Fifty pages on building real community in shared living spaces. Co-Liv co-creates it with Conscious Coliving and Art of Co, for the operators and community managers who hold the room.
The Community Facilitation Handbook is a fifty-page guide to building real community in shared spaces. Co-Liv publishes it in 2021 together with Conscious Coliving and Art of Co, in the same year the network turns its research attention to community management with the Community Building Report.
It belongs to a bigger body of work. The Co-Liv Network journal asks what the ROI of community is and defines the role of a community manager. The Co-Liv Podcast debates close-knit community versus scalability. The handbook turns that thinking into practice: how to build community in shared living spaces, on the ground, week after week.
Distribution runs via Conscious Coliving, and the rest of the research sits in the Co-Liv library.
Get the handbookCo-Liv defines coliving as any shared living space that improves the quality of life of its residents. That definition sets a high bar. Architecture gets people under one roof. Facilitation decides what happens next.
The stakes reach beyond any single house. Coliving grows as an answer to rapid urbanization, a real estate crisis, accelerated lifestyles and a loneliness epidemic, and a shared living space only answers that last one when someone builds connection deliberately. Operators feel this daily: the Community Building Report 2021 gathers what 22 operators worldwide learn about the hardest job in coliving, community management. The handbook exists so that job gets easier.
Community managers and facilitators, first. The people who welcome residents, host the rituals and handle the hard conversations.
Operators next. The Co-Liv journal dedicates a whole framework to the ROI of community in coliving; the handbook is where that return gets built.
And the wider network: the designers, investors and policymakers Co-Liv connects, who want to understand the layer of shared living that makes the model work.
The handbook grows out of a long working relationship. Conscious Coliving stands on the Co-Liv partner wall, and the ties go deeper: Matt Lesniak, Co-Liv's Head of Community, co-founds Conscious Coliving, and Penny Clark of Conscious Coliving serves as a Co-Liv research ambassador. Art of Co, home of The Art of Coliving, completes the trio.
Meet the network behind the work on the people page, or follow the whole arc in the Co-Liv story.
The handbook is one shelf in a deeper archive of books, reports and recordings. Ask Co-Liv where to start, or write to the team about facilitation in your own project.