Contents:
Letter from Nikki Phan, President 2019-20
Letters from the Presidents ...........2 Merger of SHC and Rivendell ..........4 SHC Flier from 1973! ....................7 80 Years: Hedrick House ..............8 80 Years: Elsworth/Bowie ............12 Parties and Dinner at Apollo ........18 Genesee Gardens Co-Housing.......20 SHC helps Grand Rapids co-op......23 Save the date! ...........................24 “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” - Winston Churchill
“Co-ops are like sharks — if they’re not moving forward, they will die.” - Holly Jo Sparks,Exec. Director, MSU-SHC
The Wind Through the Pines is an annual publication of the MSU Student Housing Cooperative primarily for former members and friends. The name is taken from an alumni publication produced by Hedrick House from 1943 to 1971.
Creation and coordination: Emily Tayler (Vice-President for Education, Vesta)
Production/editing: Jim Jones (Hedrick ‘71, Elsworth ‘71-72, Rivendell ‘72-74)
Production Assistant: William Taiw Chen (Apollo)
Photographer: Riley James (Bowie)
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Dear alumni, cooperators and friends, In my role as both CEO and chair of the board in 2019-20, I had the responsibilities of organizing and facilitating bi-monthly board meetings, as well as providing oversight to our operational executive committee. My year-long term as president began in May, and I spent the summer familiarizing myself with my job, planning our event calendar for the coming year, and helping to prepare educational programs for the new members of our board. It was a productive summer and I’m very excited to share with you a little bit about what our cooperative has been up to recently, as well as our plans for the future! In 2005, the SHC purchased a property in downtown Lansing and turned it into a co-op. Up until that point, we had been a collection of only student co-ops. Harambee house, as it was named, was our first venture into community cooperatives. Three years ago, we acquired two more community co-ops: Rivendell and The Shire, and we intend to continue our expansion into the greater Lansing Area in the next several years. While we’ve been expanding outward, we have also been raising the quality standards of all of our houses. “A screen on every window and every basement dry” has been the motto of our maintenance coordinator, but in the last decade we’ve also completely rewired and remodeled several entire houses, installed dry-in systems in every one of our basements, keyed all of our houses to a master key system, and done extensive work to make many of our kitchens state-of-the-art. Our co-op houses aren’t the only things we’ve remodeled. In 2015, we overhauled our governance structure. Our board began using Policy Governance, and we established an executive committee to oversee operations. The board has made steady progress in the years since to refine our policies and make our governance as democratic as possible. Last year, they focused on long-term planning and working with the executive committee to prepare for our 50th Anniversary coming up in 2022. The executive committee spent their summer in 2019 working on a number of projects, including advertisements in city and state papers, managed info tables at both student events at MSU and local events such as Pride. Our VP’s of membership and education worked together to plan consent trainings at our houses and released a sexual assault survivors’ guide for our members. We revived a bi-monthly member zine called the “Pine Press,” and a New Member Orientation is in the works, as well as a con-
