Co-op residents enjoy a potluck dinner every Tuesday.
By Sophia Bairaktaris
The aroma of dinner in the oven wafts through the kitchen and dining room. Someone rings a bell to call everyone to eat.
Residents make their way downstairs, and guests holding their potluck dishes are welcomed inside for the weekly Tuesday night get-together.
Dishes and spoons clank, and dinner is served.
Stone Soup Cooperative houses social justice activists in a not-for-profit intentional community, a household whose members share responsibilities and partake in consensus decision-making. Three houses make up the cooperative: Ashland House, Leland House and Hoyne House.
Ashland House resident Kevin Hovey, 27, said the co-op is a big “loose-knit family” pursuing the community motto, “justice and joy.”
“We get together around this big table and its like cousins and sometimes brothers and sisters,” Hovey said. “We live together and we’re friends.”
Currently, 19 people, including families with children, live at the Ashland House located at 4637 N. Ashland Ave. in the Chicago Uptown neighborhood.
The building is a former convent, leased since 1997 from Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, according to the co-op Web site, stonesoupcoop.org. While the building is a former convent, Stone Soup does not identify with any particular faith or religion.
While much of the housework and household is shared among members and the living costs are split, Stone Soup is not a commune. Each member or family has their own private room and members are employed outside the home, most with jobs and careers geared toward social justice activism.
Leland House, just a couple of blocks away, is located at 1430 W. Leland Ave. Hoyne House in the McKinley Park neighborhood is located at 3549 S. Hoyne Ave. Ashland House is the largest of the three, with three floors and much communal space.
Hovey, who has lived at Ashland House for a year, is a North Lawndale Green Youth Farm grower within the Chicago Botanic Garden. He works as a site garden manager who teaches youth about urban sustainable agriculture.
Instead of working as a certified nursing assistant as he was trained to do, Hovey turned to his other skills and interests in agriculture. He has found himself in various types agricultural work around the country before settling in Chicago.
“It paid very, very little, but I thought it was a better contribution than what I had seen in the lower level medical field,” Hovey said.
The $515 rent per month at the Ashland House includes food and utilities, so residents are able to more easily take on activist jobs and roles in the community that do not always pay so well, Hovey said.
The intentional community lifestyle at Stone Soup attracts many different people from various backgrounds and lines of work.
Alexandra Sossa, 41, has lived at Ashland House since 2003. She is the director of outreach and operations at the Farmworker and Landscaper Advocacy Project (FLAP) of Illinois, a not-for-profit law firm for migrant and undocumented workers.
“We go to the farms, we go to the nurseries, we go to the landscaping companies, to the streets and we speak to the workers,” she said. “I am the one who finds the cases for the organizations, the cases we will eventually litigate.”
Sossa is originally from Medellin, Columbia. She received her law degree from the University of Medellin. Sossa said she came to the United States “for love” when her husband at the time was studying English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
She moved into the Ashland House in February 2003.
“My father kind of worked in the same work that I’m doing in Columbia with the coffee farm workers,” Sossa said. “I am kind of continuing the work that was doing in Columbia. When I came here I wanted to work with social justice.”
Stone Soup’s diversity and consensus decision-making process and has helped Sossa to become more productive in her work with FLAP, she said. From just talking with other house members on issues facing her clients to using other residents’ resources to also help them, Sossa has been able to use the intentional community to FLAP’s advantage.
“I like to be around social justice workers. Also, because I’m coming from another country, it’s hard for me to live in this country by myself,” Sossa said. “I come from a big family and I like to be around people.”
Ashland House is usually bustling with activity.
Several meals, including the Tuesday potluck at Ashland House, are shared between the three houses on different days, with as little as five people and as many as 20 residents and guests.
Leland House members Morgan Nunan, 31, and his 2-month-old son, Oscar Rudderham, visited the Ashland House for a recent Tuesday potluck.
Nunan lived in the Ashland House for four years before moving into Leland with his growing family. Leland House offers more spacious individual rooms that are more suitable for families, he said.
Nunan said having a newborn baby in the co-op has been a good, yet challenging experience.
“As he gets older, others [in the house] will take more of a role helping to raise him, if they want to,” Nunan said. “I get nervous that our life with the baby is encroaching on other people’s territory.”
Living in a co-op is not for everybody, Hovey said. Every house has its own nature reflecting the people within it.
While disagreements in a house filled with people of many different walks of life can be common, that does not stop the flow of visitors interested in Stone Soup as a potential home for themselves.
Prospective co-op members often stop in for the weekly potluck dinners at Ashland House. Mary Luz Botero, 52, stopped in on a recent Tuesday to learn more about the social justice community.
Along with lending a helping hand with cooking dinner, Botero was given a tour of the house by a resident. She said the house’s identity as a former convent really inspired her to learn more.
“[Being] centered in a very sacred space is a really great thing for me,” Botero, a housekeeper, said. “Maybe that’s why I was drawn to this place.”
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