Cohousing-L Mailing List: Mutual accountability in cohousing — a practical question

[Kathryn Lowry (kathryn.lowry]

Hi all,

I’m writing with a question based on my experience at Daybreak Cohousing in
Portland and how mutual accountability is understood in practice.

Daybreak’s stated values define mutual accountability as including
transparency and fairness in procedures and balancing individual and
community needs. In practice, it’s often framed as “each person doing their
equal part.”

Currently, ice melt has been placed in containers outside every unit for
individual use. I have not raised concerns about foreseeable risks (such as
children accessing it), because the community has a long history of
asserting that failure to keep children away from products labeled “keep
out of reach of children” is a supervision issue, not a matter of community
safety or shared design.

That history includes a prior situation where concerns about toys in common
areas, raised shortly after I had knee surgery, were met by discouraging
collaborative solutions and escalating the matter through child welfare
reporting rather than addressing it as a shared governance or accessibility
issue.

My questions are:


   -

   In cohousing, does mutual accountability mean parallel individual
   responsibility, or shared accountability for the outcomes of collective
   decisions about common spaces?
   -

   How do communities prevent “collective responsibility” from becoming
   individual blame when the group controls the system?

I’d appreciate perspectives and examples from other communities.

Best,

Kathryn Lowry