Head to the Community Led Homes website for guidance on remote working  for co-ops and other community led housing groups from Confederation of Co-operative Housing. 

CCH have also produced guidance on things to consider in relation to governance and operational management issues. 

www.communityledhomes.org.uk/resource/guidance-operational-management-response-covid-19 

Meanwhile National Community Land Trust Network have shared a helpful video on   How to host a remote AGM, which explains the steps you can take to meet your legal obligations whilst following public health precautions.

Hope Cohousing started up as a forming group in 2018 with the aim of building five homes for rent with linked communal buildings in St Margaret’s Hope, Orkney for a group of older people. Changing circumstances and a realisation that some of our homes were now not suitable, led us to decide we wanted a new-build project where we could live independently yet communally, in reach of village and community services such as doctor’s surgery, shops and bus routes.

Although Orkney regularly comes up as one of the best places to live, regrettably it has the highest rates of fuel poverty in the UK, often linked to old or hard to heat properties. So good insulation and low heating costs are also essential components of the new build. 

Thanks very largely to the support of Orkney Islands Council and a partnership with Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, over the past two years we have made great progress. We received feasibility funding from the Scottish Government’s Islands Housing Fund which covered community consultations in the islands as well as advancing designs for the project. We have submitted a planning application this month and are preparing to go out to tender to local contractors.

Last autumn we prepared a bid for Innovate UK ISCF Healthy Aging initiative, which led us to develop ideas for rolling out a cohousing blueprint across other rural and island communities. It seemed to us that many cohousing projects are held back because each one has to find out anew how to overcome the hurdles to progress. We have been fortunate to have the active support and encouragement of our local authority, but are still having to learn how to access funds and build a successful business case, especially for the common spaces. 

The bid for Innovate UK successfully went through to the interview stage. On our trip to London to make our presentation we were fortunate to meet with Owen Jarvis and were delighted to share our ideas with him. It was also very exciting to visit OWCH and learn from three of the residents about living in a cohousing community. Recently we have been to the Rural Housing Scotland Conference in Birnam, near Perth, where we talked about our project and learned about other community-led housing developments in Scotland. Many of them are bigger than Hope Cohousing, but it was also good to learn about other schemes that like ours reflect the smaller communities we live in. 

We are now looking into community shares as a potential source of funding as well as pursuing grants and other options. We will update on progress in future newsletters. 

Survey: Can community-led housing tackle loneliness?

Many thanks if you've already completed or circulated our online survey on community-led housing and loneliness.

The good news is that we've extended the date, and also added a few additional questions about how communities are responding to the Covid19 virus. There's also an option to answer these new questions separately, if you've previously completed the survey. 

Both options, and details about the research, are here:

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lselondon/CLH/

Many thanks again for your support, and for circulating this new update to members of your group and to any contacts you might have in other community led housing projects.

Best wishes, and hope you're keeping well in these difficult circumstances,

After ten years working together, Oxford Cohousing may finally be making some real progress towards identifying a site, putting in an offer and building our cohousing community.  This progress has happened thanks to a grant of £72,000 from Homes England's Community Housing Fund. 

We applied last year and received final confirmation in January this year.  The money has to be spent before the end of March, unless an extension to the Fund is announced, for which National Cohousing has been busy lobbying.  

The money has enabled us to employ a local firm of architects - Transition by Design - who designed our logo - and other experts (including Charles Couzens as Project Manager, who has worked with Bridport Cohousing, and Jimm Reed, financial consultant, who worked with us on earlier bids) to do feasibility work on two sites in Oxford.   

This exciting progress means a lot more work for our small core group as we need to look fairly urgently now at the questions of membership (how to grow it), legal structure (we are currently a limited company but we want to be able to keep affordable homes affordable in perpetuity), and allocation of units.  Any guidance and ideas from other cohousing groups around these issues is being sought and very welcome. 

www.oxfordcohousing.org.uk