Cohousing-L Mailing List: group facilitation for financial issues

[fernselzer (fernselzer]

Hi everyone,
Our cohousing group, New Brighton Cohousing in Aptos, CA is in need of some 
group processing regarding money issues.


I'm just wondering if anyone has any suggestions for us.    We are not likely 
to spend a lot of money importing someone here, and we do know some local 
people who we have used before that we are considering, but if you can 
recommend anyone in the SF Bay area, we would be interested.
Do you have experiences processing overall money values and/or resolving 
long-term financial conflicts:   what was helpful?


Below are some of the questions/issues that we are  thinking about, but we will 
be trying to prioritize and narrow down in our next meeting in preparation for 
planning the training.  We are financially interdependent even more so than 
many communities because we are a TIC with a group loan.


Some issues:
A diversity of values, sense of trust, scarcity vs. abundance re: money.   
These issues have never been directly discussed, but are in the background and 
often foster creativity and compromise, but sometimes problematic.
 Some people may have chosen to live in our community mainly because it was 
affordable to buy in, while others were mainly attracted to the cohousing 
aspect.
 Some of our original plans were completely unhinged by the real estate bust of 
2008.  Now most of us are wanting to move forward with some of the improvements 
we had planned originally.  
 What to  do if someone can no longer afford to live here but doesn't want to 
leave even though it is holding us back from getting a better refinance. (this 
hasn't exactly happened, but could soon)
Financial situation and/or preference (and often we don't know which) causes 
some households to be unwilling to fund our recommended deferred maintenance 
and would rather have lower standards of upkeep or wait until something happens 
that must have a repair.
We are considering building a new unit in our community and how we would fund 
this and how we would use any profit, how much profit to build in, etc., are 
all in question and either stopping or really slowing down the pace of movement 
forward.


So you can see, there are a lot of possible ways for us to enter this 
conversation.  Any thoughts? I would appreciate any ideas or stories about your 
community processing around these issues.


Thanks
Fern
New Brighton Cohousing