Creating a Co-op

The tofu sizzles on a frying pan next to a pot of steaming miso soup. On the cutting board, kale leaves are being chopped up in preparation for a salad, and an electric mixer is forging its way through batter for vegan chocolate chip cookies. Amid the sizzling and chopping, students engage in a passionate discussion about the future of solar power.

It’s lunchtime at the Dudley Cooperative Society, Harvard’s alternative housing for undergraduates, a unique space structured on the idea communal living with an anti-establishment, leftist leaning. The residents refer to each other as family, and refer to the Co-op as home. But if you ask around campus, many students have never heard of the Co-op, or just know it as “some commune far away where all the hipsters live,” Co-op president Bex H. Kwan ’14 explains.

The Dudley Cooperative Society, founded in 1958, provides housing for 32 Harvard undergraduates and two resident tutors each year “who are not satisfied with the institutional nature of house life, but who do not want the isolation or the expense of living in an apartment,” its website says. Its members do their own cooking, cleaning, and food buying through a chore system. Co-opers live in two houses located in a residential area of Cambridge just about a 10 minute walk from the Yard.

Despite the inclusive nature of the community and the desire of some Co-opers to make the Co-op known to campus, the Co-op currently does not do much publicizing. Although their dinners are open to everybody, “people don’t really know that,” Kwan concedes.

The Co-op’s website has not been updated in years. Those who live there heard about the Co-op via word of mouth from friends or acquaintances in the know. Kwan explains that since the Co-op feels more like a home and less like an organization, the idea of publicity may feel a little uncomfortable. “I think that in some ways it’s a haven for a lot of people—it has become for me—so it’s sort of a secret that I don’t want to tell the whole world about.”

Part of this tension between exclusivity and inclusivity stems from the Co-op’s dedication to fostering a close community.

Yet many of the students living in the Co-op described the community there as a family. The atmosphere of the Co-op feels to them like a home in a way that Harvard Houses never did. Students were also compelled to join by other aspects of the house—its approach to food, its relationship to Harvard—that distinguish it from other living spaces on campus.

For some, cuisine was a major driving factor. Kwan explains that they struggled with eating at Annenberg during their freshman year. “For me, eating is a very personal experience and a very important part of my day, and so sharing it with people I don’t know and have strangers sit next to me and not talk to me was kind of jarring. It was important for me to know who cooked my food, and to be able to thank them.”

Devi K. Lockwood ’14 also characterizes eating at her House, Currier, as stressful. After cooking dinner with a friend during a visit, she realized “food and making food and being around food and having a smaller community of people who actually care how you’re doing is really important to me in terms of physical and mental health.”

Lauren M. Chaleff ’15 recalls the “spectator aspect” of living in a dorm or House, where people are constantly observing what you’re wearing. At her visits to the Co-op before she moved in, she explains, “I just felt so comfortable in my own skin, no matter what I was wearing.” Chaleff continues, “Here, I can walk around in my underwear if I want to and I know that no one’s going to think or say ‘slut.’”

Others referred to the institutionalized nature of the House system as the reason for their desire for an alternative. Although she really liked Kirkland House, Macarena M. Arias ’14 says there was an “overbearing, institutionalized feeling that [she] didn’t feel comfortable with.” At the Co-op, she finds that there is “less emphasis on school, school, school is your life. It’s more like: hey, we’re just living here and thinking about different things. I didn’t want to feel like I was surrounded by an institution 24/7.”

Arias explains how the Co-op fulfills different roles for its members. “For some people, this is a place where they have more liberty or leisure, where they can have a beer when they have dinner. Whereas [for] other people, this place is more like a homey place,” she says. “Other people see this place as a hub for radical thought.”

Even with these differences in the way the Co-opers experience the space and reasons for coming to the Co-op in the first place, there is a “common element to those reasons: just wanting a change,” Arias says.

Sometimes, the discrepancy in visions of the Co-op and how it should function has been the cause of conflict between Co-opers. Chaleff recalls how last year there were “two camps” within the Co-op with regards to the type of food that should be purchased and consumed. There was a lot of tension, she explains, between those who wanted to spend money on only organic food and those who said that “just because the club has the reputation of being crunchy granola, we want to eat chips and that’s our decision: this is our house and we live here too.”

Chaleff also mentions how some people living in the Co-op want the house to be more autonomous and not have Harvard send maintenance, while others do not have the same desire. “Within the Co-op, people have a lot of different ideas about what they want,” Chaleff says. “We all deal with that and try to make this a compromise for everyone.”

The process of joining the Co-op community is very straightforward; it has no interview process or application, the Co-opers explain. “It’s really a self-selecting community,” Lockwood explains. After speaking with one of the tutors and joining the Co-op for a dinner, you are put on the waitlist immediately, and are then offered a spot once spots open up.

Though she appreciates that the Co-op is a “completely open community,” Indiana T. Seresin ’15, an inactive Crimson editor, wishes that the Co-op had a “slightly more selective process so I felt like people were moving in for the right reasons and not for negative reasons like, ‘I don’t like my blockmates.’”

Many Co-opers would like to see the Co-op community expand, and would like more Harvard students to know what it’s all about. “I would love to see this opportunity open up to many people,” Kwan says. “I feel like if people really knew what we were about, and how close we are to campus, how great the food is, etc. people would actually be really into it.”

The Co-opers point to the fact that compared to other schools, Harvard’s Co-op community is very small. Stanford, for example, houses seven Co-ops. “It’s crazy that there’s only one here,” Lockwood says.