This is a draft of text to go on Website2021. Star History
My starting point for this was mostly just the history of the houses. I need some overview. I need to decide whether we are adding the other more momentous events, or covering those elsewhere and sticking her to the history of the houses. If this is just history of the houses, I need to take out the other things.
• Months prior to Oct 2014 – Several members of the current Star Community met though the Seattle One Taste community. On a private One Taste Facebook page, one person proposed starting a group house so we could live together cheaply. About a dozen people resonate with this idea, and start meeting to discuss how that would work, and to look at rental houses.
• 10/15/2014 – Lion, Florian, Rea, RachelP, and 4 others move in to an 8 bedroom rental house, 8021 Stroud Ave N, in Greenlake. Initially there is not a lot of philosophical agreement between members of the group, but we have lots of discussions late into the night. Eventually this house is named “Star House”.
• March 2015 – Three others of the “One Taste Group House” discussion group rent a house in Bellevue, calling it “Crossroads House”.
• Around April 2015, Lion and Jack take a weekend course on Forum Facilitation in Portland (see ZeggForum). They come back and decide to start a Forum in the community. Initially this Forum is biweekly, but soon becomes weekly. The initial attendance includes many people who don’t live in the two houses. Some of those people become more connected with us in other ways.
• July 2015 – The three committed members of Crossroads House and the six committed members of Star House all go to New Culture Northwest’s Summer Camp. This is the first New Culture Summer Camp for 6 of the 9. It’s kinda transformative for a lot of us. At Camp we start meeting as a group to do group processing. We agree to keep meeting weekly after Camp. This becomes the “Wednesday Group”. We use PossibilityManagement a lot.
• September 2015 – We start using Slack, so the people in Star House and Crossroads House can be in daily communication.
• Oct 2015 – Beginning of first Terra Nova study group (see Tamera).
• December 2015 – Florian rents a 12 bedroom house in north Beacon Hill (Beacon House) and populates it with people interested in One Taste and Tamera.
• March 2016 – Crossroads ends its lease and dissolves. Jack moves into Star House, while the other two community members move into other digs, still staying involved with the community.
• Oct 2016 – Jack moves out of Star House and rents another 8-bedroom house in North Seattle. This house becomes Shefa House. It’s an 8 bedroom house, and several previous New Culture connections move in and become community members.
• May 2017 – Lynne, who physically moved out of the community when Crossroads dissolved, moves back in by renting Orchard House, a 6-bedroom house in Seward Park. Orchard has a couple new people plus Peaceray who moves from Beacon.
• June 2017 – We buy Ryan House, a 10-bedroom house in Rainier Beach. Shefa ceases to be a Star Community house when most of it’s members move into Ryan. The houses are now Star, Beacon, Orchard and Ryan.
• Dec 2017 – Florian moves out of Beacon. He lives at Ryan for 7 months and then starts Stone House Aug 2018. For a brief period there are 5 houses. But Stone never really becomes integrated with Star Community, and Beacon also gradually becomes its own distinct community, no longer integrated with Star. We have a hard time saying how many houses we are at this point. 3 core houses and 2 with looser connections.
• October 2018 – We buy Sky House, an 8 bedroom house in Skyway, and all the residents of Orchard move into Sky. Orchard becomes its own community.
• October 2019 – We have a huge party at Star House to celebrate 5 years. We kinda already know we might not be at Star House the next year. We are looking at buying or renting another house in the south end, so we can be closer together.
• February 2020 – the Pandemic begins. The houses become physically pretty separated and we start doing Fourm over Zoom. It’s a hard time. We don’t really lose any core people, but we lose some of our more loosely connected residents. We start considering closing Star House and integrating with the south houses.
• October 2020 – on the 6th anniversary of renting Star House, we close Star House and 7 of the 8 residents move into Ryan and Sky. We have to cancel the leases of several “less core” residents from Ryan and Sky to do it. It’s exciting, and it also causes some very hard feelings. We agree to become a very large “bubble”. We have endless meetings and discussions about the Covid risks. We do a lot of research and buy a lot of hardware to make this safer during Covid. But we do it, making Sky and Ryan one large bubble of 18 people. We are finally all “core” in our two houses.
• November 2021 – We are starting to disucss maybe renting another smaller house again, for the two or three people we are close to who have some interest in living with us and can’t now, because we are full.