Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Committee Membership

[Casey Morrigan (cjmorr]

Responding to Sharon about work/committee set up.  Marty Roberts can add
details or correct mistakes I made on this description.

-----Original Message-----
From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
[mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of Sharon Villines
Sent: Sunday, October 27, 2002 7:34 AM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: Re: [C-L]_Committee Membership


On 27/10/2002 12:33 AM, "Casey Morrigan" <cjmorr [at] pacbell.net> wrote:

> In our case, we figured we had work divided up in a traditional committee
> structure and had low meeting attendance, and rethought that by looking at
> the work that "had" to be done and the work that people wanted to do.  We
> then matched it up and looked at where the gaps were.  We structured the
> work teams more loosely, to sort of follow people's interest rather than
the
> "to do list" (they look really similar on the outside but they handle
stuff
> differently) and decided to hire out some of the labor that wasn't getting
> done that we thought important. (which we are stuck on, see earlier post,
> but anyway on with the story)

>Can you give examples of how you did this?

Yes, though I am afraid it will bore the reader.  But here goes.  - first of
all, we had a small group of people who were interested in getting this
straightened out.  They became the How We Do Work task force (the Huey
Do-We's) .  They made lists of work we thought needed to get done around the
community to run this joint.  Then we signed off as a group on "yes, that's
the work".  Then we asked people what they liked and wanted to do, and how
much time in reality they had to commit to it.  This was done by listing
people's names and having them write what they could and wanted to do - they
could come into the common house and write it down on the butcher paper we
posted, over a week or two.  Then the task force compared the two and
presented the results at a meeting.   They grouped people by what they
wanted to do and gave them the list of things that needed to get done, noted
what they said they could do, and then asked them to get organized to get it
all done.  In whatever way they wanted.  The huey doeys asked for time at a
general meeting to get set up and organized.

So, for example, the meals people decided to sign themselves up on a
calendar and rotate the task of finding cleaners and asking for shoppers
(we'd not had a meal group before - totally voluntary meals, but unhappiness
about meal frequency and a solid group of people who said they had time to
make meals happen and how.) The common house folks decided they did not want
to schedule volunteer cleaners every week, they wanted to hire cleaners -
because they found out there was almost no one with time they wanted to
spend on cleaning.  But they will continue with their committee structure
and other work allocation procedures.

Anyway, this took a long time. But that was o.k. It was thoughtful.  No
extra meetings needed.  It took place over a few months - we only have one
business meeting a month.

>> I'm one of those people who does
a lot of work but dreads team meetings. I prefer to communicate by email and
only meet when there is an issue that needs to be discussed or physical
plans that need to be viewed. Like looking at the commonhouse dining room to
see where we can put acoustical treatments or to discuss values around the
use of the workshop.

We counted time people spent on tasks like this in looking at work needed.
We have someone maintaining our phone list.  We have someone who orders from
the bulk warehouse and coordinates divvying up the food.  Those all counted
when we counted up the hours and tasks.  It took a long time to count up
everything, but we had someone put it in a database.  This helped us when we
were dickering over how much time we wanted to "require" that people put
into the community, because we had a count of the universe of hours and how
many people we had.  (Eventually we abandoned that attempt to set an
expected time, mostly because we had a couple of members who feared not
being able to meet expectations.  I didn't like that, because I am of the
group that wanted expectations that I could occasionally get excused from,
but  I think it'll be ok. We'll see.  Those who want to work, will. those
who can't, won't. )

Also, our "decision boards" allow people to partially bypass committee time
and decisionmaking processes.  Sometimes the decision boards will indicate a
meeting is necessary on the one issue at hand.


In our case, I don't think it  is a lack of "trust" (that word is even more
loaded than "guns") as much as a lack of understanding of how to go about
resolving objections. The people who make proposals are not the ones who are
good at sorting out people's issues.

This a great point!  With our basketball hoop, one person started it, found
they didn't want to sort through objections, but someone else helped close
the decision process.  It took more than one person. And it's not just the
people who make proposals who aren't good at sorting out issues and
resolving them. Few of us are good at that.  However, we are slowly becoming
more skilled at this as a group (the fact that we completed the whole huey
doey process was an example of how we have grown as a community) though we
have a ways to go before our decisionmaking is graceful. And we've put in
place some people and structures to help us muddle through the issues when
we are stuck.

Casey Morrigan
Two Acre Wood
Sebastopol CA



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