Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Hiring community members

[Becky Schaller (beckys]

I think there is a whole book on the subject of hiring community
members.  Unfortunately, I think it
is yet to be written so it probably won't be of much help to anyone
right now.

We've hired community members for some major roles in the development of
this community and for that we've gotten excellent work and they've
given us great prices.  We not only benefited from their expertise, we
also got their commitment to the community mixed in right there with it.
 Many of the compliments we've gotten from outsiders have to do with the
paid work of community members.  However, I would caution you to be
proceed VERY cautiously.  While the potential benefits are not to be
overlooked, the potential for things going wrong is definitely there.

This is an email listserv and like any medium it has its limitations. 
It is not a good medium to give specific examples about a subject as
sensitive and controversial as community pain.  In my limited
conversations with members of other cohousing communities, one of the
greatest sources of
pain is at least partly the result of communities hiring their own
members.  It's never easy to fire anyone.  If for any reason you would
need to fire a community member, that could split the community.  
Difficulties that might otherwise be a relatively simple problem to be resolved
between an employer and employee has the potential of becoming a
community issue.  Everyone is then put into a difficult situation.
Simply by choosing to live in community, you are choosing to have
relationships with your neighbors that are far more complex and
complicated than you or they have probably ever experienced with so many
people.  Hiring community members adds another level of complexity.  My
guess is that hiring community members to perform smaller jobs is less
risky than hiring them for larger jobs.

I don't know how many painful stories there are about communities hiring
their own members.  From all I have heard, I am guessing that the vast
majority of the time, things go well - perhaps even extremely well.  But
just because you are not reading much about the difficult situations
here on this listserv, that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Becky Schaller
Sonora Cohousing
Tucson, Arizona
Where we are soon going to be telling the story of our community for my
going away party.  That's twelve years from the first slideshow.