Central Green Update

Well, the Central Green forum was interesting. It was a nice chance to get to meet some of the other cohousing people. It was also interesting from a Metro perspective as the new development is going to be linked to downtown via a pedestrian overpass.



So the bottom line from my perspective is that it is still too early
to tell if this is going to be a good fit for the cohousing side of things. Part of me really loves the idea of being in Central Green, 1. because it is a great location, within walking distance of lots of things, 2. because it is a green and sustainable development so it too addresses some of our priority concerns, 3. I think it would be a great place to showcase the co-housing concept. There would obviously be set backs with sharing the space with non-cohousers, but the benefit of that would be that we would be seen less as a cult (as Alexis said!) and perhaps the concept would be mroe easily accessible and once people see it working in practice in a public place, they would be inspired to build more developments in this way... wouldn't it be awesome if there were 5 or 6 or 15 cohousing neighborhoods in Kelowna and if people started to see this as the new way of building communities? OK, big dreams, but you just never know!

One thing I found with my small group was that they were very open to
the idea of cohousing not only because of the sustainability and
affordable housing angles, but because of the community aspect. One of
the major concerns of the city and developers is that the downtown has
a lot of social problems and the idea of having a cohousing community
who are intentional about getting to know their neighbors and being
engaged with their surroundings appeals to a lot of people from a
safety and social transformation perspective. Of course, this is also a major plus for the Metro team. It seems that there may be space on the site for a Metro building, and it too could perhaps fit into the 20% category if there were apartments etc. Either way, it is exciting that this development is going in there because it is going to be close to Metro regardless.

One funny little unexpected consequence of this meeting is that I ended up on the front cover of our local free paper! I spoke to a reporter from the Kelowna Capital News at the forum. It was kinda funny how it worked out - during the small group time, I happened to be the only one with a pen and notepad at our group, so I was nominated as the record keeper. When it came time to feedback our small group material to the larger group, they chose me to do it because I had all the notes. So the reporter came to speak to me because I had mentioned a Living Machine in my presentation. She asked me a couple of questions about it and then asked what our table had suggested it. I told her it was me and she asked what area of expertise I had. I laughed and told her I was just a mom, so she asked how I knew about the Living Machine and I explained that I had read about them in a couple different books, Natural Capitalism being one of them. So she asked me how I had heard about the forum and I explained about the cohousing group. She called me a couple of days later to follow up with more questions and I thought maybe it would be a little paragraph stuffed in the middle of the paper somewhere, but then last night a friend called to say I was famous 'cause she'd just read all about me on the front page of the paper! Thankfully there was no picture and the reporter was very careful to quote me exactly.
So there you go... you just never know what might happen when you show up!