Statement of Multicultural Intent

Duwamish’s Reasons for Building a Multi-Cultural Community

Living in a multi-cultural community is important to the members of Duwamish Cohousing for a number of reasons. Our initial planning group is multi-cultural, including three young people adopted internationally.  We are interested in having a number of cultural groups strongly represented, so that people living in the community will have both the opportunity to live with others from a similar or the same culture as themselves and to learn more about living in a multi-cultural world by living with people of different cultures from themselves.  We are interested in creating a place where many cultures can flourish together, and we can learn to appreciate, respect, support, and enjoy each other’s customs, celebrations, and perspectives about living in the world.  We think that multiculturalism, while posing a number of challenges for our community that will require great dedication to effective communication and eliminating our own racism (particularly among the European Americans in the group), will also bring a great richness to our community life.  We see our efforts as a step towards creating a more peaceful, just, less racist, and more cooperative world community.

We have purposefully chosen to build our cohousing community in a very culturally diverse neighborhood, both to have our community in a place where people from many different cultures will feel comfortable living and to provide opportunities for future connections with neighbors from many cultural groups.  We look forward to building an even broader multi-cultural community with the greater neighborhood.