Daily Archives: May 23, 2017

Shruti Merchant had a problem when she moved to San Francisco a few years ago.

She didnt really know anyone in the SF scene and, because she was working all the time, didnt really have a chance to get connected to a group she could call her own.

Its an old story for anyone moving out to a new place, but for Merchant, and others like her, the idea that there can be a better way to move to a place, and live in a city, has led to the creation of new co-living spaces.

In the old days, these spaces (once called communes by a generation less capitalizedbut perhaps no less idealistic) grew organically around shared interests and common themes and a rejection of what were the prevailing social norms of the day.

But now, as with many other things, the counter-culture of days past has been commoditized, capitalized and sanitized. The youthful idealism remains, but the song, certainly, is not the same.

Rather than sifting through online listings, or living alone in an apartment for one, we started HubHaus to offer an easy way for professionals to find quality shared housing solutions with a true sense of community, Shruti writes in a blog post about the new financing the company has received.

That shared community is young, urban, professional and mobile.

We do all the work from creating welcoming homes in neighborhoods you want to live in and setting up Wi-Fi and utilities to furnishing the place and finding people youll love living with, Merchant writes to her prospective customers.

General Catalyst has bought the pitch, leading the companys $1.4 million first financing. And other investors find similar magic in the co-living model (although Im not sure why). Common another apartment developer with designs around designing communities has raised $23.3 million in financing so far from investors, including 8VC, Maveron and Grand Central Tech.

Before both of these startups, there was Campus, which billed itself as a co-living company in the early days of the latest iteration of this particular living trend. The company launched, expandedand shuttered its doors in the span of a few years.

Our own former correspondent and longtime contributor, Kim Mai Cutler, took a turn in the co-living startup world when she worked at Roam Co-living, a multi-national twist on the concept that raised $3.4 million from investors, including the Collaborative Fund.

All of these fledgling startups pale in comparison to the true giants that are trying to muscle their way in to this new paradigm for urban (international) living.

WeWork, the $3.69 billion micro-office space real estate developer, is getting into the co-living game with WeLive, offering rooms for rent in Washington and New York, and the real estate owner, operator and developer Property Management Group, which launched PMGx to pitch to debt-laden, young, urban professionals.

Questions abound around all of these intentional communities and co-living spaces. How do they integrate with their communities? What are they doing to ensurefair rental and housing practices for minorities? What impact do these capitalized property owners and managers have on housing stores and the creation of real, lasting communities?

Lizzie Widdicomb, writing in The New Yorker roughly a year ago,laid out a beautiful history of the ever-changingconundrum that isliving for the city. She writes:

As a new, mobile workforce flooded into cities, demanding more freedom, boarding houses were largely replaced by cheap hotels designed for long-term stays. [Paul Groth, a professor of urban geography at the University of California, Berkeley] said, As late as 1930, maybe one housing unit in ten was some variation of a residential hotel. The Barbizon, a womens-only establishment at Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street, opened in 1927, when large numbers of women were beginning to work outside the home. To its guests, the Barbizon offered closet-size rooms and lavish shared facilities: a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, a sun deck, Turkish baths, a coffee shop, squash and badminton courts, a solarium, and a roof garden. To their parents, it offered the assurance of respectability: chaperones roamed the hallways, and men were not allowed above the first floor. Sylvia Plath, a resident in the nineteen-fifties, featured the Barbizon in The Bell Jar, where it appears as the Amazon, a hotel for rich young women who were all going to posh secretarial schools.

By the nineteen-sixties, hotel life had given way to the new dream: a place of ones own. In the sitcom That Girl, which premired in 1966, Marlo Thomas played an aspiring actress, Ann Marie, who moves to New York to try to make it while working a series of odd jobs: waitress, department-store elf. In the shows second episode, a friendly doorman helps her move into her own apartment. Standing on the threshold, she announces, Im my own occupant! Like Ann Marie, young women seized one-bedrooms near First and Second Avenues, which became known for singles bars and stew zoosbuildings packed with female flight attendants. The inaugural issue of Cosmopolitan called the neighborhood The Girl Ghetto: Thousands upon thousands of single girls flock to the upper East Side, cramming themselves into small apartments, subsisting on an apple and a quart of diet soda a day, waiting for a telephone to ring and having a mad, wonderful time.

Update Marlo Thomas careers to Instagram model, social influencer or no there are still department store elves but you get the idea. That picture of the late-20th century isnt really all that different from the beginning of the 21st.

As long as there have been cities, and single people who want to live in them,businesses will find new ways to cater to their whims and wants. The co-living phenomenon isnt that much different than what came before it except in its organization and its capitalization.

Still, Merchant believes in the dream and its magic.

Writing about the companys appeal, Merchant describes a living space and its notion of a shared community like this:

The real magic of HubHaus comes with the shared community that we havebuilt. Members immediately gain access to 100s of other people in thenetwork, and are invited to a variety of member-only events. Moreimportantly, theyre welcomed into their new family and bond withhousemates over monthly dinners, mixers, and just day-to-day life.While many members move in for the low rent prices, most end up staying for the connections that they make.

And there are pressures to make co-living more attractive. The rent in most cities is too damn high, and, in many cases for young professionals, their incomes are probably too damn low. Beyond that, theres something to be said for finding new ways to network and communicate in a world where everyone is LinkedIn, Facebook-friended, Instagram-followed and ephemerally Snapped. Real human connection can be hard to come by. Just ask these guys:

However, amid all the hubbub and hoo-hah around these new businesses springing up to cater to millennials whore tired of suburban living and want to be in dense, community-minded geographies, a counter-narrative is emerging.

Younger folks may be embracing the suburbs with the same zeal that their parents (or grandparents?) did. Community and culture may be key for the experience generation, but Im pretty sure that you can find those things any place where theres well community and culture. So, while this flirtation with co-living may be an option for urbanites, its not one thats particularly novel. Just a new melody for the same old chorus of moving, and living, in the world.

View post:

Co-living gets more cash as shared housing developer HubHaus raises $1.4 million - TechCrunch

The road through Santa Cruz del Quich is hectic, with tuk-tuks, buses, motorcycles and people carrying heavy loads of produce and wood on their backs through the narrow asphalt road lined with high embankments and yawning stray dogs.

It's the front door to the highlands of Guatemala, about four hours west of the capital, and to find the road north to San Pedro Jocopilas, I stop to ask locals for directions on street corners. I watch how their hands point, then I meander out of town and make a sloppy left onto a cobblestone road when I see the sign: Centro de Paz Brbara Ford.

The road is quiet, lined with open fields with harvested corn, small adobe houses and colorful laundry drying in the sun. Not too long ago, the 36 years of civil war between the state forces and the guerrillas separated families and took lives here.

The civil war began after the United States financially backed a military coup in 1954 that overthrew leftist Jacobo Arbenz Guzmn.

One of the most violent periods of this era was General Efran Ros Montt's 18-month presidency, which began in 1982 after a military coup, and resulted in about 200,000 dead, mostly indigenous people. There were death squads, executions, forced disappearances and torture of noncombatants.

Most of the human rights violations occurred under Ros Montt's destroy-all-opponents policy called "scorched earth." By the time the Peace Accords were signed Dec. 29, 1996, thousands had been killed or disappeared, families separated and the social fabric torn apart.

At the end of the cobblestone road is the Barbara Ford Peace Center, which sits on a serene, wooded property and houses a conference center, eco-park, sustainable farm with goats and rabbits, a professional cafeteria, honey production, and various entrepreneurial projects mainly run by young people. I have come to meet with Sr. Virginia Searing, a Sister of Charity of New York and the center's director who months after her 75th birthday reflected on her two decades of work in Guatemala and at the center, a nonprofit she co-founded that focuses on human and spiritual development through different programs.

Sr. Virginia Searing, director of the Barbara Ford Peace Building Center in Guatemala, celebrates her 75th birthday and more than two decades of work in Guatemala. (Kara Andrade)

When Searing arrived in the 1990s, she, Sr. Barbara Ford and a team of health promoters noticed the people they were helping still had nightmares and psychosomatic illnesses that were not talked about.

"We could walk down a street in Quich, and literally, it was ex-army, ex-guerillas, and it wasn't safe here," Searing said. "So people were still very afraid. Nobody talked to anybody until we started our mental health program."

GSR: What was your spiritual upbringing, and how does it relate to the work that you do now?

Searing: I never considered myself as someone who would become a Sister of Charity. As a matter of fact, I got the call from a sister who was putting a little pressure on me, and my first reaction was: "No way!"

I couldn't imagine I would be a sister. I always was in trouble in school. I used to always give the sister a hard time. I entered the Sisters of Charity in 1960, and I said, "Well, let me go, and if I don't like it, I will get out." But I have to tell you that from day one, Sept. 8, 1960, when I went to Mount Saint Vincent to this beautiful novitiate house on the Hudson River [in New York], I never looked back. I couldn't imagine that I was going to love it so much.

How do you see the Holy Spirit in the work that you are doing with the Barbara Ford Peace Center?

Any service, any teaching, anything that we do to create life among us is a part of my spirituality.

It is a question of living life so it becomes fully developed because community life was key for me. With the sisters and their intentional community, we learned to love one another and believe that in loving one another is how we were growing in our own spirituality.

Coming to Guatemala in 1993 and meeting these wonderful people taught me that they have an incredible spirituality. The Maya spirituality and also Mayans who were converted to be Christians because of the Spanish invasion, their beautiful Mayan spirituality just radiated right through them. When they talked about the heart of the Earth and the heart of the heavens they believe in a god that is tangible, present and, of course, growing with them and learning with them and sharing with them I grew deeper in my own spirituality.

My spirituality has always been about finding God in the present moment, living that present moment. Even if I met somebody and I had some kind of problem with somebody, I consider that a call for me to change that into blessing, to change that into the ability to be one.

Sr. Virginia Searing, director of the Barbara Ford Peace Building Center in San Pedro Jocopilas, Guatemala, speaks to a group of participants during one of the Centers comprehensive health programs in April 2017. (Kara Andrade)

Could you describe what is unique about what you and the other sisters who helped create this are doing at the Barbara Ford Peace Center?

I believe that being fully human is being fully spiritual. The mission is to create citizens men, women, young people, boys and girls to be critical, to be able to be in a process of integrated human spiritual development. They do that at their own level, the level of their family, the level of the community, and by doing that, they are allowing themselves and their communities to live in peace and in justice.

We have programs for what we call comprehensive health or integrated health. We also have human rights, and all of our programs do the same thing. For example, in the integrated health program, we work with teenage pregnant women, girls who were abused, violated, and young girls who did not become pregnant but were also violated. Sexual abuse is at the highest level, incest is epidemic, so how does one sit down next to a young girl that has been raped every day or a woman that has been raped every day and came out of the violence, and how do we do that in a way that is not obtrusive?

I do believe that in many of the practices we do, we are allowing them very gracefully and very slowly to begin to tell their story. We allow them to listen to music, to walk the music. We allow them to do painting. We do a lot of alternative types of education, all with the idea that they are slowly, gradually beginning to tell their story and to let the silent within them come out, and as it does, they begin to believe [in] the actions they are doing. There is a breathing exercise, whether it is saying words like, "I love myself, I trust myself, I feel like getting healed" whatever the practice that they are doing, it is helping them to really believe that healing is taking place.

In El Quich, it was a genocide. Every man, woman and children are now in the second and third generation, but we still work with midwives, with women working with other women, and without a doubt, all of them probably were raped, some by the soldiers, others by their own husbands after the violence was over, because many men who came out of being a soldier were being civil patrol or being part of the guerrillas even, so they never had a healing process to get [through] that anger and terrible experience of the war. So violence is still pretty prevalent within the home. So how do we allow these men and women to be able to get in touch with that finally?

The Barbara Ford Peace Building Center in San Pedro Jocopilas, Guatemala, has gardens that bloom in April 2017. The Center is a nonprofit Sr. Virginia Searing co-founded to help victims of Guatemalas armed conflict. (Kara Andrade)

How do we get them so they can learn how to relate to others in a nonviolent way? We have programs [for teenagers] that incorporate not just the opportunities per employment, but we have a lot of the integrated health so they learn how to deal with their emotions.

They do practices to actually have alternative ways [to manage their emotions]. They can use massage, they can use acupressure points: So much of it has scientific, biological background that just by doing some of these practices, healing takes place. Even if the situation of violence doesn't change, so many of the young women have learned that maybe they can't change their situation right now, but when I do have the circumstances I can protect myself, and I can't allow the violence outside to come inside.

What have been some of the challenges for you in working with this region and the work that you are doing? What challenges contributed to the center?

The challenge for me was with all the exhumations [in search of victims of Ros Montt's "scorched earth" policy to give them a proper burial], with the sleeping out in the mountains of Nebaj and some of those areas where we did the exhumations of clandestine graves. Strange as it may seem, these were some of the happiest years of my life because I was able to really be with the people, exhume the bodies of their loved ones and accompany them not only in that moment. With the mental health program, we sometimes went once or twice a month and listened to their stories, to their pain, and experienced how they cried and shouted out what happened to them, and then accompanied them and helped them find their loved ones in a clandestine grave.

This was out in the woods. They didn't bury those people in their village, they buried them in the mountains and that is where we went, that is how we spent weeks until we could finish the process. We were helping them with their mental health.

What is one thing that you have learned in your time in Guatemala and the work that you have done that you wish you had known when you started this work?

The truth that I would want every human being to know is, how do we accompany that young person, that young girl, that young boy, so that they can love themselves more, they can respect themselves more? The young girl who doesn't understand what her sexuality is, how could we help that young girl to say no, to love her mind and to love her spirit?

Sr. Virginia Searing, director of the Barbara Ford Peace Building Center in Guatemala, celebrates her 75th birthday and more than two decades of work in Guatemala. (Kara Andrade)

How do we make people who come to the Barbara Ford Peace Center, whether they stay for a year or two years, feel their lives are changed, that they are transformed and that what we did is, we helped them to be transformed themselves? If we give them the right words and the right experiences, they can truly live the rest of their lives in a way that is more peaceful, more full of justice lives that are full of dignity, which is what every human being deserves.

[Kara Andrade is a Guatemalan-American researcher, journalist and entrepreneur who focuses on Latin America, media, technology and society.]

Link:

Q & A with Sr. Virginia Searing, building peace after decades of Guatemalan civil war - Global Sisters Report (blog)

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

Second-grade students at Linden Elementary created Mini Michigan, which is their interpretation of how a city should be built. They used boxes, construction paper, glue and other craft materials to build the police station, the school, and other structures.

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

TRI-COUNTY TIMES | HANNAH BALL

Posted: Tuesday, May 23, 2017 5:24 pm

Young city planners create their ideal cities Tri-County Times | Fenton, MI Hannah Ball Staff Reporter Tri-County Times |

Linden If it were up to second-graders at Linden Elementary, their city would have a college called Unicorn University and Hyatt Elementary would have a huge water park.

The youngest city planners unveiled their box city projects Thursday, May 11 at Linden Elementary, where they showed off their ideas to Linden City Councilor and Planning Commission member Ray Culbert and City Manager Paul Zelenak. Each school made its own city, which was laid out on the gym floor.

Second-grade teachers Sarah Mawhinney and Elizabeth Clarke organized the event and worked with the kids.

Building this city truly is a fun project that helps children get a sense of what kind of characteristics go into a community. They needed to understand the basic parts of a community before planning to build their own city, Mawhinney said. Going through the democratic voting process to select the city name, as well as selecting plots of land to build on were very intentional activities to simulate real communities. This is an important and pretty creative activity to help guide our second-grade Social Studies curriculum in Linden.

Hyatt students named their city Eagle City and Linden Elementary students chose the name Mini Michigan.

Linden city officials talked with the children and told them what usually goes into a city, like residential areas, government buildings, stores, parks, churches, and other buildings. From there, the kids used boxes, construction paper, glue, tape and other craft materials to construct their buildings to create a city.

They designed hospitals, hardware stores, water parks, and other structures with their imaginations.

Culbert said it went wonderful this year. I think the thing that amazes me is how smart the children are. They seem to know right away what belongs in a city and thats great... I had one kid that said, You know what our city really needs is WiFi. He said thats the most important thing.

Posted in News for Fenton, Linden, Holly MI on Tuesday, May 23, 2017 5:24 pm.

Originally posted here:

Young city planners create their ideal cities - Fenton Tri County Times