Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: [C-L]_Consensus in cohousing/oops

[Becky Schaller (bschaller]

Raines, thanks for  your response.
>> So I'm interpreting that to
>> mean that no one who is a  member of an older community  (people living in
>> the community for five or more years) still use consensus for major
>> decisions.  
> 
> That seems a bit of a stretch, for the reasons you outline in your
> message and others. Any given question posted here on Coho-L is likely
> (historically speaking) to get a response from just a few communities,
> and once you narrow down to the few communities that HAVE been living
> there for 5 or more years, and add in filters for people interested in
> that topic, willing to respond, on the list, and not on summer vacation,
> that is a pretty small sample size to draw a definitive conclusion from a
> non-response. If the question were phrased as the negative, that might
> provide more definite info.

Oops!  What I had meant to say is that I no one who is a  member of an older
community  (people living in
the community for five or more years) is going to respond.  I agree that the
conclusion I actually sent out is a bit of stretch.   That change must have
happened in my last editing of this message.  Thanks for pointing this out.


> 
>> If anyone knows of a way to get this information or has already gathered it
>> in another way, would you please let me know.
> 
> Perhaps an anonymous survey via web page would provide a greater level of
> trust. We can certainly ask in future e-newsletters and when researching
> articles to reach a much wider audience than Coho-L.

Thanks for the suggestion.
> 
> Swan's Market Cohousing (Oakland, CA) has been living together for a
> little less than five years; Berkeley coho for a bit more than five
> (nearly 10 years if you count its
> pre-condo-conversion-retrofit-living-in-community-while-renovating-and-expa
> nding history), although I'm a recent addition so I can't speak
> definitively to its entire  history. Both make major decisions by
> consensus, and have evolved sophisticated processes for particular tasks,
> like budgeting, that let everybody be heard, taking the temperature of
> the entire community -- and some might say that these processes cross the
> line into (gasp) voting, but I believe that information-gathering
> exercises that help create a proposal (such as a budget) that ends up
> coming to the community for consensus approval is still consensus.

>> If someone says their community
>> doesn't use consensus any more, does that mean they are no longer a
>> cohousing community.


> 
> Not in my book. Consensus is a tool, and one of the identifying traits of
> cohousing, but by no means the only one.

I thought consensus decision making was one of the four pillars of the
definition of cohousing.  Somehow I can't find either of my cohousing books,
so I can't look that up.  So you may very well be right.
> 
> I think my key learning along the way is that it is not the end result
> that's so important (as much as people get vested in particular outcomes
> for decisions), it's the process of getting there and what you learn
> about each other and the solutions you come up with along the way that
> facilitate our ability to live in community. And part of that process is
> the process of (re)defining what consensus means in your community - if
> it wasn't evolving (perhaps beyond what some recognize as consensus by
> whatever their trainings or definitions began as), then I would be
> worried.
I appreciate that perspective.
> 
> Raines

Becky



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