At Avalon Community Cooperative we share a 7 bedroom house with a communal kitchen, living room, and bath rooms as well as a tiny home that shares our bathrooms and kitchen. Our house is on a double plot that has been a food forest for the past decade and we are working on cultivating the food forest and adding a garden that will be open to the neighborhood for picking, planning, planting, and tending. We have a young family living here and aim to be a family friendly coliving space for years to come. We take turns cooking house dinner every night, share a food budget for communal groceries, and all contribute to a common purse for home maintenance, utilities, and house supplies. We help govern the Land Trust that owns the house alongside the organization’s board of directors and house residents have full control over the resident bank account. We govern our house through weekly house meetings using a consensus-based democratic model.
We are part of the broader Bloomington cooperative scene that includes 5 other houses under a different co-operative organization (Bloomington Cooperative Living) but with close social and structural ties. Half of the founding cohort of Avalon comes from Bloomington Cooperative Living. There is also a greenhouse down the black that we help tend, an informal co-living house with a large garden in the back 2 blocks away, and a neighborhood center a 10-minute walk from us that several of us are very involved with. We see ourselves as embedded in a larger co-operative ecosystem here in Bloomington and want to be a part of growing the projects that enmesh our lives with those of our neighbors.
Avalon Community Land Trust aims to provide permanently affordable housing by holding property that is democratically governed by residents in the trust.
Email us, we’ll send you an application and, if you sound like a good fit, we’ll invite you to interview. Interviews are ideally in-person but can be done virtually. We come to consensus on each applicant we admit to our waitlist and, once we have a cohort of applicants, we rank out waitlist by rank-choice voting. Rooms are offered to individuals highest in the ranking first and then we proceed through the ranking until all available rooms are filled. We take applicants year-round and add them to our ranked waitlist so we have people to offer a room to when one opens. You can always apply and could possibly be at the top of our waitlist, regardless of whether others applied before you if you are placed at the top through our rank-choice voting process.
Email us! We’d love to get to know you and show you around our community.
The whole membership decides collectively.
Generally seek agreement, but have backup methods when consensus isn’t reached.
Power and responsibility are shared relatively equally among members.
Members maintain separate personal finances with minimal sharing.
Regular fees: $620
Labor: Yes (6 hrs/week)
Members with pre-existing debt: allowed
We would certainly consider members with debt as we do not income share but rather have a common purse through monthly membership dues which give members their bedroom and contribute to shared food, utilities, supplies, and maintenance. However, we would be reticent to accept a member who had a debt to OUR community such as unpaid membership dues from a previous membership period.
Common House, Garden(s), Greenhouse(s), Library, Outbuilding(s), Fire pit, Internet
Within city limits with access to urban amenities and infrastructure.
Shared living spaces with private bedrooms/bathrooms and communal
kitchens, dining, and social areas.
Connecting people and communities through an intentional online marketplace
A residential project: people live here as their primary home.
An institution, business, network, or project that isn’t a residence (e.g. a learning center, farm, or network with no one living there full-time).
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