Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Paying babysitters- the legalities

[Becky Schaller (bschaller]

Lynn, to answer your direct question, first we estimate out how much
childcare we expect to need for the coming year.  Then someone estimates how
much that would be per household.  Then we ask people to contribute.  It's a
separate account from the rest of the budget.   People can pay at the
meeting, but I think most pay outside of the meeting.  It's not a perfect
system, but that is what we do.

I'm also wondering, was your hair-raising situation related to the nanny law
or was it a liability situation of a different kind?

Becky Schaller
Sonora Cohousing
Tucson, Arizona  

> Date: Fri, 12 Sep 03 11:09:06 -0800
> From: Lynn Nadeau <welcome [at] olympus.net>
> To: "cohousing L" <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
> Subject: 
> Reply-To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> 
> Having survived the scary potential of one hair-raising
> potential-liability-suit situation, at RoseWind we are very careful about
> "employees." 
> 
> As a community, we have a stated value on supporting young children and
> their families, and nobody objects to the community as a whole paying
> sitters for meetings. But our accountant says we are opening ourselves to
> liability if our annual budget has a line item that says "childcare
> $400", or if an investigator could even track down and show that in fact
> RoseWind was really paying a sitter, even if we decide to make it less
> obvious by calling it "children's activities" or decide to give the kid
> team money to steward for sitting somehow.
> 
> We want a system which spreads the cost evenly among the members, and
> which is easy. Passing a hat at meetings does neither, as we don't
> usually carry cash to the common house, and that would also suggest that
> some people would pay and others would not.
> 
> What do others do?
> 


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