Caddis Collaborative is coming to Madison, Wisconsin, for the 2022 conference of the Cohousing Association of the United States! This conference, to be held August 26-28, will be the first time cohousers from around the country have met in person since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The theme for the conference is “Communities Coming Together.”

Caddis is excited to be a sponsor for the conference –and of course, we’ll be attending. We’ll have a booth in the exhibit hall, so make sure you stop by to say hi! We’re also leading a pre-conference intensive and presenting several conference sessions. Learn more about the conference, including how to register, by visiting the CohoUS website.

Pre-Conference Intensive

• Bryan Bowen and Ryan Adanalian, “Resilient Design” (Thursday, August 25, 8:30-12:00): Beyond solid approaches to energy efficiency and sustainability, resilient design means strategically making our communities more capable of recovering quickly from acute difficulty as well as gracefully adapting to chronic stressors. This intensive will be a close, practical look at current thinking around resilience and how it applies to the scale of communities we most commonly build in cohousing. 

Conference Sessions

• Bryan Bowen, “Community Sustainability + Resilience”: Hear about what’s happening now in the movement and how it can inform your community’s development – from Passive House to Living Building Challenge. We’ll talk through the basic strategies of sustainability as they relate to your forming community, explain all of the various rating systems like LEED, LBC, or Passive House, and look at case studies of completed projects. 
• Bryan Bowen, “Ponderosa: Deep Affordability and Resilience”: Ponderosa Mobile Home Park is an interesting example of how to apply cohousing principles to an existing affordable and diverse community. The residents of Ponderosa received funding from the City of Boulder (Colorado) after they were hit by the 2013 floods. With an eye to community and sustainability, they decided to tackle energy consumption, reconstruction options, innovative financing, a partnership with Habitat for Humanity, shared amenities, LID principles, community engagement, and capacity building – all at the same time. Through community engagement, two defining characteristics emerged: rugged individualism and incredible mutual support. This session will tell the story of how these folks were able to direct their community’s future. 
• Stephen Eckert, “The USA and Our Unique Obsession with Intentional Communities: A History”: A fun and perhaps irreverent look at the United States’ obsession with creating utopian communities. We will look at the many forms that the desire to live in community has taken over time – from Pilgrims to corporate utopias like Disney’s Epcot. The common link between these communities is not political but rather is a uniquely American desire to make the world better (or worse). Americans just aren’t satisfied with the world around us and are forever searching for utopia.
• Karin Hoskin, “Community Living at Its BEST!”: The Community Living Team or “party planners” are a vital part of a healthy community. This session will talk about the goal of this team, what skills are helpful to have in people on the team to fill various roles, and how to create a vision and a plan to carry it out. 
• Karin Hoskin, “Welcome to Our Community!”: For years, Wild Sage Cohousing Community barely had any turnover. Then we began to see some change but were able to welcome new community members with dinner, an orientation, and a point person they could ask questions of. As we evolved and had a few less members with institutional knowledge, we saw a need for a new process, including some remote access and the conscious accommodation of various learning methods. And thus the new New Community Member Orientation program was created.
• Kristen Uitto, “Designing for Affordability”: This presentation will focus on ways to work effectively with design professionals to avoid added cost. It will also identify ways to affordably design units from a space planning aspect to the selection of materials. Finally, it will ask the question “what elements of the process are anti-affordable?” 

Above: The Cohousing Association of the United States will meet in Madison, Wisconsin, August 26-28, 2022, for its “Communities Coming Together” conference.