Hei Wa house

2012 was recognized by the United Nations as the International Year the Cooperative. The International Cooperative Alliance, ICA, has used the United Nations recognition of the importance of cooperative to launch the International Decade of the Cooperative. The ICA has set a goal for cooperatives to be the fastest growing sector of the economy by the end of the decade.  It seems that for me personally, 2012 has also been the year of the cooperative, and as I look ahead this is shaping up to be the decade of the cooperative for me as well. I sit on the board of the Ann Arbor Peoples Food Co-op. I am involved with a co-op networking group for Michigan and the surrounding region. This past year I gave a couple of speeches and wrote a couple of articles about cooperatives, I am working on an organizing effort to create a workers’ cooperative. Still the cooperative that is closest to my heart is a little cooperative house that I have had ties to for 28 years.

When I tell people who are my peers in age about Hei Wa, my co-op, the house next door where I take responsibility for cooking one night every other week and get to eat delicious meals nine other times in that 2 week period,  I hear almost universal acknowledgment that this is a good deal.  When we go out for dinner, Beth often complains “it’s not as good as Hei Wa.” How could it be as good?

I was involved in starting Hei Wa in back in 1984. Too young to catch the communes of the 1960s I nonetheless wanted the solidarity of an intentional community of friends. Things didn't always go as I envisioned they would. But things did go. We were not the activist collective I imagined, but we were a community of activists.  Over the years Hei Wa has had four different locations, over the years I have lived with more than 100 housemates.  75 of them have befriended the Hei Wa facebook page.

In 2005 I moved out of the house and into the house next door. Our boys were three and five. The psychic space that small children can occupy is significant. Although I fought it, I was also aware of the psychic energy that I commanded as a founding member.  Beth and I technically owned the house, and there is a certain inescapable psychic weight that comes from this. For the good of the community we had to leave the house. From next door I think it works. We come over for dinners, and Beth and I take turns attending house meetings.

I am grateful for the food, healthy vegetarian, mostly vegan. My slogan for the community is “Hei Wa, where every night is a dinner party”.  And dinners are the place where I have the most connection with the community. It is the connection with this micro-community that feeds me in the most. It has not always been easy to watch friends and friends and friends move on, still I have come to love the flow of people through Hei Wa.  These days the house is filled with graduate students, activists and radicals. Always an interesting conversation to be had.

In the way back from the house is a sauna. I built it 10 years ago with the help of housemates, and friends. Another gathering place on certain cold nights. We are trying to fire it up every Sunday if you’re interested. Then there is the library, in half of a large 2 car garage where I keep over 5000 books.  Were it not for the community I couldn’t justify these resources in my life.

I call our house next door the Annex. Having built an addition to the back of that house we now have a guest room. Since September we have had a guest, a man seeking refugee status living with us.  He has integrated himself well into Hei Wa, cooking his biweekly meal, and helping with chores such as snow shoveling.

In a year Heiwa will turn 30, a couple years after that we will have paid off the mortgage.  I have learned over the years that low rent is good but when the rent is too low people can get stuck in a cooperative house that isn’t a good fit for them just because it seems affordable. I understand that there is a history of co-operative houses paying off their mortgage and then falling apart.  I believe that we have some ideas to protect against this tragedy.  I am hopeful that by the time the mortgage is paid off we will be ready to expand again. The Hei Wa community is my home, and the place of my heart, but it is also the institution I am most proud of having started.  I look forward to watching it grow.