Bellingham Cohousing is an intentional community of 33 households. Each household is privately owned, but all other parts of our community are shared. We have regular work parties to maintain our shared spaces, regular meetings that use a consensus decision-making process to make community-wide decisions, and frequent social events such as community dinners in the Common House. Our Guiding Principles (listed below) serve as a foundation for our collective identity and our community decision-making.
Becoming a member of Bellingham Cohousing is much more than just renting or purchasing a unit. If you would like to connect with our current members to learn more about us, please let us know you’d like to stop by our daily coffee hour, which is held at 10 am every morning in the Common House. With our small rate of unit turnover, it can often take some time to become a member but we maintain a list of interested parties so that we can send out information about an available unit when an owner announces that they are selling or renting out their unit.
We can be reached by using this link to email us: info@bellcoho.com. Please let us know a bit about yourself, your family and your interests. How do you think you could contribute to Bellingham Cohousing? Are you interested in renting or purchasing a unit? Which types of units are you interested in? We’ll reply to you!
Bellingham Cohousing Guiding Principles
We aspire to create a collaborative, multi-generational community where we place a high value on kindness, respect, gratitude and shared responsibility. We honor each person’s unique way of being and support each other’s interests, skills and contributions to our community, the larger community and the planet.
We recognize that awareness and acceptance of our interdependent nature is the foundation for health, happiness, well-being, and survival. Therefore we commit to more deeply embody our principles so that we may make them a living part of our daily lives and by so doing manifest the community of our aspirations. To this end, we feel that these principles are best held as questions rather than statements, and each of us will continually ask ourselves…
How do I deepen my trust, respect and acceptance of others?
How do I bring joy to our community through both work and play?
How do I resolve conflict responsibly?
How do I live interdependently while acknowledging individuality?
How do I contribute to my community?
How do I authentically care for the members of my community?
How do both I and my community live ever more lightly on the earth?