Re: orienting out of town members
From: Sharon Villines (sharonsharonvillines.com)
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2005 07:10:53 -0800 (PST)

On Nov 30, 2005, at 4:47 PM, Lynette Bassman wrote:

Since some people relocate to
join cohousing, or join cohousing as part of a relocation, there are
likely to be people who want to join, but can't attend meetings because
they are not yet in town.  Our membership procedure involves people
attending some meetings and social events so we can get to know each
other, to determine the goodness of fit. So I am wondering how we might
accomplish that when the people are far away and can't easily travel
here.  One solution might be to have them wait until they move here to
join, but the joining date determines unit selection seniority, and if
they wait, they may not get the unit type that they want.

They can't really wait until they move there to join because they may be moving there just to join. We had several households like that. Our construction date was delayed a year so several had actually moved here to temporary housing before they moved in but they had joined before. If our group had had that requirement, we wouldn't have made the building loan deadline for contracts on file.

We had an active email list and people did travel to the area to meet people before they joined. They (I was one) actively participated on the email list "listening" to conversations and decisions.

But in reality, the community experience is so different once you move in from what you may have expected that the heavy requirements of participation before hand don't really mean much. After move-in it's a whole new ball game. People were very different after move-in than before.

You want people to know this is cohousing and has participation requirements, and is a 'we" (not a "they") venture, etc. but beyond that there just is no guarantee that things will work the way you planned.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org


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