About BACH
The Brown Association for Cooperative Housing is an independent corporation owned by its members, located in Providence, Rhode Island. Since 1970, we have housed and fed Brown and RISD students, as well folks from the greater Providence community, at an amazingly sane cost. We currently own and inhabit two houses on Waterman Street. Each is home to both permanent residents and a non-residential vegetarian food co-op.
A co-op is both a radical and a tradition-bound
institution. It is a household, though an unusual one. There is no
established hierarchy, and no one can set the standard of how clean is
clean enough or ban sombreros unilaterally. A co-op is definitely
not a dorm. There are common areas to clean, meals to be
cooked, dishwashers to be fixed, and if house members do not do these
things then they are left undone and all suffer.
Figuring out how to make the household run from scratch each year would be a formidable task. This is where tradition comes in. People have been surviving in simple communities since the beginning of time, and for about thirty years, a number of them have been in BACH. We value our hystory for its stories and its lessons; it tells us when the roof needs fixing and how the common rooms were named. But admist a society that seeks to create dependencies, whether on governments or industries or cleaning ladies, the co-op is a radical phenomenon indeed.
Our Tale...
BACH began as a far-off flickering fluorescent light in the collective eyeball of a fretful / naive / hyperomnivorous few back in the late sixties. The first co-op occupied a Brown-owned house in 1970, and BACH was incorporated that July. For a few years, we lived in two houses, Carberry and Milhous, which were leased from Brown. In 1975, Watermyn was purchased independently of the University.
In 1994, just after our dear Finlandia opened, Brown decided to purposelessly terminate the leases on Carberry and Milhous. Their reasons for this decision remain highly suspect. After a courageous fight with the Brown administration, both houses were eventually lost. Aside from a brief eviction at Finlandia in 1996, she and Watermyn carry each other through the years with all-BACH dinners, parties, and inter-house cooperation through this brave, strange world...
- Learn more about our past, with essays and primary sources, at BACHuments and Hystory.
- Confused? Consult the BACH Glossary.
- We're all in this together. BACH has been a member of the North American Students of Cooperation, or, to friends, NASCO. It's a federation, a meta-cooperative, and the best place to find out about co-ops around the country.
- Call us up if you want to know more.
