The People of Belterra Cohousing

Stephanie Legg & Roger McGillivray
After running a successful construction company, building custom homes on Bowen Island since 1976, we are looking forward to slowing down a bit, although our construction experience & management skills may be valuable as Belterra moves through the rezoning, subdivision and construction stages over the next couple of years.

For 20 years we have dreamed of living in a socially & environmentally sustainable community on what we now call the Belterra lands. ([bel] – beautiful, [terra] – earth, Beautiful Earth). When we first talked about our dream we did not know that this particular lifestyle actually had a name. Only later did we discover that this idyllic & vibrant type of community was called cohousing.

We have a blended family with five children. We always look forward to the kids coming home on special occasions when we can share a meal and play with the grandkids….the common house kitchen will be perfect for that. We will be leaving a beautiful home, on a large secluded property, here on Bowen and were a little nervous, at first, about how well we would fit into a cohousing community. Now, after getting to know the other Belterra members, we are really looking forward to living in our new home, working with others in the community gardens and enjoying get-to-togethers in the common house.

We love going on long motorcycle rides, reading by the fire, listening to some good blues and oh…did we mention…long motorcycle rides?

Steven and Lori Snyder
Lori and I first became interested in co-housing after the birth of our first child in 2000. It was then that we became aware of our need for a community, or better yet, a village, to help us raise our daughter. Our vision was one that provided a natural/rural setting close to the big city, and attracted and supported diversity within the community. Bowen and Belterra is a perfect fit.

As an architect I have done work on Bowen Island and have developed familiarity with the local flavour as well as the local personalities. Lori and I also have friends who live on the island and our eldest daughter is enrolled in a Bowen Island based ‘homelearners’ school group. We are all familiar with the trails, beaches and sights on Bowen and we look forward to having all of this at our doorstep.

Lori has worked in the hospitality and natural health fields, holding such jobs as flight and train attendant, as well serving as a natural health consultant. I have worked in the restaurant and construction businesses and am currently self-employed as a residential architect. For a short stint, I sold jams and preserves at farmer’s markets across B.C., and have spent time working on a farm. Currently I am working in a supportive role with the architect in designing the Belterra community.

Lori’s interests include the study of medicinal and edible plants (her unusualness that people might not necessarily know about her) and saving the world. Lori and I have traveled extensively, both in North America and throughout the world. With my various experiences I have come to love both cooking and preserving of good food – generally the cupboard is almost always full. When time permits I paint, carve and play hockey, (not necessarily in that order).

Our combined skills include familiarity with design and construction, project management and organizing groups. We both have had roles facilitating groups and are currently involved in a leadership training program. Also, Lori and I have a love of gardening, small scale farming and landscaping; both us are familiar with many methods of stewardship such as ‘permaculture’.

Our experience with working with the Belterra cohousing members in creating a community has been absolutely remarkable. From creating a mission statement and governing principles (which was easier than it sounds) to designing our homes and neighbourhood, the group has worked to craft a common vision. The members have committed themselves to focus on ‘commonalities’ and we have observed the project moving forward with ease.

Lori and I have two daughters, Lily Joe and Estraea Rose, who are ten and four respectively. Both girls have clambered up and down the site and look forward to living at Belterra and collecting rocks. Lily Joe is keen to open a restaurant and bakery to serve and gather the community.

Steve Barker and Mary Ann Persoon
Steve and Mary Ann have been married for 36 years. They have raised two adult sons and enjoy a large extended family that lives in the lower mainland.

Mary Ann is a teacher in an inner-city school and intends to commute daily when she moves to Bowen. She is hoping that between carpools, transit and her bike, she will enjoy the transition from noisy, busy downtown to the peace and quiet of her new community. She loves gardening, reading, writing and is a fanatic soccer fan; following the ups and downs of Arsenal fc and is a Whitecaps season ticket holder.

Steve is an individual and family therapist. He also supervises a counseling clinic and has a private practice in North Vancouver. He has been involved in supporting social services for the Hispanic community. Steve grew up in South America and moved to Vancouver in grade eight. He appreciates the west coast and rain forest. He kayaks, plays squash and tennis and likes to read.

Steve and Mary Ann are looking forward to being part of a community that values cooperation and commitment to creating a safe and stimulating environment along with home ownership.

Elisabeth Thompson
We moved to Bowen in 1970, from Germany, where we owned a family run B&B and retail store. Since then we have lived on and improved several properties on Bowen. We liked Bowen for its natural character and its close proximity to Vancouver.

I love to work outdoors in the vegetable garden & in the woods on my property. Also I am an avid nonfiction reader

I look forward to getting to know my new neighbours at Belterra, working together in the community gardens, and I especially like the idea that the cove will be within easy walking distance from my new home.

My contribution to Belterra will be composting & trail maintenance.

Cindy Leitner
Cindy Leitner is a recent immigrant from Oregon. She loves the quiet, rural life on Bowen, and looks forward to living there with folks who have similar values about sustainability and community. A former public school Reading Specialist and religious education consultant for the continental Unitarian Universalist church, she enjoys outdoor activities such as biking, hiking, and canoeing. She loves traveling and photography; playing squash; reading; folksinging (limited guitar playing) and singing in choirs; movies; growing, cooking and eating homegrown vegetables; and writing and editing. She has been involved in many social justice issues and has worked for non- profit peace and advocacy organizations.

She has two young adult children and is really looking forward to her first baby grandchild—due very soon! Her husband Allan loves the concept of cohousing but isn’t yet sure about the rural island life. Together they enjoy their blended family (total five children and two grown grandchildren) and their common interests in semi-retired life.

Jane Kane
Jane has newly arrived to live on Bowen and what attracts her here is its natural beauty, wilderness, ocean proximity and the balance of natural with human spaces. She could never live in an urban environment for long, and loves Bowen’s diverse culture, being an island that is still accessible to the city.

She is delighted to revisit community living through co-housing’s shared values of sustainability, optimism about the future, and exploration of what is possible instead of just complaining about what’s wrong. To Jane, co-housing represents love, joy, connection, creativity, synergistic thought, collaboration on shared projects, and interactions with people of different generations.

Jane has worked in many areas and is an art psychotherapist. She lived for two years in Scotland’s famed Findhorn intentional community and still retains close ties with them. As a therapist she was mentored by Dr. Edith Wallace (who received her psychoanalytic training from Dr. Carl Jung) and has applied her knowledge to develop appreciative approaches to supporting the talents, capacities and energies of individuals and groups, with art therapy being a means of self-exploration toward the articulation of difficult thoughts and feelings. Additionally, Jane is a student of ancient hula, the sacred dance that expresses Hawaii’s history through movement.

Her grown children are Aideen, 32, who is building a straw bale home in Australia with her husband, and Nolan, 30, a broadcaster in the UK. Both attended Waldorf schools and were raised in intentional communities on Quadra Island and in the Okanagan. They are examples of the magnificent potential when a village raises a child, as will happen in cohousing.

Jane enjoys the willingness of Belterra members to work collaboratively, their sense of fun, and seeing them excited by the possibility of this novel and sustainable way of living. She is looking forward to sharing her skills cooking for large groups, and drawing on her 35 years’ experience as an organic gardener, alongside her background as an artist.

Diana Thompson
I'm proud to be part of this evolving community. So much of what we are doing resonates with my pioneering spirit. Our members are productive, resourceful people coming from a variety of rich backgrounds. I am excited about the synergy that is possible within such a group. The good will, eco-friendly values and cooperative spirit of Belterrans is refreshing. I'm also excited about getting to know more of the interesting and creative folks of the larger Bowen Island Community.

I have worked in libraries for 40 years where I have worn many hats and honed a variety of practical creative and technical skills. From shelving books and assisting with research; to installing computer systems, providing training and writing manuals - and for the past 16 years have worked as a graphic designer for VPL producing a variety of publications and promotional pieces.

Artist by nature, I look forward to being on Bowen Island full-time, settling in to my new home and making a transition to home-based freelance work. I hope to find more time for painting, gardening, hiking all the trails, discovering all the beaches, the peaceful places and savoring good food with good neighbours. Having easy access to a city while being worlds away on an island is an ideal lifestyle in my mind. Being close to nature is important to me. At my current home, I love to observe the flow of creatures passing through my wild garden. I am their servant with suet, peanuts, bird baths and readily available fruit and veggies. They provide endless entertainment.

In 2011, I spent some time in Australia, cycled down the east coast of Tasmania. I fell in love with "Tassie" and adopted a Tasmanian Devil . "Ozzie" will not be moving to Belterra, he lives at Cradle Mountain in Tasmania and is currently helping the "devil's cause" by working in advertising for Blundstone Boots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWM-_Cv25dM

Loren Schein
Loren Schein was born in Hollywood, and grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. Throughout his earlier life he heard envy-inducing tales told by his Montreal-born, Massachusetts-bred mother and Poland born, Bronx-bred father of the good old days of playing in the snow in bright, colorful winter togs; all the while he was shvitzing in the relentless brain-fry of a Southern California sun, quaffing cool drinks by the cruel, ubiquitous swimming pools of his family, friends and relatives. After a few more-interesting decades in San Francisco and Oregon (Eugene, currently), he is now looking forward to getting a taste, finally, of the British Columbia version of winter in his dream of Belterra living.

Loren has been a carpenter, legal secretary, electrologist, entrepreneur and many other things and was an actor for a few years in Hollywood after college in San Francisco, finally giving it up in order to escape the crazy life of chasing the faint dog-whistle of fame. His main claim to fame now is thirty trips to Europe (mainly the coldish north) in search of hidden treasures, metaphorical and also tangible, and a couple decades' involvement in the burgeoning intentional communities movement in the US and Europe. He is a former board member of the Fellowship for Intentional Community (www.ic.org) and is an ardent believer in the virtues of living in community. With the changing world's need to share space and resources, he looks to cohousing as a comfortable and alluring way to live in the old fashion, close to one's neighbors, sharing meals, and yet with a separate, cozy home to retreat to.

Loren looks forward to living on beautiful Bowen Island, among Canadians, whom he esteems a more evolved collection of humans than he has been accustomed to.

Paul Tennant
In 2000, a few years before my retirement from the UBC Political Science Department, I bought my own place on Bowen Island. At UBC I’d lived in a new town house right on campus. On Bowen, I intended to pursue carpentry, woodworking, and, especially, to create a garden and orchard. At my new place the old house was much in need of remedial carpentry, the workshop had plenty of room for my woodturning lathes, and the back slope of the large lot seemed ideal for garden and fruit trees.

The towering Douglas Fir trees surrounding the place seemed symbols, and guardians, of a quiet, creative seclusion. Birds were abundant and the local deer had an ancient pathway through the trees and across my property. I looked forward to a new life of plants, craftsmanship, and contemplation — and to visits from the birds, the deer, and my three grandchildren (and their parents).

I set up my workshop and began house renovations. I started an orchard and planted grape cuttings along a workshop wall. I made friends with Jane Dough, matriarch of the local deer tribe, and began my efforts to get her to take food from my hand. To protect the local robins from baby-snatching crows and ravens, I built them safe nesting platforms under the workshop eaves. House renovations proved tedious. During the first heavy rains I discovered that my house sat in a depression. I hired a local contractor to complete the renovations and fix the flooding. I dispensed with her services, the work unfinished, upon realizing I’d hired a con artist.

Jane and her tribe did make visits — lengthy visits, especially in my absence. I learned that my fruit trees lacked a key feature of native plants — bark and leaves that deer find distasteful. Next I learned that deer are immune to electric fences — so I enclosed each tree an unsightly palisade. Still the fruit yield remained pitiful. Reluctantly, in my third year, I accepted reality — too little sunlight was the cause. In the shade of the Douglas Firs no garden or orchard could succeed. The grapes were different. In that same third year, now grown high on their south wall, unfenced, and unfenceable, they produced copiously. Before any were ripe enough for me to pick, the robins ate every single one.

My seclusion, creative or otherwise, did not materialize. I soon found myself on the Board of Directors of our private Island Pacific School, and also on the Island’s Advisory Planning Commission (I’m currently its chair). Through the APC I met Roger McGillivray, and came to know of Belterra, which will pioneer precisely the sort of clustered residential development Bowen needs.

Today I have nine grandchildren (along with an ancillary four sons, three daughters-in-law, and one son-in-law). The younger of the nine live in San Francisco and Edmonton. As families with young children do not travel easily or often, their visits have been few — so I visit them several times a year.

As for “my own place,” I do love and enjoy it. I give my blessing to native plants as they retake their place on the back slope. I look forward to the robins’ annual harvesting of their grapes, and take credit for their being numerous enough to mount attack mobs against any black marauder. I welcome Jane’s stopping by to accept apples or salted soda crackers from my hand, and I’m moved when she brings her new fawns to meet me each spring.

Nevertheless, I now know that living on one’s own has its deficiencies. My townhouse at UBC was one of 24 in a compact development of four 6-unit buildings. My neighbours and I formed something of a small community, partial and unintended though it was. Even so, living alone in that setting was not truly living alone. Belterra will provide a similar setting in terms of place, but will be quite different and much better in human terms. Our Belterran community is emerging now, before a nail is driven, and its ultimate qualities will be just as much the outcome of our decisions and activities as will the buildings themselves. Having grown together, People and Place will fit together.

Place is important, but not, as I thought on coming to Bowen, all-important. We take, and make, our true place as part of a community — among family, friends, and neighbours. As Aristotle understood, we humans are creatures of community.

Lyne Brindamour & Dan Kemlo
We have been working very hard in our respective careers and have been living in the city for a long time. We now want to be closer to nature in a smaller community. We also want to play more. We both like open water swimming, biking, and hiking.

We are excited about choosing Belterra and being with neighbors who know and interact with each other for the best interest of their community. What a wonderful new community to plan for and be part of.

Rebecca & Matthew van der Giessen
In the midst of a wild array of family photos, appointment reminders and theme magnets that jostle for attention on our fridge is a design sketch of housing at Belterra. We printed it off the web site early in our discovery of the Belterra dream, and long before we let ourselves truly know that this was the home for us. While our rational minds ticked off all the boxes and performed their due diligence, some deeper part of us knew that this was a dream of community that we could make part of our lives.

Our attraction to Belterra wouldn't come as a surprise to those who know us; the theme of community has been woven through our identity as a couple. We met on a short-lived community experiment in Northern Ontario. A few years later, we had moved to Edmonton with our four young children (and a dog!) and stumbled upon Waldorf schooling. Again, the attraction was not just of an educational approach that resonated with our values but to a community of like minded families, many of us who had moved into the neighbourhood around the school. We felt as if our identity and values as a family were nurtured as much by the other young families as by the education our children were getting in the school. These formative experiences have also strongly influenced our now adult children. Each one of them has become involved in some form of community networking in fields such as midwifery, community activism, environmentalism and health. We watch them pass those values on, in turn, to their children.

Our discovery of cohousing has been a natural continuation of our positive experiences of loose-knit community built around shared values. We have been lucky enough to know some of the original members of the Quayside community in North Vancouver, and appreciated the way in which they shaped an organic connection between the surrounding community and the life they have nurtured in their building. We have felt drawn to the even-handed sensitivity in which the community design process creates space for children through a daycare and midwifery centre within the building, and yet has no vetting process for people who want to buy an apartment.

As we have explored the possibility of committing to the Belterra vision, we have experienced the same combination of openness to the individuality of others with a commitment to creating a space that nurtures the best of our dreams for what community could be if we gave each other the permission to bring ourselves fully to it.

We are thankful for that opportunity and excited to be participating in the process of bringing that design print of Belterra off our crowded fridge and into our lives.

Rebecca is currently a social work student. Matthew is a somatic practitioner and educator working with touch, breath and movement approaches to embodiment and healing. They live - for the moment - in Edmonton, Alberta.

Kat and Cam Hayduk
Kat and Cam have lived on Bowen Island for eight years with their 9 year old son, Sam. They love the sense of community and access to the great outdoors that Bowen offers. Since 2009, they have owned a home-based video production business, Turtlebox Productions (turtleboxproductions.com). Turtlebox produces short videos for non-profits and foundations to help them in their outreach, advocacy and fundraising campaigns.

They are both very active volunteers on the island and are involved in a variety of community groups: Cam is involved in the music scene on Bowen, he sits on the Technology Committee for the Bowen Island Community School,and he occasionally teaches film classes for kids and adults. Kat has sat on the board of the Bowen Island Montessori School, was a member of the National Park Community Advisory Committee and was a very active member of Partners for the Park. She is currently the secretary for the Parent Advisory Council for the Bowen Island Community School and sits on the fundraising committee.

Cam grew up in Calgary, Alberta and spent over 20 years as a cameraman in the Vancouver film industry before starting Turtlebox. He enjoys kayaking, playing guitar and mandolin, reading, hiking and really obscure movies. Kat is originally from upstate New York. She worked in feature animation in California and video game production in Vancouver before starting Turtlebox. She likes hiking, reading, listening to NPR and watching Mad Men.

Sam is in grade three and he enjoys hiking, swimming, playing violin and watching anything narrated by David Attenborough.

They are all thrilled to be part of Belterra and look forward to downsizing their footprint and upsizing their community!

Susan and Peter Matthews
We were both brought up in the south of England, and moved with our son and daughter to Ontario in 1985. In 2006 we moved west, choosing Bowen for its beautiful beaches and forests, welcoming community, and its easy access to Vancouver. Shortly after moving we celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary – see the picture.

Sue’s professional life has involved systems engineering in several industries, including defense, medical and financial. In 2000 she returned to school full time to train in Chinese Medicine and as a result has three of our four degrees.

Sue is a keen believer of lifelong learning, preferably in a group of like minded people. Tai Chi is an important interest and she has been visiting Bowen for Tai Chi training for many years. She is very proud of completing the full Yang style curriculum held on Bowen in 2010. She added two dogs to our previously cat based life, and takes singing lessons and is a member of the United Church and Community choirs. She has been gardening organically for decades, and has enjoyed the delights and challenges of gardening on Bowen.

Peter’s professional life has involved electrical / electronic / software aspects in the electrical supply, marine and aviation fields. (Peter has the other one of our four degrees – it was not awarded to one of our pets!)

Peter is a versatile DIY’er, with mechanical, electrical, and woodworking skills. He has sailed since a child and has progressed from one and two person dinghies in the UK, to keelboats on Lake Ontario and here. Bringing on less experienced crews has been a joy to him and has led (amongst other results) to a ‘First in Class’ in the Round Bowen Race. He currently crews for another Islander. His current volunteer activities include the Coast Guard Auxiliary, technical illustrations for boating manuals, and being a Partner Director with 1st Credit Union here on Bowen. He is semi retired and runs, with Sue, a rather technical consulting business from home.

We are looking forward to moving to the beautiful land of Belterra, living within an evolving community, and welcoming visits from our children and grandchildren.