Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing-L Digest, Vol 123, Issue 13

[Barbara Moulton (bcmhorse]

About Covenants, or CC&R’s as we call them in California:  I suggest you take 
the time to think them through fairly carefully, anticipating that your 
community will morph over time.  You want them to be consistent not only with 
the way you hope to operate at the outset, but also designed to work well in 
the likely case that your community will, over time have new faces and lose 
some of the early ones, and that needs and attitudes may shift.  Ditto your 
by-laws.  We just spent a year and a half (or was it two?) revising our bylaws, 
and we still need to codify our consensus policy because we were persuaded that 
we need some sort of majority rule in the case of unanticipated difficulties 
working with each other or with new members who perhaps don’t exactly share the 
same process values needed to make consensus (as in unanimity) work.

Even now that our by-laws are pretty good, we’re still stuck with our original 
CC&R’s which in some cases, don’t match our needs very well.  So get good legal 
and community advice.  We found a lawyer who lives in intentional community, 
and we have had a training with Tim Hartnett, the author of Consensus-Oriented 
Decision Making, to get us started reworking our consensus policy.

It’s tedious, but I think you’ll be much happier if you do a good job up front.


Barbara Moulton
Yulupa Cohousing
Santa Rosa, CA 95405
707-544-4614
bcmhorse [at] sonic.net




On Apr 8, 2014, at 3:16 AM, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org wrote:

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>   1. Covenants Guidelines (Shari Hirst)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 20:14:34 -0600
> From: "Shari Hirst" <sharihirst13 [at] gmail.com>
> Subject: [C-L]_ Covenants Guidelines
> To: "Cohousing-L" <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
> Message-ID: <AEC561E806A84FF8B9546571C3081AEE@warmfeelings>
> Content-Type: text/plain;     charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> We are a young community and are working on drafting our Covenant 
> regulations.  Any information older communities can send us regarding basic 
> generic guidelines, would be very much appreciated.  This would be guidelines 
> regarding our property in common.
> 
> Thank you-
> Shari Hirst
> Sand River Cohousing
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
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> End of Cohousing-L Digest, Vol 123, Issue 13
> ********************************************
>