Synergy

Synergy is a student-run cooperative community located on Stanford campus, tucked just above the Row. Synergy was founded in 1972, growing out of a student-initiated course that sought to establish and experiment with a community encouraging cooperative relationships, collective action, and alternative lifestyles. It has often held a political mission, which is cultivated through teach-ins and political reading dinners.

We are a warm, eccentric, and tight-knit community. There's always good music playing in the kitchen and lively conversations happening on the couches in our breakfast room. We also throw awesome parties for Halloween and Valentine's Day in addition to more intimate gatherings. As a residential space, we hope to cultivate opportunities for collective and personal growth in the way that we treat our space, labor, and one another with intentionality. As a community, we see “intentionality” as our efforts to elevate the voices of all house members, examine ways to bend conventions in both personal and communal practice, and cultivate a safe and positive environment that supports self-expression.

At Synergy, we share a concern for the historical inaccessibility of co-op housing to marginalized communities on campus. We are committed to the responsibility of helping foster a culturally sensitive house community in order to challenge this history and create meaningful house dialogues with actions that incorporate direct feedback and coalition with communities across Stanford’s campus. In our home, we hope to continue exploring the ways that cooperative practices can be powerful tools of resistance and self-care for marginalized communities.

Synergy sits atop a quiet, forested hill and is an idyllic refuge from the rest of campus. When you walk up our path, you step into a different world: home-cooked meals, gender neutral bathrooms, bountiful gardens, a vegetarian kitchen, collaborative artwork, collectively consented house policies, a building workshop, a view of the bay from the bathroom, and a warm embrace of all walks of life. House policy is made by consensus, which means every resident has a voice and all decisions (house norms, job policies, hosting social events, etc.) must be approved by everyone present for those meetings. We also change rooms and roommates every quarter through a consensus process.