Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Paid staff

[John Major (JMAJOR]

Hi, Marty et alia -

(what a crackup - Stuart meekly wonders why things have tailed off,
and the list gets so much traffic in reply that  I've had to wait until
vacation to catch up! I love it... I bet Stuart was just prodding us   ;-)

I feel that Sebastapol is our "sister coho" in a way, going through all the
development drama at the same time, as we are...

>Who do you pay in addition to architects and engineers,
>etc.  Like a project manager, coordinator...  And how much?  Are they
>members of your community?  At what stage did you start paying and
>for how long?

We talked about hiring a project manager at some point, because we
were feeling pretty fried about tracking everything, but we decided that
between the builder's project manager, the architects, and our "liaison
committee" (three people that function as the interface between the
architects and the group), we have it covered. A project manager at this
point (going into construction) would just be another layer between us
and the pros. 

We have plenty of other professionals involved, given that we all have
day jobs and we are in a hurry - the architects and builder are going to
handle the building permit process, fortunately, and we have a pro
finding the bank loan for us, which is a huge weight off our shoulders.

So we are focused on final design issues (customization, options,
materials), and recruiting those last few members. I should confess also
that we even hired a public relations consultant a few months ago,
because the recruitment folks were fried, and really feeling the 
pressure!    ;-)   He's been a godsend - had a major newspaper article
arranged for us after the first week, and we are well on our way to
signing everyone up by groundbreaking, our goal.

But it's hard anyway at this point, as one can read from between the
lines in your post - there's a lot that has to be done, right up to
ground-breaking. So, that prompts another question to the List - see my
next post, "construction-phase workload"... 

So our "professional team" looks like this:

- Architect (paid flat fee, involved for over a year, since first
programming workshop)
- Builder (brought on early for "value engineering" and costing help, will
set flat fee after final bids in)
- Financial consultant (brought on early to help with affordable housing
grant and to teach us what to expect from the banks - now that we're
actually "in the bigs", he's excited! He's charging us just for hours
worked.)
- Public Relations consultant (brought on just a few months ago for the
final push)

(with lawyer, environmental consultant, soil/survey firms, etc. on call)

>How many volunteers were working hard at this point too?

Of course, we are encouraging *everyone* to pitch in, but the Burning
Souls number about 8 or 10, so another way of saying it is that there is
about 25% of the group carrying most of the "ToDos". The load is at least
spread around more than in your case, because you have a smaller pool
to start from - I'm not surprised that you're feeling a little burnt out. We
also figured out that we need to work hard at giving new folks a
jumping-in point, so we are trying a "microtask" approach to tracking all
the work, which I'll describe in a new post. Don't know how well it will
work yet...

We have been very lucky to have in the group approximations of
essential skills - a patent attorney, a draftsman/architect, a software
development project manager, an amateur accountant (as well as a
research biologist and a Marxist Economist, and...), so their work has
saved the group gobs of money and effort. I should also say that we
considered bringing a developer on quite late in the game, to help with
financing and the effort, but in the end we found that we had done most
of the hard stuff (finding a site, zoning, design, etc.), so it wasn't going
to be worth it.

>(formerly Jewell Hill - how do you like our new name?)
My Marti says she likes "Two Acre Wood" a lot, and wants to know if it
is "after A.A. Milne"?!?

Hope this long-winded screed helps -

John Major
Wasatch Cohousing
...where we are getting a big charge from new folks jumping in with both
feet - thank heavens for that!