Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: shared work agreements in cohousing communities

[Tree Bressen (tree]

Dear Rachael,

>         Some specific questions-

Hi, i am a group facilitator who's worked with a bunch of cohousing 
communities, including working with several specifically on work policy.

From what i've seen, all the options in your list are utilized somewhere; 
that is to say, i've seen places with a suggested amount of hours and 
without; voluntary and mandatory; a broad description of what counts as 
work and a more limited one; a variety of accountability systems; 
exemptions for life transitions; and so on.  I think renters usually 
contribute about as much as members.

>Can you suggest  processes that we can do at the community meeting (we 
will have two one hour slots at the two meetings in June) that will help to 
resolve some of these issues?

First of all, you should know that work policy is a huge item for most 
groups, and you can expect to spend many hours both in and outside of 
community meeting before a final policy is agreed to.  Two 1-hour slots is 
a nice opening, but i'd be surprised if it was enough time to create even 
the beginnings of a policy.  Some ideas of what to do with that time are:

1. Show the group your list of questions that you sent to the list, and ask 
them if any main *questions* are missing.  (People will want to go into 
answering the questions, but that's premature.)  You might be able to do 
this over email in advance too.

2. Put the questions roughly in priority order to address.  (The committee 
can try to do this, or the group can use multivoting.)

3a. At this point, you could distribute a written survey outside the 
meeting to get an initial sense of where people are at on the answers to 
those questions.

3b. Another tack is to choose one question to work with in the meeting, and 
do a spectrum mapping with paired dialogues.  That is, let's say you choose 
the question of whether the work expectation should be mandatory or 
voluntary.  Ask everyone to stand up and locate themselves on a line across 
the middle of the room, with folks who strongly support mandatory at one 
end and folks who strongly support voluntary at the other.  Once everyone 
is lined up, find the halfway point in the line, and fold the line in half 
so that the people at each end are now near each other.  Have everyone pair 
off with someone across from them so that people are dialoguing with those 
who have different views (or if they are in the middle of the spectrum, 
perhaps people with similar views), and give them 10 min. to talk.  Then 
have people go back to their seats and say what they learned from the 
discussion, or maybe have them line up a second time as positions may have 
shifted.

4. Another spectrum map or survey question that might be useful is to find 
out how many hours people are now putting in, and how many they'd ideally 
like to be putting in.

5. Once you've gathered info and had some discussion, start your policy 
from where the most agreement is, and then work your way through the rest 
of the issues.  If there is no agreement at all, then start working on the 
biggest disagreement and explore that.  Go underneath people's positions to 
find out how they feel and why, what they think or are afraid will happen, 
and so on.

6. It can also be useful to share a few sample policies from other coho 
groups as background research.

Good luck!  Cheers,

--Tree



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