Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Should individual "sponsorship" be allowed of communityproperty?

[Jim Snyder-Grant (jimsg]

I can't say I've read every entry on this topic -- I've been away from the
list for a while -- but I did want to add one success story to the list,
with some details.

Our common house was built a couple of years after the rest of the
community - a result of a painful decision related to cost overruns. The
budget for the common house had been set and agreed to some time before, as
part of our over-all (too-small, it turned out) budget. We had also been
through extensive programming & preliminary design development back in more
optimistic times, and we had a good sense of the priorities of the group.

When it came time to focus on the design of the common house, many
households were still feeling the crunch of the higher-than-expected housing
prices. At the same time, when we priced out our original design, it was way
over our budget.  So first we did what we could in terms of design: scaled
it back in size & complexity, and then started carving away at the stuff
that could be carved away at.

But we were still left with a big gap, and with the knowledge that some
households did have extra money.

We ended up tapping that resource in three stages:

1) We had a round of gift-giving where the common house committee listed the
stuff that had been cut out that could be added back in with financial
support, along with price tags.  We accepted donations for specific items. A
smaller subset of the committee did the actual tallying - we decided to keep
the names private.

2) We had another round of gift-giving where we simply asked for donations,
where the common house committee would decide how to use the money based on
data form programming, some supplemental polling, and thinking about what
options would fit together.

3) When we started collecting the already-agreed-on amounts for the base
budget, a different group set up a loan fund, to help out those who figured
they couldn't pay the money needed by the time it was due. These
low-interest loans were paid off over the next 3 years.

The process was not easy, but it worked. Our common house ended up costing
more than 50% over the base budget, and that difference was made up for by
the donations. I'm very glad we did not try to stick with the original
budget.

We were concerned that the first round of donations would create some sort
of inequities, but we dealt with it in a few ways:
1) The options for donations were prepare by the committee to match what
programming had already revealed as important to the group.
2) Anonymity was maintained, so that the possibly negative social aspects of
who-donated-for-what weren't activated.
3) We had that round of general fundraising, to fill in any odd 'gaps'
created by the first process. No one, for example, gave money for certain
materials upgrade that made no visible difference, but helped things last
longer. The second round helped fill some of those gaps.


We have not tried using any variants of this process with our annual budget
process, but I'd like to explore that idea with my neighbors for next year..
With our landscaping, in particular, there is a big gap between the minimum
we need to do to protect our investment, and what many might like to do to
increase the natural beauty of the place.


-Jim

--
Jim Snyder-Grant
jimsg [at] newview.org
18 Half Moon Hill
Acton MA 01720
New View Cohousing
http://www.newview.org

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