Quaker-inspired co-housing project
A Friend in the south west of England is involved in setting up a radical housing project
A radical housing project inspired by Quaker principles is being set up in the south west of England.
The new venture ‘Project O’ will be located in a farmstead or small country estate with land and has its first public meeting this month.
Quaker Jackie Carpenter, who is a member of Bude Meeting and has been living in the Trelay Cohousing Community in Cornwall for twelve years, is co-founding the project along with a small group of non-Quakers who are spiritually leaning. She told the Friend: ‘This is not actually a Quaker project, but our ideal is for the new group to follow the Quaker principles of truth, peace, equality and love, and also the calm and respectful way that Quakers behave.’
The project, which is in its very early development stages with a launch meeting in Liskeard on 13 April, will aspire to be ‘an example of simple, sustainable living’, ‘a deeply spiritual space’ and ‘an educational centre teaching practical skills like food-growing and crafts’.
According to Jackie Carpenter, a sustainability consultant who was president of the Women’s Engineering Society from 2002-03, ‘people will be less anxious about the issues being publicised by Extinction Rebellion if they feel empowered and know how to grow food and generally look after themselves without needing shops so much. [In Trelay Cohousing] we grow quite a lot of our own food, so I know plenty about small-scale food-growing’.
With contacts at Cornwall Council, Jackie Carpenter thinks the project will probably be in Cornwall but she said: ‘I’m Spirit-led not ego-led so I’m open to possibilities and will see where we are led.’ The founders are currently reaching out to Quaker groups and ‘everyone else as well. The right people for this venture will appear as if by magic’.
