Cohousing-L Mailing List: Incentives for early joiners

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

Dear Hans, 

I don't know how you can guarantee any early joiners any sort of 
financial perks without shooting yourself in the foot, so to speak. 
Unless  you have a clever scheme all worked out in advance, guaranteed, 
that gives you a buy-in price range you feel is affordable, a density you 
feel is reasonable, and a milling crowd waiting to buy in so you can sell 
it all right away. 

Otherwise, you are more typically in the situation where all sorts of 
things could drive up your costs, over time, leaving you in a big bind. 
And the potential resentment that hard-working latecomers might feel, 
about having their buy-in prices jacked up so that the early joiners can 
"get paid" ..........

There will always be people who DO do more of the work, and there always 
will be people who do more than other people know they do. There will 
always be some degree of emotion around the work-contribution issue. X 
works less, but he's older and tires easily, Y is obsessed and works more 
than anyone ever asked for, and then feels unappreciated, Z can't find 
time to work, and feels guilty about it, etc etc. It seems the best 
approach is to ACKNOWLEDGE people's contributions with abundant verbal 
recognition, written recognition, one on one, and whole group, as often 
as possible. 

And, like so many of the other issues that keep popping up, the 
underlying issue is not how to police people or punish or reward them, 
but how to increase community spirit, how to get people feeling good 
about what's happening and their participation in it, and so they WANT to 
do all they can. 
-------------------------------------------------
Some other ways to allow some people financial recognition of their work 
or money-at-risk: 
You can consider the hazard-strewn path of paying people for particular 
tasks or jobs, and the payment can be in cash or equity credit. This 
works best if it's clearly a situation where otherwise you need to hire 
an outsider, and the insider has already given abundantly as a volunteer. 
And this still has a great risk of building resentments-- Why is HE paid 
when I am volunteering? This was the only issue that got really messy in 
our early years: I wouldn't recommend it, but some groups have done it 
successfully. 

You can also make a decision as a group to accept an interest-bearing 
loan from a member, with a written contract. We did that a time or two, 
and it worked ok. 

Lynn Nadeau
RoseWind Cohousing