Just over a year ago I wrote a piece celebrating the relationships that were blossoming in the early days of living together and community organising at Wirksworth Housing Co-operative. Since then a lot has changed, and my understanding of love within this collective endeavour has deepened.
During that time we’ve welcomed 6 new people (including 2 children) and said goodbye to 2. We’ve weathered heartbreak together as we lost one of our founding members following my separation. We’ve also had plenty of joyful experiences with the wider community such as running D&D nights and multiple events as part of the queer care collective - with 4 more gatherings happening this winter to provide sober warm spaces for our local community. We’ve hosted about 20 overnight visitors - some who have needed love and care in troubled times, some who were interested in co-operative living, and most recently a few members from the Radical routes network volunteering their time to help us to navigate complex financial questions. We’ve taken the DWP to tribunal over local housing allowance issues and won (again with the support of Radical Routes and our friends at Wild Peak Housing Co-operative). And we are finally about to submit for planning permission to introduce 3 new bedrooms, improve the facilities within the community space, and to insulate this beautiful grade II building for which we constantly count our blessings for even when it’s bloody freezing.
Alongside of all of this we are constantly learning more about ourselves and one another. We’ve made mistakes, we’ve been surprised, but the commitment to the change we are trying to create both for ourselves and generations to come is still burning bright within all of us. I wanted to share some of the things I’ve experienced so far, in the hope that it might inspire anyone living communally in any capacity to consider how to shape and reshape the way you live together with others.
Personal growth
Relationships are like mirrors. When we allow others in, they will shine a light on parts of us that we didn’t know existed. I thought I was pretty good at this process by now as a result of being a parent and having practiced polyamory for 6 years, but sharing your daily space with so many other adults and children really pushes you to extend your understanding of yourself in ways you weren’t expecting. I’ve had to practice holding my boundaries more than ever, and I’ve also had to practice letting go of expectations or flexing my boundaries too. Perhaps it’s also the pressure that the group was put under following my separation, but it’s also made me question what’s truly important to me and to refind what I believe in over and over again. And learning to do this in real-time alongside multiple other people has been both painful and magical. You learn to be witnessed at your most vulnerable, to practice repair, to really notice when it’s important to speak up and when to remain quiet.
Food
One of my most unexpected challenges when moving into the co-operative was navigating food. As someone who cooks for my kids every night, and is also committed to changing the ways we eat, I assumed this way of living was going to excite me to get to feed more people and reduce our collective waste.
Initially a few of us were all taking it in turns to cook communal dinners most nights, and shopping for our staple foods together. We tried to be extra thoughtful about the competing dietary requirements and allergens within the group. But when so much change started happening we struggled to hold onto this commitment. I noticed in particular for myself that I was having real anxiety around food. Working with my autism coach Micha I realised it was the first time in almost 20 years that I hadn’t been solely responsible for food shopping and cooking, and as an autistic person I was really struggling with not knowing when and what I’d be eating.
I also enjoy cooking as a transitionary activity before I eat, and entering into an overstimulating dining room without that build up was really challenging for my brain. I was sad to have to tell the group I wanted to eat and cook separate meals but it was something I needed to do to have consistent regulation. Since then we’ve slowly been resurfacing with our collective meals - but on a more flexible basis. Most weeks there will be one or two people during the week who will just send out a simple message to say what they intend to cook and anyone can help themselves. For me this approach feels like it shows love and care in a way that centres agency - when someone offers I can be confident they definitely have the capacity to cook for others, and that if I accept or decline the offer it will not be experienced as problematic/inconvenient.
And it almost made me cry the other day when my housemate Char had registered my current hyperfixation on cadbury’s chocolate mousse and popped round with it to brighten my day. The way we notice each other's needs and adapt how navigate something like food fills me with so much confidence for how we navigate other complex issues together.
Space
In such a big building I didn’t imagine we might struggle at times to find the space we all respectively needed. One reason for this is because we have 4 kids as part of our co-op, and small children expand into the space they have. It’s beautiful to witness them all expressing themselves in ways many of us didn’t as kids, and to consider how running around in a giant hall playing games might fill their memories. But it’s also a sensory challenge for a predominantly neurodivergent co-operative.
In addition the building is not designed as a ‘home’. So while we have big beautiful communal spaces (and unnecessarily large hostel bathrooms) it doesn’t necessarily evoke the feelings that others might get from hiding out in their cosy living room or relaxing in their bath.
This year I started renting the cottage next door which me and my kids moved into - while it’s not officially part of the co-operative I believe having a shared garden and an extra kitchen has been pivotal for our capacities to keep investing time and energy into each other and the project. And as we invest in renovation work, the next few years are going to involve a fair amount of negotiation and rearranging to get the combination of needs right. We’re lucky to have such a large space to play with - so long as we can raise the funds we need. Some co-operatives don’t have that same flexibility, but we’ve heard recently about a co-operative that gives their new members a ‘moving in’ budget to make their rooms feel homely. I love the sentiment of each new person being given power to reshape their space to suit their needs.
Money
I wrote last year about our financial model and celebrated the freedom it gives us as a co-operative. But following my separation, we have a substantial investment within the co-operative that was loaned by the founding member who left. It raises some financial questions that none of us imagined having to navigate so early in our journey. The fully mutual housing co-operative model is great in lots of ways because loans are separate from any tenancy - this creates security for those who remain as part of the co-operative because the building can’t just be sold out from underneath those living there like many private landlords can. And the fact that everyone is also an equal director regardless of whether they loan money to the venture means that it levels some of the power dynamics that can ensue when someone is resourcing a project.
But if someone’s commitment to the co-operative was based on them being able to live there, and then they need to find somewhere else it is reasonable for them to request to withdraw that money early. We are currently raising loanstock in the hope that we can return some of their funds to them, invest in the renovations we need to and continue to support more people without access to wealth to live as part of the co-operative. Experiencing this as a member of the co-op has made me reassess the money I have within the project and my own commitment to wealth redistribution - it’s made me think about mine and my kids future in a more collective sense to the point where I even investigated ensuring the funds remain in the co-op if I was to die. But the experience has also made me more committed to raising funds from a wide range of sources to ensure the project doesn’t hinge on the goodwill of a few core people.
Rituals and rhythms
In my work I often talk about how having clear rhythms, cycles or consistent shared practices helps teams to build trust and confidence, particularly through times of change. One of the most invaluable practices we have implemented as a co-op is consent-based decision making, with the support of our lovely collaborator Abi Handley. The structure provides us with a pattern of communication and a route through complex decisions which values everyone's voice and feelings, and makes spaces for dissent and difference. I also think it’s particularly helpful for neurodivergent people to have a structured framework for how they bring ideas and challenges into a conversation.
We continue to prioritise time together as a group every week to discuss decisions and share issues, and we’ve recently started doing one sunday a month together where we delve deeper into a particular topic. So far we’ve revisited our visions for the co-operative and had financial literacy training on those days - and the next one is likely to be working through our DIY tasks together ahead of the winter.
Solidarity
Living in this way wouldn’t have been possible without the support of both our local community and the national co-operative movement. Most of our investors are local people and it’s been really powerful to feel both accountable to people we see on a weekly basis and to feel supported by them. In addition, having a place we could immediately turn to in the form of Radical Routes when we’ve been in crisis has made a huge difference in ensuring we didn’t descend into hopelessness. Most of the time we’ve been able to get easy answers or pretty immediate support from others in the network but even when we’ve had challenges that someone in the network isn’t familiar with, the speed at which people rally around to ensure another co-operative makes it through challenging times has been a really powerful experience.
It’s made me more committed than ever to the co-operative movement because it’s the first time in any organising space that I’ve really felt that collective sense of care and also focussing on facing up to the challenges that are literally on our own doorstep. It’s soothed my tendency to get a flight response to conflict I’m implicated in and to show up for my comrades in a more grounded way.
I said to one of my housemates the other day that this period of time had really shown me what a chosen family actually means. I think many of us have a tendency within the lgbt community to want to experience only love and joy together because of what we’ve faced in other spaces, which is legitimate in lots of ways but that also means when conflict arises or we find each other irritating or too much we can end up retreating. When I was struggling to connect with my housemates during the upheavals this year I reminded myself that they were my siblings - and that means our struggles are shared and we are in this together forever in some form. I had to find a way through that feeling and to allow our relationship to morph into something more complex but also more meaningful in the long run.
Please get in touch with us via wirksworthhc@gmail.com if you are considering investing loanstock, or if you simply want to learn more about housing co-operatives.