Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: fundraising; recipes; games

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Deborah Behrens  <debbeh [at] Auto-trol.COM> asked:

>We have a close to zero budget on furnishing our common house.
>Has anyone any suggestions for fund raisers?

One idea is to have a community garage sale of all the stuff people 
will be getting rid of when they move. Invite members to donate the 
proceeds to the community. Another good fund raiser is to invite 
everyone's relatives and all their  friends to a dinner auction.  Cook 
dinner for them all ($5 a person) and then auction off services or 
other donations.  We do this at the Pre-school and made $2,500 this 
year.  I donated 2 hours of computer consulting for Word and/ or 
publisher and it went for $90. My wife donated 4 hours of garden design 
and labor work and it went for $100!


> Any ideas for games to play, or other things to do at meetings,
>that improve community and our knowledge of each other?
>We had a lot of fun playing '3 Truths and a Lie' at our picnic the 
other day.
>We have a retreat coming up that we could use some ideas for.

One thing we have done is have everyone's name on a sheet of notebook 
paper.  Pass them out so each person gets someone besides themselves. 
Then they interview that person for 15 minutes. A standard set of 
questions can be used such as where did you grow up, tell me a story 
from your childhood, what do you do for fun, etc. or people can make up 
their own. Swap around so that there are two groups, the interviewers 
and interviewees.   Read the interviews and then collect them into a 
3-ring binder as biographies of the members.

Sharing circles can also be fun.  Share your favorite food, leisure 
activities, most embarrassing moment, Childhood story, etc. Each person 
goes round in turn.

Another circle activity is to have people sing their names and group 
sings it back to them.  You can also mime yourself in your daily work,  
and we have even had people dance their feeling.

Something which is very powerful is to do self analysis.  Questions 
such as: who am I comfortable telling my honest feelings to, How do I 
react to criticism, How do I affect other people, How do I react to 
being tired or hungry, How open am I to asking for what I need.  Having 
things like this talked about needs some pre-meeting homework time, 
often as a questionnaire but can be very enlightening to share with each other.

Another thing kind of along the same line is to priorities ranking: 
Draw a  4 inch line on paper and mark 1 on the left and 10 on the 
right. Then ask priorities questions such as how important is 
childcare, meetings, dinner, community in relation to the rest of my 
life and have people mark their priorities along the line with 1 being 
low and ten being high. This can explain a lot about peoples 
motivation.  If you really want to visualize the priorities do a people 
line where people actually stand in line in place of their priority, so 
if something is a high priority for a lot of people there will be a 
cluster at the 10 end of the line.

There are also a number of values clarification exercises which are 
useful to help determine where people are coming from.  Maybe someone 
has done these?  We have just done some simple forms of this by asking 
people to fill out an open ended sentence such as: I want Sharingwood 
to be a place where.........  There are a number of variations on this theme.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood