Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: guidlines on consensus acceptance of new members

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

Coreen Plewa <plewac [at] msn.com>
is the author of the message below.
It was posted by Fred the Cohousing-L list manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org>
after converting 2 attachments to text and posting them on web page.
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Please see the Member Policy at our website http://www.ElderGrace.org and
the two forms ... [ in file at http://l.cohousing.org/eldgrace.txt ].

We try to have several existing members meet with the prospective member
but we don't "vote" anyone out.  People seem to self select out if they
don't like what they have heard or read. Coreen

-----Original Message-----
From: rdorfman [at] mindspring.com [mailto:rdorfman [at] mindspring.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2006 11:45 AM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: [C-L]_ guidlines on consensus acceptance of new members

We have a site and are still in very early development stages, but have been
meeting long enough to form a cohesive group of about 12 households.

We are anticipating a number of new poeple to join soon and are putting
together our guildlines for intake of new members.  These guidelines spell
out what a household needs to do financially and operationally (attending
meetings, committes etc) to become an equity member.

One question we have is whether to leave the final inclusion decision to
"self-selection", or to include some sort of provision for the current group
members to have some say in who can come in to the group.  The concern is
that with self-selection, someone with the time and $$ could insert
themselves into the group, even if they have very different ideas about what
cohousing should be.

Any insight as to how this has been handled appreciated.

thanks
Ron Dorfman
North Oakland Cohousing