Community Living is a way to retire at your larger property
Community Living – What’s in it for the owner is the question you are probably asking
Community Living allows ageing empty-nesters to fill the property to capacity and enjoy the following benefits:-
1 Not having to leave the home that I have spent my life and my life savings re-creating a run-down property into a wonderfully self-sufficient, affordable housing, sustainable environment.
2 Having no children of my own, I am looking for a compatible set of younger people to share this wonderful environment and opportunity to live in a self-sufficient, sustainable community-lifestyle. To be involved with mentoring practical wisdom/knowledge/experience, or even ‘babysitting’ as needed and agreed collaboratively.
- If people don’t already have this knowledge or experience of applying the food growing/home maintenance knowledge that can be easily found on the Internet – here is a ready-made opportunity to absorb and practise what is already working.
- In the process, the parents and the next generation learn how to provide for themselves in a healthy and affordable manner.
- At the same time, the ageing owner has some extra pairs of hands to help with the workload. 🙂 Many hands make light, quick work
- Younger generations learn from our experience, thus all the learning & experience isn’t lost = fulfilling lives 🙂
3 Social isolation is one of the biggest causes of increasing mental ill health, particularly anxiety and depression – especially in young at-home-mums and older people . We can alleviate that by recreating supportive communities on the property of empty nesters – where meaningful relationships are mutually negotiated.
- As a specialist counsellor in trauma and relationships, I feel this is the most obvious answer to so many people’s struggles with mental health and financial stress in our community.
4 Once we are all settled in, it is my aim to broaden my community-education scope to help Society at large – to physically see that this Community Living Cohousing idea does in fact work very well.
- There are already examples of bigger community-living projects [Green Fabric, Decohousing, Pinakarri & many others] here in Perth/ WA and across the world. I have visited very many of them, and received advice and mentoring in the development of this project. Contact Eugenie at Co-Operation Housing Fremantle for workshops, advice and much more.
- Later in 2023, I will continue work to share to the community at large aware some resources where these ideas are working already and have been working for decades.
Of course I am lucky and old enough to have experienced what it means to be part of the Perth hills community where people in the whole Shire gather together and support each other with community spirit not just when there’s a bushfire or flood … to build what is now known as Social Capital.