Dorothy Mazeau was our Treasurer. In a total shock to us, she died at the beginning of October. We had a brief email from her letting us know she didn’t expect to live another week and that she was at peace. According to her obituary, she had had cancer for a year and a half. She never let on. At our August strategic planning meeting she was full of life. She will be greatly missed.
How I Got to Know Dorothy
I got to know her when she got in touch with me as she was starting Golden Girls (and Boys!) Connections in Canada. The service was an online matching program for people seeking housemates. At the time, she was living in Ontario. Once a year or so, she would come to Vermont to visit family and also arrange with me to buy multiple copies of Sharing Housing, A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates. She would sell these when she did presentations. In one of these visits, I asked her to join the board. (We meet via Zoom.) Without hesitation she said, “Yes!” She was smart, thoughtful, thorough and knew a bit about how to put our financial house in order. We will forever have “Dorothy’s spreadsheet” as a way to review our finances.
A Fellowship
Last summer Dorothy was awarded a fellowship with the Samuel Center for Social Connectedness to study shared housing. To create a comprehensive overview she intereviewed and surveyed both home share agencies and self-facilitated home sharers. Her report is “HomeSharing: Housing That Connects Us.” (The link is a Google doc, you are welcome to download it.) She concludes with four recommendations:
- research and analyze the cost benefits for the government of shared housing,
- have a robust centralized organization to promote shared housing,
- create legislation to codify home sharing and reduce risk, and
- have “Train the trainer” educational programs for locals people to support the development of home sharing.
We concur.
Blog Post
She also wrote a blog post, When Friends Form a Family
This is how it begins,
“Are you someone living alone in a big house filled with memories – and your kids’ stuff? Are you looking at the years ahead and wondering how long you can manage caring for the house – and yourself, for that matter — holding onto your goal of living the rest of your life in that house and in the community where you feel at home?
Speaking of those empty bedrooms did you know that in a study by the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis, the authors studied what they call “Housing Suitability”? They make the assumption that a “suitably-sized home” has as many residents as there are bedrooms in the home. They found that there are over 5 million spare bedrooms in Ontario alone, which represents 25 years of housing supply, at current construction rates.” Read the rest.
May her work be carried forward by additional researchers and activists. We will certainly do what we can here at Sharing Housing.
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On this blog we have an interview with Dorothy from 2017.
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