For many religious liberal and activists, there is a difference between what we want the world to look like and the way that we are actually able to live our lives. Faith communities and housing cooperatives are two powerful places that people can find support in making the daily decisions to live more in line with their values. To that end, we are forming a faith-based coop in Boston.
The Lucy Stone Cooperative (LSC) will be a cooperative house for 10-20 housemates informed by Unitarian Universalist (UU) values and our commitment to sustainability, spiritual practice, and social change. We are working to create an intentional community in our house, as well as an extended community of friends, neighbors, activists, and spiritual seekers. LSC will serve as a center for both spiritual renewal and social justice organizing. Our goal is not to withdraw from the world, but to engage more fully with it.
Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religious tradition, held together not by a shared set of specifics beliefs about God or heaven or holy books, but by our covenant. A covenant is an agreement not about what we believe, but about how we will live together. LSC will deepen our faith by expanding the idea of covenant beyond the church and into homes and neighborhoods. We also believe that coops are best served by having specific agreements of how we will act toward each other, based in our deepest values.
We're committed to social justice, and cooperation makes it happen. We're committed to spiritual practice, which can be the grounding to sustain social justice work. We're also committed to sustainability. As a part of the interdependent web of life, we are morally obligated to live in a way that is respectful of the earth and each other. By living in community, we are able to overcome many of the barriers we may otherwise face living on our own and can better live out our values.
Our ambitious goals of fostering both a strong house community and a center for social justice have required visioning and organizing. Through monthly planning team meetings and more than 70 one-on-one conversations with community leaders, we're developing a common vision. From this group of leaders, we formed an advisory committee, including the founder of United for a Fair Economy, the executive director of the UU Urban Ministry, one of the co-founders of Boston Community Cooperatives, and other UU leaders, housing activists and co-opers in the area. Meeting with so many individuals has created space for a larger group of people to become invested-with their time, energy, knowledge, and resources-in the Lucy Stone Cooperative. We need a larger community to realize our vision; it takes a community to build a community.
The LSC house will be cooperatively-owned through a group-equity model. In addition to engaging in grassroots fundraising, we are seeking allied loans from churches, individuals, and other nonprofits to make the house as cooperatively-funded as possible. Allied loans allow people and organizations to make socially responsible investments in LSC, and we pay them dividends once each year, often at rates below bank interest rates and to the benefit of our community and our partners, instead of corporate banks. By seeking donations and allied loans from congregations, friends, and community members, we are able to reduce the amount of money we are paying to the bank, allowing us to keep our rent more affordable and making the money we borrow go further.
In November, we had our first big kickoff party and fundraiser. Not only was it a fun event with live music, good food, and dancing, but it also brought together and inspired more than 170 people of all ages, beginning to build the community we seek and enabling us to begin our capital campaign with $13,000 in donations from over 150 people. This winter, the planning team will start the search for our house and begin our programming with a leadership development workshop, as we continue to shape the future of the Lucy Stone Cooperative. To learn more, or to be in touch, please check out: www.lucystonecoop.org
