lots of bikes, bordered by huge snow-topped mountains (being Texans, we got really excited by those!).  We first got B-roll of the town, then headed to Nomad Cohousing to meet our first subjects.  Nomad is a community of about 30 people, 10 of them kids, nestled on an acre of land in the middle of the city (such as it is). We got some fantastic interviews with the residents, including a popular architect, two sustainability coaches, and a whole bunch of kids!      We learned that the central tenet of cohousing is the architecture: houses are commonly arranged facing each other around a central courtyard, with a common house for gatherings and weekly meals.  This facilitates interaction and creates an old-style neighborhood with a ton of community and sustainability benefits.
  Next, we visited Masala co-op, a lovely little mixed-age house with chickens and gardens and a great mix of people, and then captured an interview with Wonderland Hill founder Jim Leach.  Wonderland Hill is the largest cohousing developer in the United States.  Jim gave us some great information on the history of the movement and the work that's being done today.  The next day, we went to a gathering at Chrysalis co-op which benefited the Boulder Food Rescue (a completely awesome organization which collects extra food from grocery stores and brings it to co-ops and homeless shelters) and then headed out to LA.
  After this first section of the trip, the question I have is - if community living has so many benefits, why don't more people live in it?  Co-ops and cohousing have been around since the 1960s and '80s, respectively, but they're still a pretty small proportion of American housing, especially when compared to communal living in other countries.  If you think about it, living in community is far more natural than living alone.  Maybe it's our American mindset of individuality and entitlement - definitely community living does require work and sharing.  For me, the most important question of this film is how to bring more people to this amazing way of life.


-Sara

Manley Co-op and the Mop Slap

Front porch swing at Manley

Ah, what a joy it was to be at a co-op. Even with most of its members out of town for spring break, the Manley house posse graciously took us in and shared stories and laughs with us.
After our informative and beautiful time that was spent at L.A. ecovillage, the crew was even more pumped to visit another community.

Jeff, the executive director, immediately gave us the guest room to store our loads of belongings, and without a hitch we began a tour of all 4 houses under the Santa Barbara Student Housing Co-ops. Each house is as diverse as their members from Biko House with its “people of color” themed house to Dashain, the most “co-opy” of all the coops (dubbed the House of Seitan).


The time in Santa Barbara was encompassed by an interview with Jeff, who’s time spent on the board at the Madison coops and coops in Costa Rica prepped him for the massive responsibility that is SBSHC as executive director.

Jeff Bessmer, Sara, and Joe take a break during our tour

The most fun I had was when we sat down with the few members who stuck around at Manley, and shared coop traditions with one another. Nothing like sharing the infamous mop slap technique (courtesy of 21st Street Co-op in Austin) that is used quite often on coopers deemed “uncooperative” (hey, it’s better than getting kicked out or fined). Let’s hope that we didn’t influence any policy changes at Manley House.

-Ivy

http://sbcoop.org/?q=node/23

Los Angeles Eco Village

 I was surprised to find the place nestled in between a strip mall of fast food joints and schools. There is a lot to say about this fabulous place, and the people within it. It is home to a food co-op that sells bulk food for about $10/lb (not limited to the residents), a micro-brewery, bee colony, a weaving class for the kids in the community, and a bike shop headed by Jimmy; a carefree member with a passion for bike building. Some of the members have started their own businesses from selling chocolate to Jimmy's bicycle kitchen (a shop aimed to bring more bikes into the community), the community has inspired and encouraged members to obtain the skills needed to sustain their lives.

As of this writing, Lois Arkin (the founder) and the rest of the members are gearing up for an expansion of the ecovillage set on 2 blocks on Bimini Place between 1st and 3rd streets which will include a pedestrian friendly walkway in the alleyway to increase foot traffic. At one point, during our tour, Lois had the crew stand in the street to demonstrate how much the street needed this addition; plenty of cars were using the street as a shortcut.  A coffee shop with low income housing on additional floors, an outside learning center for the community, and within the property itself an art studio, improvements on an outdoor living room, and so much more all for the sake of bringing the community closer together.

If you are looking for a place that integrates "social, economic, and ecological systems of the neighborhood" this is the place. I met such a diverse group of members in this 40 unit space from Anne, the resident doctor with an infectious laugh to Julio, a cancer survivor, with a heart of gold, I was enthralled to have spent 2 days with everyone.

Check out more about the eco village and what they do!
http://www.laecovillage.org/

T-Shirts, Co-op Style

Katie and Sara hard at work!

Stencils!

YOTC shirts are here!!! Thanks to Annie and Katie for making stencils of our signature buffalo and of the “Year of the Cooperative” lettering, Sara and I spent most of our night making some shirts. It was my first time using the bleach method, and luckily Sara bought a few extra shirts which became my “oops, I am horrible at this” prototypes.

Days later, my hands are still smelling like bleach, but it was all worth it, my lovelies!!I Any-hoo, we plan on selling these babies at our booth during NASCO for 10 bucks a pop. If you are in grand ol’ Ann Arbor, Michigan, come grab a one-of a kind handmade shirt ( all proceeds go back to the completion of the doc), or stay and chat with Sara, Grigor and I. We want to meet all of you!

The end results!

NASCO In Retrospect

Our time at NASCO was filled with pleasant adventures and came as an affirmation. Let me catch you up, NASCO is a 4 day conference held in grand ol’ Ann Arbor, Michigan. Co-opers from around the globe come to the conference to attend workshops, mingle with fellow co-opers, and in many cases, visit Black Elk for its famous party. Usually the trip is paid for by scholarships set aside by the coop organizations from each city, and only a specific amount of members are allowed to go.

Luckily, Sara, Meg, and myself were on that 24 hour bus ride to and from Michigan. Did I mention that NASCO asked us to host a workshop discussing our film? Besides the fact that I forgot the firewire cable which was needed to dump footage when our 1 memory card was full, and the tech. difficulties we experienced when the projector did not let us screen our trailer for those who came to our workshop forcing us to play it on our tiny computer screen, the trip was a success!

Not only did we have the workshop to spread the word about our film, the generous folks at NASCO gave us a booth in the Commons area as well. Year of the Cooperative memorabilia went like hotcakes (few people were seen WITHOUT a YOTC button pinned to their shirts). While Sara and I manned the booth, folks were enticed by our lovely trailer Joe edited for the film.
We met so many people who signed our email lists, and showed great interest in the project (we even met someone with contacts in Canada!). Many of the coops that were mentioned, I never heard of, despite the extensive research we have done so far. We were able to secure on the spot confessional stories from willing participants eager to talk about their current coop experiences.

The response was encouraging, and it came as a relief. Because of the amount of eager faces at our booth, and the button supply getting smaller and smaller as the weekend went by, I can see that there is a far greater need for this doc to get made. We are all so pumped to continue on with this project. I can’t wait to look into the co-ops even further and find that this one has its own farm, or this one has a community bike shop that is open to the public. Whatever the appeal, YOTC film crew is coming with camera in tow.

-Ivy