Cohousing-L Mailing List: Should individual "sponsorship" be allowed of community

[Racheli Gai (racheli]

Hi Liz,
I guess I'm not sure at this point what "equality" you are
talking about.
To me, the issue of accepting gifts involves the following
concerns:
Say we allow people to give expensive presents to the
community (assuming these are things the community consensed
on being interested in), what are the potential downfalls?
*  One is, that the big donors might get some special treatment/
privileges/"power" because they can buy for the community others can't. 
*  Another is that the gift would not really belong to everyone equally,
but that the givers would retain some extra authority regarding who uses
it, how much, when and how...
*  A third issue is that those who those who can't contribute expensive
gifts would feel guilty/ashamed/... 

My experience hasen't been that we're treating those with more money
differently than we are treating those with less, or that giving a
somewhat expensive item to the community makes any difference in that
person's standing in the community.  If it was the case that people were
treated differently, I would be against allowing such gifts.
As I said in a previous post, most of the time people don't even remember
who contributed towards which item, and it's certainly  the case that
everyone is entitled to equal use of anything belonging to the community. 
(With the exception that some items, such as certain exercise equiptment)
are not to be used by children. If people feel guilty or ashamed that they
can't give expensive presents, then the question is: Is the community
doing something which contributes to such feelings, or is it
"self-manufactured"?  If the community treats people differently in this
regard, certainly it's something to look into and try to resolve.  As to
people who feel unworthy because they don't have much money, that's an
issue for them to work on. There are, obviously, lots of ways to
contribute to a community -
giving money is only one of them (and I'd think not remotely the most
important).

R.


>I have been living here for TEN YEARS. While it doesn't make me the
>oracle of knowledge, I do have a perspective that is being ignored
>because I'm perceived as being overly emotional about this, in spite of
>evidence to the contrary. In that time, several different households have
>been the "poorest family" in our community. I can tell you that it's
>*NEVER* the poorest family that blocks consensus on spending money.

>This is not about the poorest family, it's about fairness. You might just
>as easily say this is about the family with the most disposable income.
>If you structure your HOA dues so that everyone can reasonably pay them,
>(again, we've done this for 10 years) there's absolutely no reason why
>any particular family would block consensus on the basis of their
>inability to pay. And since it seems to bear repeating, I'm not talking
>about items that cost 100 bucks, either. We've paid for many such things
>without consensus.

>What price is too high to pay for equality? Shall we just throw out the
>idea of consensus entirely because you think it might be inconvenient?



-- 
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racheli [at] sonoracohousing.com (Racheli Gai)
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