Leaving no one behind
Members of Cohousing NL are looking to create a community where social connections and sustainability are priorities. Tara Barker
Housing is a fundamental right, yet affordability and accessibility remain significant challenges in Canada’s housing sector. In a quest to research, advance and test a viable solution, Cohousing NL, located in Newfoundland and Labrador, found valuable support through the Career Launcher program of Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan).
From the onset, Wendy Reid Fairhurst, Cohousing NL’s managing director, discovered a strong alignment between the two organizations’ dedication to advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in local communities.
The common goal? “To leave no one behind,” she says. “Due to a number of factors, such as the direction of government, industry and the market, plus changes in our population, it’s important we look at social enterprise and innovation for answers to the housing challenge.”
Since Cohousing NL aims to enable decision-making and prioritization by community members, community-scale sustainable infrastructure that reduces the environmental footprint and a focus on housing that supports social connections, it was a perfect fit for CICan’s ImpAct initiative, which supports internships that advance SDGs while providing Canadian youth with critical skills for the 21st century.
“We are thinking bigger than just the single community, and that is very meaningful to work on. ”
“The Career Launcher program has given me the opportunity to get on-the-ground experience in a social enterprise startup,” says Hillary King, who participated in the three-month-long Social Enterprise Business Development Support internship at Cohousing NL. “I learned about the barriers faced in obtaining funding, the opportunities that can be found through community collaboration and how sociocratic decision-making is a valuable governance structure for organizations.”
Cohousing NL has also benefited from Ms. King’s presence, which continues past the three-month internship, says Ms. Reid Fairhurst. “She has been fully embedded in our process and impacts the decisions we make, which is great, because this increases our diversity.”
Many Newfoundland communities are “long strips of roads with houses spaced out alongside,” explains Ms. Reid Fairhurst, who turned to cohousing as an alternative to traditional housing tracts that can come with isolation and vehicle dependency. Yet despite the strengths of the model, she soon recognized “that current cohousing developments in Canada are largely inequitable and unaffordable.”
Cohousing NL is exploring how a social enterprise business model, hybrid for-profit/non-profit structure, shared professional services, national knowledge-sharing and alternative funding will allow the Cohousing NL pilot project to achieve more affordability and share learnings across the country.
“We are thinking bigger than just the single community, and that is very meaningful to work on,” says Ms. Reid Fairhurst, who hopes that, as a result, cohousing will become an option for more people across Canada.
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