A wonderful letter came through the door today. Confirmation that we had been awarded a £10,000 grant to undertake a pre-feasibility study.

What’s a pre-feasibility study? Good question and one we struggled with and obviously gave a good answer to in our grant application. The simplest way to answer is to tell you what we will do with the grant.

The aim is to produce a community vision and realisable action plan for the development of the site. And to do this we will:

1. Create a development timeline with key issues and next steps – covering site, finance, leadership and community engagement.
2. Clarify the roles, structure, leadership and make-up of the community vision group.
3. Identify development needs of current members in terms of skills and experience. 

4. Identify the needs, requirements, resources and capacity of potential key partners.

5. Identify research potential and possibilities for wider learning.

6. Identify key contacts and essential liaisons.

7. Recommend how the benefits of cohousing can be most effectively applied to meet the local context and community. 

This pre-feasibility study gives us a real chance to move things along quickly. We are able to pay for help so that by the end of the three months we are in a much better position, with real clarity about what we are aiming for and how we can get there.

Okay – not the most interesting topic to blog about but it’s important. Personally I’m not sure I really believe in insurance – it seems like glorified gambling. However, I do believe in being responsible and can see that if a fire in one of our houses destroys the neighbouring property I’d feel even more devastated if we couldn’t help them rebuild it.

I’m sorting insurance because we’ve just bought a new house next door to our existing one. I thought it would be straight-forward as I’m only after basic buildings insurance. I insured our current house online through the Cooperative Insurance.

Things weren’t so simple. The Cooperative Insurance realised that something funny was going on. The person sorting the insurance wasn’t the person who owned the house. After several phone calls they confirmed that they cannot insure a Housing Cooperative!

That wasn’t the end of the story. I thought this sounded so ridiculous that I decided to have another go. Three people and a supervisor check later, I had someone prepared to give me a quote. I had to do it by phone as their website couldn’t understand cooperatives – only limited companies, partnerships or sole proprietors.

In the end I got a better offer from Insure Green – who were suggested by the Ecology Building Society (who are fantastic at understanding Housing Cooperatives).  I was reassured when I phoned Insure Green as soon as I was told to speak to Vikki, “who dealt with cooperatives.”

So I now have insurance covered – just in time for firework night. The summary of the policy has arrived by email and I’ve confirmed that “No proposer, director, partner or family member involved with the business” has:

• been refused insurance
• been bankrupt
• or ever been convicted of a criminal offence.

I wonder – if we do achieve our ambition of being a truly diverse community, how are we going to meet these conditions?

Great news – our housing cooperative has just doubled in size after buying the house next door through an auction. One of our members attended the auction to bid in person. I hid behind the live feed to my computer and felt nervous even though I wasn’t there.

It was so hard deciding how much to bid. We knew roughly what value the house was and we knew what state it was in.  We also knew that the house would benefit from some lovely neighbours!

To us the house was more than just a house. It provided a great opportunity for us to practice cohousing while waiting and working towards the bigger scheme.

With just one house the decisions are simple – can we afford to do that repair/improvement or not? Things are now much more complex – should we spend money on new flooring in one house or on secondary glazing in the other?

We’re hoping the expansion will provide great opportunities to start building a more sustainable, supportive, open and diverse community-minded way of living. And we are pretty sure that the consensus decision-making training later this month will be essential to help us try and achieve it.

A newspaper article caught my attention. It described a housing estate where people really looked out for their neighbours, children could play safely on the street and elderly people knew that those around them could be called on for help when needed. It also looked beautiful.

The article was describing Springhill cohousing in Stroud and I decided to take my family to investigate. We were met by Max Comfort, whose name summed up our visit. The houses were light and spacious with balconies looking out over the rest of the estate.

I had expected more green space but realised that what made this estate different was that every inch of ground was available to use, for example the narrow main street was pedestrian – transforming it into a playground and meeting point.

There was also a Common House that everyone on the estate used. It had enough space for all 70 residents to eat together. It also acted as a youth club and in some ways took on the role of the village pub.

People often describe neighbours as good by saying that they ‘keep themselves to themselves’. This wasn’t the case in Stroud, where good neighbours meant people you knew and worked alongside to make the local area and community better.

I believe that anyone who has a taste of this will realise that people are naturally social. We don’t really want to live in isolation but fear and misunderstanding can displace are longing for community. What cohousing showed me was that it is possible to do something different and to live in a better way.

Having experienced a taste of Max Comfort we want to see if it is possible to create cohousing in our streets in Chapeltown, Leeds.