What made you offer to take on the newsletter? Suzanne

1. Who gets the newsletter? Equity members, Explorers, Friends and Associates, anyone who subscribes (and they may be outside the community). We are trying to form a community before we are in community. Why not use the newsletter to help? For external people, we are giving them a peek into our group so they can learn what a great bunch of people we are (of course) and how we are working towards community.

2. Do you want suggestions for topics for the newsletter? No! I do not write the newsletter, I edit it. I do the interviews and that alone takes up enough of my time. The newsletter will be more dynamic if it is a community effort and written by all of us. So no suggestions, please, but contributions? Yes!

3. Who should contribute and what sort of things can they contribute? Everyone should contribute and anything. I’ve sent a list of ideas that include:

• if you are a writer, got a piece of fiction/non-fiction you will share?

• a poem

• a piece of art you made and the idea behind it or a piece of art you have and why it means a lot to you

• a recipe: food, drink

• an article you read and liked; please credit the author

• a hobby you have — why you like it; its simplicity or complexities

• a book, movie, tv series, music, podcast review

• a photo you really love

• you had a problem and found a quick and easy fix for it

• a cartoon; please credit the artist

• a pet bio – how did you get your pet, what breed, age, sex, what funny or interesting things the pet has done/does

Anything else you can think of, go ahead!

5. Why isn’t your name on the newsletter? I am but a humble servant of the KCC community. Aside from the interviews, we all really contribute. I’m just putting it together.

6. Final thoughts? If you haven’t contributed yet, do so! If you’ve contributed before, do it again. Keep those submissions coming; this thing doesn’t write itself, you know. And send it to Pam (not totally unknown).

Food Recipe Collector
-Linda Herold

I am a collector of food recipes of all sorts. I suspect I’m not alone in this activity. I’m a bit of a foodie, and gathering recipes is something I have always done. While in a doctor’s waiting room, I would peruse magazines for tasty recipes. Sometimes I would write out one in a note book or discreetly rip it out of a magazine. If I really liked what someone had prepared at a pot luck or a dinner date, I would ask for the recipe. Another source was from Alive magazine, a free magazine I acquired from our local Health Food store. I guess I can’t help myself. Perhaps I come by it honestly. My mother has a huge stack of collected recipes stored in her kitchen cupboard.

My mother, who at 97 has given up cooking except for the occasional Jewish-style chicken soup, cooked everything from scratch, as did her mother. My maternal grandmother would hover like a helicopter over my family while we were eating, anticipating serving us endless portions of her home-cooked meals. Not that I ever hover over my family. But I always appreciated both my mother and grandmother’s home-made Jewish cooking while I was growing up. Their modelling of enjoying, preparing and cooking food and being creative in the kitchen has been instilled in me.

Over the years I have managed to fill 2 large binders of recipes organized into various categories. One of the silver linings of lockdowns has been taking the opportunity to sort through my “stuff,” including recipes. I’ve downsized to one large recipe binder and that felt like a big accomplishment. I became reacquainted with recipes I forgot I had or have never even used. At the same time, I’ve been incorporating forgotten frozen food items that have been tucked away in my large stand-up freezer in the basement into recipes.

One such item is carob powder, a cocoa powder alternative. It's made from dried, roasted carob tree pods and looks a lot like cocoa powder. Carob powder is sweet, has a unique taste and many nutritional benefits. It also has a long shelf life. I had no idea how long it was in my freezer but it smelled good to me.

I enjoy making bite-size homemade snacks which pack nutrition and satisfy my craving for an afternoon pick-me-up with some sweetness. Below is a recipe I rediscovered in my binder collection which includes carob. It’s fun to play around with the ingredients, and lately I use more dates than honey. Of course, one could use cocoa instead of carob. It’s a very forgiving recipe.

The last few years I’ve decided to let go of my obsession with collecting recipes; well, I might collect only once in a while, if the recipe is very special. Occasionally I’ve been googling recipes. Perhaps I’ll be down to one small binder of favourite recipes along with just a few cookbooks by the time I move into KCC.

Snicker-snackers

½ cup sunflower seeds
½ cup sesame seeds
1/3-1/2 cup honey
½ cup nut butter (such as cashew)
½ cup unsweetened carob powder
¼ cup wheat germ or oat bran
¼ cup unsweetened coconut

Add ingredients one at a time to a food processor and blend until the mixture forms a ball. Pinch off small amounts and form into bite-sized balls. Roll balls in extra sesame seeds or coconut if wanted.

Variations: pumpkin seeds, almonds, cashews, chopped dates, raisins, a drop of vanilla, pinch of cinnamon
Enjoy!

KCC Members in the News
-Al Slavin

pssst… Judy’s in the picture and Lyn is quoted

https://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/opinion/contributors/2021/08/01/town-ward-united-church-women-spread-christmas-cheer-in-peterborough-july.html?source=newsletter&utm_content=a01&utm_source=ml_nl&utm_medium=email&utm_email=55750529A4A4C7A9E12D2516D647BDB0&utm_campaign=peha_103932

Equity Member Interview - Scott Donovan

Community, community, community… Scott is all about community. He sees all aspects of his life revolving around community; from the family and neighbourhood he grew up in, to the faith community he’s involved in, to cohousing. Is it any wonder that Scott was the one who got the Peterborough cohousing ball rolling?

Scott was born in 1964 in Halifax, the youngest of 7 children, and grew up in Bedford – a small town outside the city. His dad was a carpenter and mom worked at home (with 7 kids, I guess so!). They have a French/Irish background. He describes both parents as “awesome” and they were really connected to the Catholic church community and acted in service to the community. Being the last child, Scott had a lot of freedom to do his own thing; this was formative for him and gave him a lot of independence. (This is not completely unusual for later children. It is often justified by parents as “we have spares”.) Though he was the last child, his sisters started having babies when he was 10, so he grew up around younger children.

All his education was in Halifax. Since dad was a carpenter, Scott knew construction and focussed on becoming an architect from a young age. First, he went to a technical college, which was fairly regimented, so, seeking some inspiration, then went to art school. He really enjoyed that. But he was also focussed on design and building construction and got a degree in architecture from what is now Dalhousie University. A good school for him, as that school celebrated design and viewed architecture as art. While in school, Scott found opportunities for travel. He worked 2 terms in Greece with archeologists and also worked in offices in Norway and Texas. He took a course at university on cohousing and loved the idea that people could live together and design their own space.

He graduated in the mid-90’s when there was little work for architects. All through school (to pay for his education), he had worked at small free-lance jobs for small firms doing mostly design work and house additions. He continued doing that. All his small jobs were related to architecture and design. “That’s all I know how to do. I’m a total dummy. Nothing else I can do.” Despite asserting this, Scott is a resourceful person and from his teenage years had learned how to find work. Scott liked doing his own thing as he’s a bit of a free spirit. It still suited his underlying love of design. It was spotty sometimes, but he made enough to survive on. By this time, he was in a long-term relationship and renovated his own house in Halifax. He was aware of a cohousing group in Halifax and went to early meetings, but it never went anywhere.

During university, a trusted friend suggested Scott check out the Unitarian church and he let go of his connection to the Catholic church. In 2006, he’d gone to a Unitarian conference in Vancouver and met Jovanna. She lived in Peterborough; he in Halifax. Both had ended long-term relationships. They hung out together for a day and a half, then stayed in touch and started a long-distance relationship.

In 2008, feeling like he couldn’t get things going in Halifax and drawn to Jovanna, Scott uprooted and moved to Peterborough, where he got work in a small office. He did that for about 3 years before he left it. He contacted a little office in Amherst, Massachusetts, run by 2 women who were cohousing experts, telling them he would be interested if they had any openings. This was by email, so they told him to come see them for an interview, not knowing where he was from. The interview went well and they offered him the job a week later. He needed a work visa, which you couldn’t get ahead of time – you had to present yourself at the border and have a job to go to. You needed a job first to get through the border and you had to get through the border first to get to the job.

Scott spent more than a year there and had a great time, but when the work coming in diminished, they had to let him go for financial reasons. Back in Peterborough, trying to find work, he knew he had to get himself out there and known as an architect. He started doing presentations on cohousing for this reason and for a genuine interest in cohousing. They were informational sessions, just to let people know about it. He did it for more than 2 years, trying a variety of different venues. Eventually people approached saying, “we should start thinking about creating this”. Aukje was one of the early group. Paul Bennett signed up and was on the mailing list from 2014. Scott did small jobs until the Lett position came up in 2017 and he has been there ever since.

Scott has no children; Jovanna has 2 sons from her previous relationship. One lives in Peterborough; the other, coincidentally, lives in Nova Scotia and went to the same art school Scott did.

What does Scott like to do for fun? He is in a phase now where he is doing a lot of committee and leadership work, which he finds immensely rewarding and is thoroughly enjoying it. He likes working with his hands -- he had renovated Jovanna’s house and some of his small jobs were really manual contractor work. He has always been interested in physical fitness and is a rower at the Peterborough Rowing Club. He loves camping. Art – mostly the visual arts -- lifts him up; he seeks it out.

He travels when he can. He enjoys cities and travelled quite a bit in Europe indulging in his love of art and architecture. Jovanna loves the southern climate and they have visited Costa Rica, Grenada and Jamaica. His last bit of travel was to New York City just before Covid at Christmas 2019 – he needed a fix of big city art and architecture.

Scott’s last word? Cohousing isn’t like a faith community; we don’t all think the same. But it has some aspects of it: trust, fellowship, being of service to the community and being there for one another.

Introducing… Karen Turner

At one point in our conversation Karen said, “As you know, Heather is a much nicer person than me.” That made me laugh. But isn’t it lovely that, whether true or not, she feels that way about her spouse?

Karen was born in Tillsonburg 75 years ago. Her parents are from the area and met, as every young adult did at that time, in the tobacco harvest. Both were from Anglo Saxon stock; the cemetery in Fingal has all the Turner ancestors back to the original settlers. “I am as Settler as it is possible to be,” she says.

She has a younger brother and sister. They moved a few times before ending up in Mississauga, where she went to high school. She went to McMaster University in Hamilton and got a degree in Psychology. She applied to the School of Social Work at University of Toronto and was accepted “way too young”. They should never accept someone fresh out of university who knew nothing of life, having grown up in a middle-class suburban family that never had a brush with trauma or poverty.

Karen was married the same month that she started Social Work to a guy she dated at McMaster, so was in stress mode that whole year. She left school after first year to work in social work at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. It was a traditional mental hospital and an eye-opening experience for her; she was radicalized by it. The way people were treated, the freedom taken away from them, the control doctors and staff had over them; it deeply affected her. The whole medical model seemed the wrong direction to her. She went back to school with a very different perspective on human needs and what the role of social work could be and finished her MSW in 1971.

Her next job, though, was at a psychiatric institution for children and she worked at their community outpatient clinic. The psychiatrists and psychologists there had a more community, family therapy-based approach to children’s mental health. She worked there 3 years.

Karen and her husband decided to travel throughout Canada in a camper van. They headed east to Quebec, the Maritimes and Newfoundland. They drove to Calgary, rented a place and worked in their respective fields (he was an accountant) for the winter, and skied in Banff. The following summer they travelled north to the Yukon and west to BC and Vancouver Island. When her husband got a job offer, they moved to Kincardine, a small town in Ontario.

They loved it and got deeply involved with the Baptist church. All 3 of her children were born in Kincardine: Katie, Joel 2 years later and Paul 3 years after that. They lived there 10 years. Her husband then took a job as a financial person for the Canadian Baptist Mission Board in Mississauga. Karen’s husband and Heather were colleagues there; both were on the management team. They all lived in the same neighbourhood and went to the same church.

Her marriage broke up in 1992. She moved down the street to an apartment to be close to the children. When Karen’s youngest was in school, she went back to social work at Peel Memorial Hospital in Brampton. Karen worked there until the Mike Harris years that decimated the health care system and she was laid off in the sweep in 1995.

Heather and she became involved with each other around that time. They were very closeted; Heather would have lost her job on the spot if people knew. They decided to be “roommates” and shared an apartment “to save money”. This went on for a number of years until Heather was able to resign with severance. Then they “came out with a vengeance. I put it my Christmas letter that year.” It turned out that many “knew”. They thought they were in the closet, but it turned out to be a glass one! Her middle child is gay and had come out to the family a number of years before. When she came out to him, he said that he was really pissed off that, at that time, she hadn’t come out to him!

Karen and Heather bought a house in Bolton and switched to the Anglican Church there. They lived in Bolton about 12 years. Karen worked for the CCAC in home care for more than 15 years in Brampton, Mississauga and Caledon, until she retired.

They moved into Toronto in 2010. Why? They were becoming much more oriented to social justice and their theology changed because of that. The Bolton church was too comfortable. It was also because they became involved in an intentional community forming where they live now. The idea was that some in the community would live together, but others could have their own housing, but all be in the same neighbourhood. They bought a house, the current one they live in. Unfortunately, this community fell apart for them.

They started attending the Church of the Redeemer, where Karen got involved in various kinds of leadership roles. They still maintain some Baptist connections and work with a couple of progressive Baptist organizations (“Yes,” she says, “they do exist. It’s not an oxymoron.”) She can’t bring herself to resign until some things have been finished and she can pass it on. The demands on her time for the last 4 months have been hard and she is sorry she has missed a lot of KCC activities due to it.

Her oldest daughter has 2 kids; the older one is starting university. Her middle child is single and lives in Berlin, working as a musician and songwriter. Her youngest lives in Peterborough and has 2 boys age 5 and 2. Being able to visit in person in the last few months which has been a great joy. Their plan is to sell their Toronto home and move to Peterborough; they are currently fixing up the house to do so.

Karen reads a lot, has a spinning wheel and spins and knits; she always has something on the go. She loves to walk. She and Heather love to travel. The last time they travelled together was to South America. She travelled alone March 2020 to a Baptist function in Puerto Rico. When she left Toronto life was normal, but when she returned 5 days later, the world had changed due to Covid.

Some Inspiring Words -Linda McLaren

Take the time to think; that is the source of power.
Take the time to play; that is the fountain of youth.
Take the time to read; that is the source of knowledge.
Take the time to love and be loved; it is a gift from God.
Take the time to make friends; it is the path to happiness.
Take the time to laugh; it is the music of the soul.
Take the time to give; that is the best gift.
Take the time to work; it is the price of success.
Take the time to pray; that is the strength of mankind.