ABOUT CHAPELTOWN COHOUSING
Don Francis
Our story
Our community started when members of a local housing cooperative just up the street from where we are now read a news story about cohousing. It took 12 years of hard work , big feelings, births and deaths, but we made it read about our story here.
Don Francis
Our model
Chapeltown Cohousing is a housing cooperative that owns the land, the homes and the shared facilities. We offer affordable rented and shared-ownership homes on a very long term lease. All our tenants and residents are members with an equal right to shape our cooperative.
We make decisions by consensus.
We run the community in task groups and make decisions in a monthly general meeting.
Sustainability
Globally, economically and socially. We want the buildings and our lifestyles to have as low a carbon footprint as possible. We do this by living in well insulated homes, composting our waste and sharing as much as we can to minimise our consumption, including washing machines and cars.
Diversity
We don’t want to end up a community of self-righteous eco-freaks. We’d like to have as much diversity as possible in background, ethnicity, education, wealth, age and belief. We have some policies to make sure we live up to this value (we provide affordable homes and have an allocation policy to make sure we reflect the racial makeup of our neighbourhood). But more importantly, we learn from living in a diverse community.
Openness
We want to be part of our wider community. We want our children to be able to play safely outside – but we don’t want to keep others out. We enjoy building relationships with our neighbours in the streets around, and finding ways to make some of our facilities available to them.
Support
We look out for each other and aim to share the responsibilities of keeping the show on the road. We want to be generous with our time and possessions.