Cohousing-L Mailing List: non-participants in the consensus process

[Leah (drsweetie]

Hi everyone! Here at Fordyce Street cohousing we recently had a consensus 
decision about something that had some emotions around it and a few people 
decided not to put up any kind of card for the decision-making process. Without 
getting into too many details, the actual decision we were making was not where 
the emotions lay. We were deciding on an improvement that we could make at low 
cost to our low income participants. Some "free market" participants had 
already spent 4 times as much on the same benefit and could not have the low 
cost option, while others had opted out of the upgrade because of the cost and 
would have done it if it were the lower price. I don't think anyone felt any 
negative feelings about the low income participants getting this "great deal" 
but had personal feelings about the fact that they could not have it and 
therefore decided not to participate at all in the decision making. This made 
us wonder -is it really consensus if poeple are not participating
 when they are sitting right there in the room? 
 
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