The Canopy joins Boston Community Cooperatives

We are very excited to announce that we’ve decided to partner with Boston Community Cooperatives! BCC is a nonprofit umbrella organization that furthers the coop movement by creating shared infrastructure among several coop houses under joint ownership. By becoming a BCC house, The Canopy will operate under BCC’s existing nonprofit incorporation and will share governance and operations with other BCC houses.

Inspired by similar organizations across North America, BCC was founded in 2001 in order to allow the Boston group-equity cooperative housing sector to serve more people by forming multiple coop houses under one umbrella organization. This streamlines cooperative overhead. By sharing governance, legal fees, administrative functions such as bookkeeping, and other operational systems, coops can realize efficiencies and free up more time to pursue their missions. This model has proven very successful in several places, such as Madison, WI, where Madison Community Cooperatives manages a network of 11 houses with over 200 residents.

BCC currently owns one house — Seedpod, a 12-bedroom house located near Fields Corner in Boston. The Canopy will be the second BCC house, in a location yet to be determined. (We are interested in finding a property within the Boston metro area, accessible by T or major bus route – basically, if you draw a circle from Medford to Watertown to Dorchester, we would want to be within that circle.)

The Canopy and BCC are both committed to expanding access to coop housing to populations outside of the typical twenty-something demographic that typically benefits. We’ve already had extensive talks with BCC about the nature of our collaboration, including a kickoff at the BCC annual meeting this past weekend when Canopy members officially joined the BCC Board of Directors. We are looking forward to continuing to work with this forward-thinking and creative group!