Arboretum Cohousing | Who we are

Arbco includes single individuals, couples, single parents, young families with children at home, and empty-nesters. We are little ones through elders who represent different cultural backgrounds and lifestyle choices. This page gives you a bit of background on the some of the members in the Arbco community.

Robin and Kathy Alexander have been long time Midwest dwellers before moving to Durhamm NC a couple years ago in order to take up residence in Eno Commons cohousing. The relative lack of cohousing in Wisconsin led to the move. Now, changes in state supplied health insurance coverage dictate a return to Wisconsin, so we were glad to hear of another cohousing organizing in Madison.

Kathy has moved around extensively in her life (including Papua New Guinea, Kansas, Alabama, Chicago inner city, Texas and longs for a lace to settle down and stay. Robin has had some experience with community and cohousing beginning with a commune in Madison in the early '70s, a stint at Scott Peck's Foundation for Community Encouragement and now Eno Commons cohousing. We are hoping to find a good home in Madison when we move back.

Ann Maria Bell is staring blankly at her computer screen, at the untitled document that will contain her Arbco biography. There's an awful lot of white space. Perhaps I could fill it with some kind of meta-commentary on what it's like to write a biography about yourself in the 3rd person, she thinks. Or perhaps I should just stick to the relevant facts, like 'Ann is 43 years old' or 'Ann eats a lot of beans' or 'Ann likes ducks, rabbits, and worms, especially the ones that live in compost piles.' Oh, and I'd better say that she has lived in co-ops and other shared living arrangements for most of her adult life, in fact, that's how she met her husband Bill Sethares. It's probably not worth mentioning that she grew up in Stamford, CT because she didn't like living in the suburbs and couldn't wait to leave. Better to focus on the places she lived afterwards, like Ithaca, NY, where she went to college, Madison, WI, where she went to grad school, Nashville, TN, where she pretended to enjoy being an economics professor, and Palo Alto, CA, where she actually enjoyed working at the NASA Ames Research Center. There probably won't be space in a short bio for all the places Ann & Bill travelled in between, like Peru, Bolivia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Zimbabwe, so just mention their most recent year-long stay in Paris and Samos, Greece. And don't forget to include her current info: Ann lives in Madison, WI where she is writing a novel for young adults called "Building the Potato Palace." She spends a lot of time staring blankly at her computer screen.

Bill Sethares is a primate whose armspan (from fingertip to fingertip) is approximately the same as his height. One of his earliest memories is of making noise; in a moment of foolishness, his parents allowed him to buy a saxophone with the money he got from selling seeds (his first failed foray into commercial activity). In the ensuing years he has written songs with dead poets, songs in praise of the Fourier Transform, and song lyrics in Klingon and Ubbi-Dubbi. During the day, he can be found loitering around the halls of the the Department of Electrical Engineering. He enjoys hanging out with humans, especially humorous ones, which explains why he likes cooperatives, cohousing, and Ann...

After many years of eclectic and erratic work experiences and hedonistic rapture, I have settled down with my lovely and understanding partner in Madison. Living in a city where knowing too much is a virtue, I naturally gravitated to work in the rarefied atmosphere of energy policy, research and evaluation. Fortunately, many other seditious fellows with far more talent have also embedded themselves in the Madison energy vortex. Amazingly, we have actually accomplished a good deal in the last twenty years. It's not a stretch to say that our work has led, in part, to the green standard of living that Arbco represents. Arbco is the next step in my and the Madison community's evolution.

Being at heart a loner, it makes sense that I am moving into an intentional community where everyone knows each other's business. I see Arbco as an unfinished landscape, with ample room to grow, and to make huge mistakes. It is comforting to realize that my fellow travelers on this adventure will look out for me and rescue me when I am drowning in pity and self indulgence. I know very little about these strange and wonderful co-habitues, but somehow feel great comfort and solace in the shadow of their souls.

My background speaks volumes to the risk they are taking in accepting me into their community bosom, but I hope to redeem myself with fine works of carpentry, landscaping, dramatic presentation and winning leadership. If nothing else, I can sooth their netted brows with false assurances about energy efficiency rebates and the impending collapse of capitalism. My story continues through the kindness of strangers.

Karen was born in California into a Coast Guard family so grew up not quite knowing what was between the coasts. Maybe her early years of moving around developed a love for travel. She took a year off from work to journey from Germany to Nepal to Kenya and soon after, spent a year teaching English in China. Now, after 34 years in Wisconsin, she is proud call myself a born-again Midwesterner. Karen's career as a speech pathologist brought her to Madison. It didn't take her long to know this was "my town, my home". She is now retired from the University after 30 years as a clinical instructor. Karen is active in a folk arts organization (Folklore Village), neighborhood association (Regent), and works part time in the Regent Street neighborhood grocery co-op. Most of all, she appreciates the company of four-footers (3 cats and 1 dog are currently in her household). Looking forward to joining a cohousing community for many years, she is especially pleased to a part of the Arbco community. Members can count on her for pet sitting, walking, and shmoosing.

Patrick and Nina both enjoy cooking, gardening, and playing in the Celtic folk music group The Hackberries. They have a friendly toy poodle named Terra who loves to cuddle with anybody and everybody. Arbco neighbors are welcome to borrow her if they are in need of a loving lap-warmer. We would be happy to pet-sit for neighbors as well. We currently live a few blocks from Arbco and are excited about joining the Arbco community, staying in the neighborhood, and sharing meals together.

Patrick works as a Product Manager in Sales & Marketing at Alfalight Inc., a high power laser diode manufacturing company in Madison. He got his B.S. in Chemical Engineering as well as his M.B.A. from UW-Madison. Pat enjoys programming and doing graphics design in his spare time. He also cooks Thai feasts, plays piano, and grows cucumbers the size of baseball bats.

Nina is an environmental studies graduate student at UW-Madison. She grew up in Ithaca, NY and Germany and got her Geosciences B.A. from Williams College in Massachusetts in 2003. After that, she worked as a geography teaching fellow in Hong Kong for two years. The air quality in Asia was so bad that Nina came to Madison to study international environmental management. She enjoys hiking, canoeing, camping, and contra dancing.

Carey Dachik lives near the planned site. He is excited about cohousing in general, and about this site in particular because his work as a spanish interpreter is primarily done blocks away at the two nearby hospitals. Carey also works part-time installing renewable energy systems, and hopes to be part of the energy team at Arboretum Cohousing.

He first learned about the joys (and frustrations) of living in community during his time in the Peace Corps, in a village in the Dominican Republic. Researching ways to live in community in the States led him to the growing cohousing movement, and family ties in Wisconsin brought him to Madison and the Arboretum group.

Asked why he is drawn to cohousing, he says "For a lot of reasons, but mostly because I can't think of a better place, or way, to raise kids. And, because places that are good for little kids are almost always good for the bigger kids that often call themselves 'adults.' After learning about cohousing and seeing it in action, I just can't imagine ever buying a single-family home -- it just seems like all the work with a lot less of the good stuff of life."

A member of Arboretum Cohousing since January '06, Karen moved into Arbco in the fall of 2008, when the buildings were brand new and after selling her house on the east side of Madison. Originally from northern Wisconsin having moved to Madison in 1970, Karen also lived briefly in northern New Mexico and on "hobby farms" in rural Dane and Columbia counties. Her small town upbringing and knowing her neighbors has helped her appreciate community.

Karen was involved in a cohousing group in the mid 90's that met and dreamed for several years, eventually taking on separate visions and paths. So she's achieved a long-time goal living at Arbco. She works for an environmental magazine, has experience facilitating groups, loves to play music and commune with nature.

Jen, Craig and Sophia Hadley are a young-ish family.Madison is Jen's home town. Craig is from Illinois. Neither of them has any family living in town now. Jen works as a video designer with Wisconsin Public Television, Craig is a self-employed designer/administrator of database-driven web sites, and Sophie keeps happy just by being a four year old.The idea of cohousing came to Jen in a dream, and then she followed up on the web.Jen and Craig hope to live in a community where their daughter will know all her neighbors and will see them as extended family. They hope to provide for her the same "small town" feeling that they experienced growing up, where people look out for each other and provide guidance for the children. Craig used to go fishing, and Jen used to garden and cook. Now they mostly run after Sophie. They have been involved with Arboretum Cohousing since April 2005.

Rachel Karch is 21 years old and loves celebrating her birthdays. She also likes to sing, mostly nursery-rhyme type songs like "This Old Man" or "C is for Cookie," but also "Cheeseburger in Paradise" and "Where have all the Flowers Gone?" Rachel's other favorite things are to jump on the trampoline, swim, play with toys, swing and go for walks. Rachel likes people and they usually like her. She will really like the community part of Arbco where she will have so many friends. Rachel was born in San Diego and has lived in Appleton for the last 14 years. Rachel was born with a chromosome abnormality, isodicentric 15, which you can learn about at www.idic15.org. The main effects of idic 15 on Rachel are that she is cognitively disabled, has some autistic characteristics and has seizures. Rachel's parents, Anne and Paul, first learned of cohousing many years ago from an article in the Utne Reader but didn't have a chance to make it part of their lives until Paul and Rachel walked past the Arbco construction site.

Paul, who works as a business lawyer; Anne, who is getting a PhD in Education at the UW after being a reading teacher; and Rachel's brother Chas, a junior at Madison West, moved to Madison in August and live in the Vilas neighborhood. Rachel has a sister in college in Boston. Our family plan (Rachel is not much into planning or thinking about the future and lets her parents help with that sort of thing) is for Rachel to live in the Arbco community with a caregiver and perhaps another roommate while the rest of us also actively participate in the community because we live so close by. Rachel has been living with caregivers in Appleton to give us time to make arrangements for her to live and work in Madison. We are usually all together on week-ends, sometimes in Appleton and sometimes in Madison, and are very much looking forward to being closer together.

Janet Kelly has lived in Madison since 1978, just over half of her life (now you can figure out how old she is). She lived for 5 years as a child in France, and then moved every six months up through high school with her Army family. Some of her happiest memories are living in her grandmother's working-class neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut, for 2-3 month intervals when she was in elementary school. Everyone had a porch, everyone knew each other, everyone stopped to talk, and there was a grocery store and drug store on the corner. These experiences gave her some "un-American" ideas about how people should live together, and a longing for a stable close-knit community. Janet thinks the practice of nuclear families living in isolated suburban mansions is just obviously wrong, and doesn't understand why more people don't see that. She first became interested in cohousing because one of her daughter's best friends in elementary school lived in Village Cohousing.

Janet has served on the boards of several community organizations dealing with housing issues, including Friends Community Housing (low-income housing in the Allied Drive neighborhood) and RFDF (residential housing for developmentally disabled adults). She is honored to be serving as the Chair of the Board of Arboretum Cohousing, and actually enjoys (well, most of the time) all of the meetings needed to make a cohousing community come into being.

Janet has been practicing law for 25 years. Before law school she wandered around in various academic fields including French, political science, philosophy and experimental psychology. She likes both language and technical and scientific problems, and her law practice, which focuses on utility regulation, combines both of these interests. Outside of work she enjoys singing, swimming, reading about foreign policy, and making textile designs on the computer.

Janet has two daughters. Kate is a freshman at Northwestern, and Rose is a senior at West High School. Her daughters like to tell their friends that their middle-age mother is joining a "commune", but they like and support the idea of cohousing.

John Merrill is a retired professor, Associate Dean for Outreach and Extension in the School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin and Extension Housing Specialist, UWEX Family Living Programs. We have recently turned in our office keys and are recreating ourselves. We are already heavily involved in volunteer activities and expect to continue this but with some refocus. We also enjoy being out of doors birding walking, biking and canoeing. We expect that both of these interests will find us traveling extensively in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Part of recreating ourselves is looking for housing that will provide us with more of a sense of community. We live in a lovely house with very nice neighbors but most of us come and go through our attached garages and see each other rarely and haven't gotten to know each other well enough to interact socially or to feel comfortable asking for help if we need a ride or a hand with a project.

We are also very concerned about the environment. We are always looking for ways that we can live lighter on the land. Living in town with bus service and walkable shopping continues to be important for us and something we look forward to in cohousing. Shared facilities and equipment make sense. We have friends and family using our guest room two or three times a year. For most of the year the cat is the only one who uses the bed. Seems like a waste of space. On the other hand, when we do have guests we would like to have them staying close by.

The Moores are a family of six, counting critters: Lucy 54, Lee 17, Bruce 53, 2 cats and a dog. Lucy teaches English as a Second Language at UW-Madison. She is an accomplished musician (Voice, piano, and flute) and dotes on her family. Son Lee is a junior at West High, with a passion for sports in general, and football in particular. Bruce works for WDNR, and is a wetland/native plants enthusiast.

Janet came to Madison from Michigan, via Colorado. She spent 20 years as a musicologist, but when that failed to pay the bills she got a bachelors in nursing and now works at UW Hospital. She has two terrifically fine twenty-something year old children who are cooler and more interesting than almost anybody.

Janet has always managed to surround herself with cool and interesting people, and Arbco will be no exception. For years she rented a room in her home to folks from all over the world. She ushers for fine arts groups, volunteers for all sorts of things, sits quietly for reading and movies, and stays involved with music.

Her goals are to lead a simpler and less stressful existence. She wants to focus on what matters... reducing her footprint on the earth, being an asset in the world, and having a happy, satisfying, purposeful life. Arbco sounds like the right place for all of that.

Cynthia Sampson was a resident of Madison in the 1970s and early 1980s when, sporting a new Masters in environmental communications from the University of Wisconsin, she worked as an environmentalist and then in environmental dispute resolution. She left Madison to pursue a career in international conflict resolution -- in Boston, New York, and Washington, DC -- with most of her work related to religious and interreligious peacebuilding and positive approaches to peacebuilding. She was active in program development and evaluation, writing, editing, and fundraising. Twenty-one years later, she came full circle back "home" to Madison, having concluded that unless we protect Earth's ability to sustain a high quality of life for "all of the children of all of the species," our gains in peacemaking among humans will be transitory.

Cynthia is currently working as a freelance editor on topics ranging from climate stabilization and energy security, to resilience, to integral philosophy and the evolution of consciousness, to religion in the postmodern age.

Cynthia was primed to join Arboretum Cohousing, having been interested in cohousing for a number of years and yearning to live in committed community -- an urban village -- with wonderful people and furry four-leggeds of all ages and stripes (and no stripes, just to be nonprejudicial). Her immediate family includes two four-leggeds of the kind that say "meow," one sort of striped and one not. She enjoys walking and swimming and dancing and singing, and looks forward to getting her first bike in a couple decades when the weather warms up. She loves being back in Madison and actively connecting with the sustainability community here.

Hi, I am William Simmons. I am 18 years old and I currently live with my parents, Scott and Liz, and younger sister Jessica (15) outside of Paoli. This past June, I graduated from Belleville High School. In the fall, I will be attending Madison Area Technical College. I hope to work in aviation one day. Working on computers, cooking and composing music are among my many interests. I am very excited to be a part of the Arbco Community, and look forward to the new friends I will make here.

Sheila and Tom first met on a rainy day in Tanzania, where Sheila was serving as a British United Nations Association volunteer and Tom a Peace Corps volunteer, and the sun has shone ever since! Starting married life in the German Rhinegau, they arrived in Madison in 1968 to attend graduate school, Tom in African history and Sheila in Economics. After several years, including a year in Kenya, they moved to Melbourne, Australia, where Tom taught at La Trobe University and Sheila conducted research on curriculum reform. After eight years, they returned to the U.S. to Massachusetts., where Tom continued to teach while Sheila served as director of international programs at Williams, Brown, and Butler in Sydney, Australia. After twelve years, they returned to Madison, where Tom chaired the African Studies Program and the History Department and Sheila was Director of International Students and Scholar Services and active in a number of organizations, including Madison Urban Ministry and the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, before retiring three years ago and moving south to Oregon (WI).

They have two daughters, Jennifer a professor of colonial American history and Heather a dancer, producer, and photographer, along with a Labrador, Arusha, who can't wait to swim every day, and a cat, Spider, who isn't so sure. Along the way, they helped found a free school, shared in the development of a participatory children's theatre program, participated in a variety of co-ops, and been active in community politics. At Arboretum Cohousing, they hope to retire peacefully in an interesting and caring community of people.