Co-living for joyful times and social change

£580
£700

Looking for two people to join a small-scale aspiring intentional community. This basically means a flatshare, but sharing a vision as well as a space.

The first part of the vision is just to explore community-based living itself.
The most obvious forms of this might be stuff like eating dinners together and cooking in turns (imagine only cooking dinner twice a week!), possibly bulk-buying food (the savings are real), sharing housework equitably. This would partly be because these things are more efficient – but also coming from a commitment to resisting individualism, atomisation etc., and learning how to really see and show up for each other.

The second part of the vision is a more outward-looking intention to build connections and community power across Edinburgh’s progressive/countercultural/left/climate scenes. Essentially this would mean taking advantage of the central location and our own concentrated energy to offer an informal space for bringing people and ideas together – e. g. inviting people to share meals, watch things, maybe the odd party.

The space is four large double bedrooms, one living room, one kitchen, two bathrooms, a frankly strange expanse of cupboard storage, and a shared garden. N. B. though, I have renovations planned to change some things around and create a fifth bedroom (for me!). Council tax band F, which currently winds up as £64pp; other bills fairly low (and should get lower with double-glazed windows coming in autumn).

I’m looking for people who are consciously engaged with this moment of widespread crisis (political, economic, ecological, etc.) and would like to be part of some sort of shared effort. This doesn’t necessarily mean ‘activists’, but does mean something like it. It doesn’t necessarily mean die-hard communards, but does mean some commitment to community as a value in itself.
Timeframes are flexible: general preference for long-term, but could work with shorter. One of the rooms is available immediately; the other probably some time in June/July (flexible, can discuss).

From personal experience, I’m very conscious of how draining the Spareroom searching process can be (and how generally unhinged the whole situation is). Sending solidarity if wanted.
To keep it simple, please send me some words about:

What you do for work/study
Your relationship to collective living
Something about your politics (not looking for some single-word right answer, more frames of reference: what kind of stuff you like to read, listen to, talk about, and where you’d like to go with it)
Something about your hobbies
Anything else you think is relevant (no requirement!)

I myself am only going to be moving in once I’ve sorted the renovation work (date tbc, but probably end of this year or start of next) – but since this involves a new bedroom, it won’t mean any displacement.
The two already-existing flatmates are lovely and will improve your quality of life by scandalous margins.
To value everyone’s time as much as possible: if I think from your message(s) that you’d be a good fit, I’ll arrange to meet you myself and if that goes well I’ll try to line up a subsequent hangout with all of us.

About me:

I worked full-time on Extinction Rebellion UK between 2018 and 2021, left this by the customary exit route of burnout, and now do freelance writing for/about radical movements. I’m also in the process of starting a magazine/website about movements for social change.

It’s probably already pretty apparent that I’m a fan of community. I lived in a large-scale intentional community in England for a few years. I learned a lot there; I was thrilled by how much we could achieve by working together, but also witnessed some of the pitfalls: most prominently tensions which turned into conflicts, but also the drawbacks of running a consensus model at large scale. I admired the overall vision and model, but eventually decided that I wanted to find something more nimble, urban and politically engaged.
I’m pretty quiet by default, so although I’m up for merriment and other drugs I find it super important to have chill space as an option. From observation and experience, this is a vital part of any co-living setup.

I’d love to ramble about my politics but guess I shouldn’t lead the witness on this bit.

I love tennis, reading, hiking, boardgames, yoga, sometimes go wild swimming and sometimes tell myself I’ll get into bouldering.

/End ramble.

Oh also - due to volume of replies I don't think I'll be able to reply to everything; if this is you, apologies!