Welcome!

The Massachusetts Association of Housing Cooperatives is an organization of Massachusetts housing cooperatives, providers of resources and assistance to co-ops, policy makers, housing advocates, and individuals and organizations that embrace the principles of Cooperative enterprises.

We work to support a wide variety of existing housing co-ops and promote the establishment of new housing cooperatives. MAHC is building a network of financial, legal, and operational property management resources that will provide a solid base of support to housing cooperatives and insure best practices and responsible, accountable democratic management. We work with state and local governments and other stakeholders and allied organizations to advance policies and legislation to expand cooperative housing options in Massachusetts.

New Website is Live

We’re as ready as we can be. We’ve pulled over the old content and added a little bit of structure so the website can grow and be useful to our membership and the world at-large. It’s done in a very plain WordPress now, so it’s less tied to a particular web hoster (kthxbai Squarespace!) and allows multiple authors (or as they’re called now, content creators), which should allow more timely and diverse content. We’ll have more options for supporting things like email and forums as well as organizing events. We’ll even make it prettier and have pictures and graphic stuff eventually.

One of the first things we’ll be working on is the Resources section. Just has a couple of high level items on it now but we’ll planning to curate all manner of materials that will be useful and interesting for housing cooperatives. Send us links or things you think should be included.

We’re also starting to plan for a forum on cooperative membership selection and its intersection with fair housing law. Just like our Property Management Forum we’ll gather a good cross section of experts and cooperative board members to discuss our experiences with the new member selection process to illuminate the best practices to find the best members for your cooperative and follow Fair Housing Laws.

Initial Content Done

I’ve brought over most of the content that was on the original site. I’ve done some rough editing. More needs to be done to eliminate redundant information. Some sections like the resources are going to need some serious work.

I played around a bit with changing WordPress themes but it became a rabbit hole. We can do some serious styling and beefing up the website going forward. The two big advantages for going live will be opening up the site to multiple editors and getting domain specific email.

Preliminary Design

So we’re casting the old website into WordPress. This is kind of the prototype. It’s a bare bones WordPress using the 2015 Theme. It’s current form is meant to be generic. The primary goal at the moment is to move the site to a WordPress hosted site to be able to move the DNS to the new hosting service, which gets us easier access to email to the doman. We’ll have all sorts of opportunity to improve the design and functionality with the new hosting.

The Home page is a blog page with an About entry pinned to the top. We should have the later blog entries listed on the Home page with the Navigation to other pages. Not thrilled with the Menu at the moment but it works. The idea is to make the Home page more dynamic and to highlight new items on an ongoing relatively low effort workflow. The other pages are sort of org critical and are static but linked through the menu: Membership stuff in particular. This theme has a menu on a sidebar for desktops and hamburger expansion on mobile. I’ve attached the PDF Membership forms so do they download.