Cohousing-L Mailing List: Vision statement sreening new members: fragility of new groups

[Rob Sandelin (Exchange) (Robsan]

Todd wrote:

>When you join Cascadia Commons, you sign on to those values. If you don't
>agree with them, you don't join. This is a pretty strong deterrent to right
>wing politics.
>
>I think this is very smart.  Beleive me, you want to have as cohesive a group
>as possible in order to get this HUGE undertaking done with the least amount
>of tears and people leaving, etc.  A young group is FRAGILE, you are barely
>held together by anything and people can leave whenever they want. Once you
>get salted a bit, and you grow some together you can withstand some shots,
>but when you are new, it is very easy for the group to dissolve and whole
>project go under. The only thing that keeps early groups going is your vision
>and dreams.   So concentrate your early meetings on building bonds, sharing
>life histories and dreams. Find ways to create community amoung yourselves
>first, then start taking on big risks and scary stuff.  Make a community
>first amoung the people, then set out bulding one. I think a HUGE mistake
>cohousers make is that they think once we get all this building stuff done we
>will have community. WRONG! Community is built every time you get together.
>So take time to make bonds and connections. It would be tragic to put all the
>time and money into building a neighborhood and then discover that the people
>around you are functionally strangers who you know their meeting style but
>nothing else about them. 
>
>Don't even THINK about trying to secure a site until you have a good meeting
>process, a conflict resolution process and know each other really well.  If
>you don't know how to build community, find somebody (like me) to help you.
>Until you get a site secure your group is very fragile, once you have a bunch
>of people with serious money invested, you can take the bumps because those
>who invest money are committed. But still you want people who are compatable
>and can work together.  Defining  who you are and what you want  via a vision
>statement can be a very effect way of bringing together compatable people.
>You really don't want just anybody invovled in this stage, you want people
>you can trust and hopefully even like, otherwise you aint going make it as a
>community, and you will have missed the whole point of cohousing. Later on,
>when lots of the scary, hard stuff is over, you will be very strong as a
>group and can take on all kinds of stuff and not even hiccup. But when you
>are new and tentative, getting sucked into major philosophical disagreements
>coupled with bad meeting process can fragment your group and kill the
>project. I have seen 12 cohousing groups go down in flames in the early
>stages because people did not have a clue how to deal with each other, much
>less make decisions and function as a group. Since there was nothing really
>at stake, people just left the group until it died. I watched this happen
>just last month with a group that met twice. There was no one left to
>organize a third meeting. 
>
>Rob Sandelin
>Northwest Intentional Communities Association