On a warm fall evening in October, I stepped bright-eyed and a little shy, into my future.  This was the evening I would begin to love the co-ops.  Lothlorien Co-op was vibrating with conversation, excitement, and beautiful people.  Intricate murals, eclectic furniture, and some bikes could be spotted among the chattering students, who were smiling, hugging each other, and talking enthusiastically.  A buzz of music and laughter spilled out from the kitchen area.  A crate of avocados leaned precariously off the edge of a wooden table.  Dinner was scheduled to start in fifteen minutes.

Noticing that mine was a new face, a few girls came over to talk to me.  After some friendly greetings, they asked me about my freshman experience.  I felt welcomed and included.

“Dinner should be coming out soon,” said my host.  He motioned towards a long table, stacked with chopsticks, bowls, and plates.  The room was getting crowded, and a line was forming.  I talked to more friendly residents: a lanky bearded guy and a girl dressed in flowing silky fabrics.

After twenty more minutes of waiting, my host assured me that such late meal preparation was not commonplace.  He said that the Monday cooks were experimenting, and it was taking a lot longer than they expected.  They were making tamales, guacamole, and tortilla soup!

By this time the room was full to the brim. When someone brought out a guitar, another found something to drum on.  One girl began to belt out a tune in Spanish, and the whole room became a party.  Bare feet pattered on the wooden floor, jumping and dancing.  I couldn’t help but smile.

Then, as though we used the music to summon the food from the kitchen, the sweaty-faced cooks emerged bearing heavy pots in their arms.  We ate, talked, enjoyed, and went back for seconds.  I introduced myself to more people, and marveled at how homey and delicious the experience was.

My first experience at Loth was peppered with integral co-op values.  Since then, I’ve learned more about what cooperatives are based on.  Voluntary and Open Membership without discrimination is an important value that I experienced off the bat.  Secondly, concern for community and community development are other very apparent principles of Berkeley’s co-ops.  My first impression of that was how people rushed into the kitchen to help the cooks, took it upon themselves to start an entertaining jam session, and did their part in the clean-up.

Other principles presented themselves to me later.  At council, I experienced the democratic nature of governing the co-ops.  For anyone new to a housing co-op, the hand signals, patience for discussion, and sophistication of the concerns at council are an amazing testament to the power of democracy in a community.  Next, Education, Training, and Information is a cooperative value which builds community.  The amount of programming available to me makes me want to be involved!  Stretching workshops, Beehive info sessions, weekly Women’s meetings and more are beneficial to body, intellect, and soul.

When I left Lothlorien that evening, I was full.  My belly sat comfortably packed with nutritious home-cooked food and my mind was crowded with the names of all the interesting people I had talked to.  The rest of me was brimming with excitement for the house I had just discovered.  An amazing community had showcased itself to me in a mere two-hour package, and I couldn’t stay away if I tried.

-Anika Rice

It is too easy to get sucked into the issues of the house that we live in, just as its easy to get sucked into the issues of the day and forget about the world beyond what our eyes can see. In the way that its good, then, to take a semester or more to live in another part of the world, its also good to look beyond the particular house we sleep in, the system we make up the membership of, or the type of cooperative of which we are a part.

Especially difficult is to escape my house, CZ; and we even have a term for it. Whenever a group of Czars want to get down to Thai Temple or over for a music festival, or even down to Memorial Glade for some Frisbee, CZ Inertia kicks in, and any planned time for departure is exceeded by, on average, an hour of people running to rooms to get jackets and wallets, having a quick smoke, or going to the bathroom, or calling up their friend, or sorting out what car to ride in or where the damn soccer ball went. Its likely happening on a smaller scale in smaller houses, but the same concept is, I think, one of the reasons that the BSC as a whole seems to be more fragmentary than unified. Sure, we all drink tea out of mason jars (its so great to see the proud carry said jars across campus) and smell bad after we clean the bathroom, but it seems sometimes that the only place that BSC membership ever shares activities is at our parties; and conversation is certainly limited by dance floors and lines for the bathroom.

Look at this for a minute. The BSC has 1,250 members living in 20 houses. Over a thousand people make up our organization, a number that turns over every four years (kind of) and is repopulated by fresh faces. Never again, I think, will I be a part of such an interesting and inspiring mode of living. Why is it so hard, then, to get out to other houses besides my own and meet all the other incredible and inspiring people I’ve been sharing my cooperative lifestyle with? Why don’t I talk even to the other people in my house I haven’t spent time with yet, the people I recognize and nod to but never really converse with? The answer to these, as I’m sure had been deduced, is that firstly I don’t have social skills and secondly there are more people in the co-ops than I could meet in a year – meeting one new person a day. Another part, much smaller but something I regard as significant, is quite simply that everyone settles. I settle into the people I know and talk to, into my classes and study habits and clubs and hobbies and jobs and yes, I settle into the parties. To move out of that state, once established, is difficult and uncomfortable, and I think that this is a reason I don’t feel as connected to my peers and fellow members in the cooperatives as I could be.

My favorite philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, says that “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Its when I first moved into Davis, or back into Casa Zimbabwe with a new crew of Czars, that I didn’t settle for comfort and met new people and had a fantastic, if anxious, time. There isn’t really a way to create that sentiment among the membership at large, though, no matter how many welcome orientations or social events we organize at the central level (trust a former CZ Social Manager on this one).

There have been, however, a number of events which brought a sense of cohesion to me about fellow humans of the BSC. The first was the Casa Zimbabwe alumni reunion, which was a party. The other two were WestCo and NASCO, both for which I want to end this article with an enthusiastic endorsement. WestCo, in the spring I helped to organize it, was a showcase for the BSC and a rocking good time with friends from up and down the West Coast – there’s something about bringing in people from other cooperatives that broaches that hesitation we have about talking about the movement of which we are a part. Beginning simply, with comparing methods for running council and getting people to wash dishes, the conversations quickly expand into more profound pools, from which that catharsis I didn’t know I was seeking until I touched it wells up.

The first time I reached that feeling – that I was a part of something big and wholesome and good, with these co-ops – was before WestCo, at the NASCO Institute held every year in the late fall in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I urge everyone to consider these events, if only to talk about how interesting the names of the houses in Eugene, Oregon are, or how incredibly similar 21st Street Co-op in Austin, Texas is to CZ, or how amazing the people in Maryland are, not only for founding a brand-new cooperative system, but also for naming it CHUM (and one of the houses Bucket). If you want to feel linked in a new and powerful way to your house, and have a weird social anxiety that allows you to be Social Manager but also leaves you awkward and terrible at conversation at parties, then teaming up with the Btown crew that attends NASCO or getting out to wherever WestCo is going to be next is probably one of the best decisions you could make in your life.

LINKS

Cartoon about CHUM (mentions Berkeley too!): http://shareable.net/blog/housing-chums

http://www.nasco.coop/

WestCo (2011): http://bsc.coop/westco/

21st Street Co-op: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Street_Co-op

and http://www.collegehouses.coop/ (see sidebar, I guess it miiight be closer in looks to Cloyne? I dunno I never been)

-Casey Schenkelberg