Cohousing-L Mailing List: Meals program

[Marcia Zuckerman (marciazuckerman]

Bay State Cohousing moved in 3.5 years ago, and started our meals program with 
a meal scheduled every eight days.  Head cooks, assistant cooks, and cleaners 
all signed up on the Gather program.  At the beginning, every meal was offered; 
there were many people eager to be cooks.  Now only about half the scheduled 
meal dates actually get filled with a team.  Sometimes we use those times for 
potlucks, sometimes nothing happens.

We’re considering a plan to create standing meals teams with everyone in the 
community who wants to participate.  A team would be assigned to each date.  
The teams would be big enough so that there would be people to lead, assist, 
and clean.  

I’d like to hear from people who run meals this way, or perhaps have other ways 
to get people to cook.  Many of us would like to eat together weekly and are 
sad that it’s not happening.  As a stopgap, we’ve decided that unfilled meal 
dates will be Bring Your Own Dinner for anyone who wants to eat together.

A few specific questions:  how big are the teams? what about people who want to 
eat occasionally; is there some way they can participate? do you have a set of 
recipes that are easy to make for large groups?

Thank you,
Marcia Zuckerman
Bay State Cohousing