Catya Belfer-Shevett

I have been fascinated by intentional communities since I was a kid. I was (and am) a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy, which might well have had something to do with this.

While we were at Simon's Rock College, my friend Scott and I took a class titled "Utopias, Dystopias, and Experimental Communities". A couple of years later, he and I got together with Dave, Adam, and Caro and started The Homeport Collective, a communal house, in 1994. Homeport moved twice before buying the house we were in for 8 years in Bolton, MA. In July of 2005 we sold that house and closed our doors.

In 1999, Dave and I started to think about a bigger community than Homeport, with more parents and children around (Our son Zach was born in 1998). This led me to Cohousing, a neighborhood model of intentional community with individual home ownership. In the Fall of 1999 I dragged Dave along to our first National Cohousing Conference, where he fell in love with the common house at Pioneer Valley Cohousing.

Soon after that we got involved with Mosaic Commons and have been an active in building that community. We expect to finally move in in 2008, which is terribly exciting.