We are glad that you are on the website of the Association for Housing WSPÓŁ. It’s a meeting place and an exchange of experiences for everyone interested in various forms of community-led housing, including cohousing, housing cooperatives and building group. See what we do and join us! (membership declaration)
Our goals
We believe that the system for meeting housing needs should not be based primarily on profit-oriented models. In addition to renting or buying housing on the private market, there should be a variety of alternative housing models. One of these is community-led housing, which as an Association we want to support and promote.
We want our activities to create conditions that will allow the Association’s members and all others to realize collective housing projects. We hope that through their affordability and lack of profit orientation they will be the answer to the housing crisis.
We also believe that through the development of community-led housing, strong and supportive neighborhood and local communities will be formed, which will help reduce loneliness.
At the same time, we want to implement and support projects for which sustainability is important. Therefore, in our activities we will take care of innovative and ecological solutions, as well as high quality of common and public spaces.
How we operate
Association for Housing WSPÓŁ is an umbrella organization that promotes and supports the development of community-led housing, including, among other things, by assisting with the implementation of projects, collecting experience and good practices, and networking potential members.
Community-led housing can be implemented through participation in a housing cooperative, cohousing or building group. For us, it will be particularly important to implement projects in a model based on common ownership, but we also do not exclude supporting initiatives for which it will be important to maintain individual ownership.
That is, in simple terms, a group of people get together to build a building consisting of private apartments and common spaces. Abroad, such initiatives are most often known as cohousing.
The group jointly determines its needs, decides on the choice of plot, size of apartments, amenities in the building, type of common spaces, among other things. It can designate one room as a guest room, create a coworking space, a neighborhood café, a gym, a rooftop terrace with a playground or a neighborhood garden. After setting expectations, members meet with an architect to discuss the project and begin the investment process.
For more information on completed and planned projects, visit the Projects section and the blog. Don’t hesitate to contact us!
We will be happy to write about other projects that have been or will be built in Poland. If you know of such a project, are a member of a housing cooperative or would like to create one, write to us! We can add a description of your project and thus help promote it, and at the same time exchange experiences 🙂 This will make the formation of each subsequent cooperative easier.
If there are more of us it will be easier to realize our dreams of better places to live!
We also invite all other people who are interested in our activities to contact us. You can write to the e-mail address: stowarzyszenie@wspol.org, call (+48 504 837 335) or join the Facebook group.
