Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Handling donations

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

We've moved from the initial "we'll take anything!" stage when the CH 
was new and needed everything and members still had a lot of stuff 
from their own move-ins to unload, to now requiring prior approval 
from the Common House Committee. If some new item were to just show 
up, the committee would decide if it should stay or go. If someone 
were to place overly restrictive conditions on some item, I expect 
the Committee would say "no thanks".

No one has donated anything as valuable (and problematic) as a hot 
tub, although we did accept a piano that requires us to pay for 
tuning it on some regular basis.

The CH kitchen is often the site of unprovoked donations of items of 
dubious usefulness, which may end up on our monthly giveaway bench if 
the Kitchen Subcommittee feels these items don't deserve to take up 
space in the kitchen. (And it has happened that some good-citizen 
member sees such an item on the giveaway bench and kindly donates it 
to the kitchen all over again. It's like the cat came back, the very next day.)

    Muriel at Shadowlake Village Cohousing, Blacksburg VA