Cohousing-L Mailing List: Inter-generational Integration efforts

[Becky M. Pulito (Becky]

Hello!  I have a question to pose mainly geared towards established (aka,
built and moved-in) communities.  But if you have an opinion or idea, and
you are pre-move-in, I am of course interested in your information as well.
Bear with me. I cannot find a way to ask this question in a simple sentence
or two, so here goes.

 

I am interested to know what, if anything, your community did to prepare
your members for living together in community, particularly in regards to
children.  Did you hold a discussion about expectations, concerns, requests?
If you have policies or guidelines addressing concerns around children
specifically, did you formulate them before move-in, and if so, how?  And if
you intentionally did not create such policy/guidelines, what was your
reasoning?  How did you learn what the wants and needs were within your
membership?  How did you address such a delicate subject?

 

We have families with children, and we have couples and singles without
children.  We haven't expressly communicated about any expectations or
concerns we may have.  I'm sure we all have different ideas of "the way
things will be".  We need to communicate.  We are having a hard time finding
a good way to do that.  Our meetings have a distinctly businesslike feel, so
we are having difficulty figuring out how a discussion such as this could
fit into our typical meeting structure.  We've considered creative ways of
integrating adults and children in certain activities, but some members
bristle at the idea of forced or artificial integration.  How to smooth the
communication pathways and figure out. whatever we need to figure out??

 

Many thanks,

~Becky, Camelot Cohousing, Berlin, MA