Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: orienting new members

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

One of the things I have observed is that new members are often overwhelmed
with information. They get this huge stack of papers with the expectation:
"It was in the bylaws, didn't you read them?"  This often is a set up for a
unhappy relationship with all the "paperwork". The expectation that everyone
is going to actually read this huge pile of sometimes obtuse paperwork is
unrealistic.

One thing I saw a chapter of Habitat for humanity do once that I thought was
a good paperwork management scheme was they gave new members an empty
notebook, with a colorful cover. Then, at every  meeting, they gave the
members a reasonable sized chunk of the manual to read every couple weeks.
In this way, since the load was manageable, the rather large manual actually
got read over the period of a couple of months, instead of being shelved
because it was too big and cumbersome to actually read. The important
material was handed out first, then the less important stuff.  At each
meeting the new folks got asked, did you read the  last section and if yes,
did they have any questions? If the answer was no they did not  read it,
then they didn't get the next set until they did, which was at the next
meeting. Since the assignments were small and the expectation was on
performance (reading the material) apparently rarely did anyone not do their
"homework". They used to just hand out the whole manual notebook and found
nobody had the time to read it and I suspect that people are also daunted by
the size and time requirement to read it. By putting it into manageable
chunks they got a huge performance improvement.

Rob Sandelin

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