family that decides everything together, stays together

More about the Townhouse.

Janielle has been writing a great deal about life in and around the Welling Townhouse over the summer. I thought I’d take a second and write a little more about the Welling Townhouse as the cooperative community it houses during the normal school year. I’ve lived there for just over a year and love sharing household meals and responsibilities with thirteen other Bennington students.

Little Things:

The Welling Townhouse Cooperative is an intentional housing community committed to living cooperatively and sharing responsibility for household governance and daily upkeep.

Last term we hosted numerous impromptu dance jams in the kitchen, pizza potlucks on Friday nights, and several live concerts in the living room.

We accept applications from Bennington College undergraduate students in the fall and spring of each year. The Cooperative does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or dietary preferences.

Since moving to the Townhouse, I’ve tried a total of 29 new foods. (I’ll post a photo of that list soon.)

We use a version of the formal consensus process when making any household decision, ranging from seemingly simple questions like, “What kind of soap do we want to buy?” to some more complicated questions like, “How much money do we want to spend on food per term?” and “What process do we want to use for selecting new members of the house?” (see flowchart below)

The family that cooks, cleans, eats, decides, works and plays together, well we stay together.

When school gets started up again, come join us for dinner!