Community Life

Being in a community together takes a mix of patience, care, creativity, and silliness.

To help guide us in our day-to-day life together, we wrote up and agreed on this list of Rights and Responsibilities of living in New View.

We have different committees to look after different aspects of our shared properties and activities: Finance, Maintenance, Landscape, Membership, Meals, Commonhouse Living, and more. There's a Steering committee that meets once a month with committee representatives and other community members. We make decisions by consensus, with a (rarely used) fallback to voting. You can find out more about the details of our governance on our Documents page.

Groups of volunteers mow, plow walkways, garden, pick poison ivy, and take care of our computer network and some of our carpentry needs. We celebrate together whenever possible—the end and beginning of each school year, holidays, anniversaries, and more. Kids relish capture the flag games and their own made-up "onion game" on warm evenings.

We have parties for birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays -- here's the beginning of the Halloween March:

Stories about life at New View

• "Our House" by Dana Snyder-Grant  
• "Cohousing and the Arts" by Susan Cunio Salem
• "First Pictures" by Dana Snyder-Grant (1996)
• "Pizza and Cake" by Dana Snyder-Grant (2001)