Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: 3 top conflict sources

[Catya Belfer-Shevett (catya]

To add another arena, from a group yet again back to land search..

(this is, of course, only my personal take, and i'm not speaking for the 
group.)

I'd say our largest recurring conflict, or perhaps recurring 
heavily-emotional-issue, has been how newer folks to the group deal with 
those of us who are out of the closet as poly and/or queer.  Three aspects 
generally show up - personal comfort, PR, and marketing.

We have some stuff in place to try to deal with this, and we get better at 
it with each semi-regular meltdown about it, but WOW is it hard.

Our current solutions include:

PR: Strategy - keep a low profile
1 - no links to personal home pages off of the website, and no full names 
on the website.
2 - keeping those of us who are out of the closet, especially with easily 
web-searchable names and web presence, out of town meetings, newspapers, 
press contact, etc.

Marketing / Prospectives: be open about it
The last thing we want is to surprise anyone months down the road, so from 
introductory meetings (which i run) onward, people who are out of the 
closet stay out of the closet.

Personal Comfort:
1 - Mentors check in with new folks to see if they have any questions / 
concerns
2 - Q&A and discussion as needed

Advice on this one is welcome, I could really do without completely 
derailing the work of the group onto people melting down about this stuff, 
again.

        - catya
                         ____
Catya Belfer-Shevett  ____\  /      Interested in
catya [at] pobox.com       \  / \/      Cohousing in MA?
www.catya.org          \/       www.mosaic-commons.org
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