East Bay Cohousing - Berkeley/Oakland/Emeryville/SF

March 31, 2010 6:00 PM - 12 attended

Third-Night Communal Grapevine Seder at Berkeley Cohousing w/Santa Fe cohouser

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The fourth annual EBCOHO D-I-Y (Do-It-Yourself, or rather OURselves) open-to-all Communal Grapevine Passover Seder this year at Berkeley Cohousing, featuring a special guest who journeyed through the desert, Chris Chappell, visiting from Commons on the Alameda cohousing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This is a Third Night Seder, so sign up to bring all your leftovers from the first two nights. When you RSVP, indicate what you're bringing so others can see and avoid duplication.

This is an EBCOHO social, with an overlay of community and perhaps some Berkeley cohousers participating; we're also inviting Elders' Guild members and friends from Bay Area Community Land Trust. Feel free to join in at the last-minute, but please do RSVP here. Kids are welcome, but it is up to you to keep an eye on 'em.

Tradition translated into cohousing terminology: We relive the enslavement of isolated living and the subsequent Exodus of the cohousers from separate, solitary existences (led by a prophet who shall not be named) into sustainable community. Think of it as a fun ritual framework for celebrating freedom, in all the senses of the world, easily adaptable to whatever modern afflictions are upon us. My cohousing community traditionally does an irreverent multi-denominational seder, recently using a "chocolate milk haggadah", substituting chocolate milk for the traditional wine or grape juice. The BarCamp ("Open Space") format seems ideal for bringing people together in self-organizing fashion to reinvent this tradition to reflect the concerns of our generation (and to help us see how much the same they really are, thousands of years back).

In keeping with the Passover tradition, please don't bring leavened bread items for the potluck, but anything's fare game; please label any non-obvious ingredients to support participants with allergies.

No pets, service animals, or smoking in the community, please; Common House access requires climbing a few steps.

We're carrying on a decades-old East Bay tradition, the "Communal Grapevine," in which people in group houses and communities in the area gather together a few times a year and compare notes about best practices for community living, and talk about the challenges and rewards of living collectively, hosted in different communities and at East Bay Cohousing Clubhouse. We expect some "old-timers" who have been living in community since then, along with some explorers and new cohousers, maybe a couple dozen altogether.

Topics that have come up in the past at these gatherings and are likely to recur include: Keeping the kitchen and bathrooms clean, shopping, storing, cooking, eating food and dividing any leftovers, selecting and deselecting house mates, paying for house and greening, roles by gender, children and elders.

Betsy Morris
This just in: We will have additional guests from afar, including Diana Porter, organizer of Cincinatti EcoVillage, a retrofit-neighborhood-connector visiting town. We've got some yummy leftovers from Berkeley Cohousing's common dinner tonight, plus more we're adding just for the occasion.

Posted March 30, 2010 at 9:09 PM
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12 attended

3.001 (1 ratings)

Event Host

Raines Cohen
Cohousing Coach and Aging In Community Author, Co-Organizer

+3 guests
Event Host

Betsy Morris
Cohousing Coach, Organizer
myra
susan

+2 guests
Judith Gussmann
Elders' Guild Community Housing group leader
A former member
A former member

Your organizer's refund policy for Third-Night Communal Grapevine Seder at Berkeley Cohousing w/Santa Fe cohouser

Refunds are not offered for this Meetup.

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Berkeley, CA

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Imagine lively people-scaled communities dotting the San Francisco Bay Area - places co-created by their residents for raising kids, for retirement, for growing food or simply living well by sharing more. The Bay Area already has ecovillages, and cohousing neighborhoods, resident-owned housing cooperatives, and group houses -- real world places where we can live more sustainably through a more cooperative way of life. You can have both privacy and community when you know your neighbors on purpose, in day-to-day relationships based on common vision and values.

East Bay Cohousing (EBCOHO) is a Bay Area-wide MeetUp. We connect a wide variety of kindred spirits and resources. We support individuals wanting to learn more, forming groups looking to create community together, and members of existing communities. We are mostly in the East Bay and San Francisco; others are from the North and South Bay, Los Angeles, Nevada, and other parts of the US and Mexico.

There are over two dozen cohousing communities in the greater Bay Area, (more cohousing in Oakland than any other U.S. city). There are also dozens of other emerging and long-established intentional communities. EBCOHO members have recently bought or rented homes in cohousing neighborhoods and cooperatively owned apartment buildings in Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland , Pleasant Hill, Grass Valley, Santa Rosa, and Nevada City. We have members living in Swan's Market Cohousing, Triple Point, Temescal Commons, Berkeley Cohousing, Parker Street Coop, Berkeley Town House, Addison Court Coop and established forming groups like East Lake Cohousing (formerly North Oakland Cohousing).

Extra bonus for 2012: The National Cohousing Conference is coming to town in June!

We host EBCOHO events for members, and link you to other events featuring a global network of friends and allies: pioneers in cooperative culture and sustainable communities: urban farmers, affordable housing developers, green builders, and creative visionaries in the movements for more open, user-friendly and collaborative technologies, economies, and governments. There's a global reinvention of communiies going on - both on the ground and online -- and the Bay Area is one of the world's epicenters.

EBCOHO has more events than our MeetUp-based home page can show fully, so please click on our Calendar to see more. Join for free to get involved! There's no charge for basic membership, but supporting members get discounts on some events, including socials, and workshops, cohousing books, and Cohousing Coaching.

Join us for an orientation, for social events, discussion, talks with exciting speakers, and hands-on workshops to learn the tools for developing good group relationships, and the real estate development process.. Find others who share your vision for supportive neighbors. Do it for yourself, for your family, for your parents, do it for the Earth! Make 2012 the year to deepen YOUR community connections.