Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: sweat equity

[Hungerford, David (dghungerford]

The recent discussions on sweat equity bring to mind some experiences we at 
Muir Commons have had.  The various categorizations people have suggested in 
this forum, "doers" and "talkers,"  "shovel ornaments,"  those "don't do a 
whole lot," that "minority which does the most," and those who 
"fluctuate between doing lots and doing little,"  all have their share of 
truth, in my experience.  So, some anecdotes, without any intended pretention 
to advice:

*Our meals committee actually split at one point into two committees, the 
"doers" and the "talkers" (no kidding, and yes, it was to some extent 
tongue-in-cheek). The doers went to price club, ordered bulk items, cleaned 
out the refrigerator, organized the shelves and cabinets and so on.  The 
"talkers" took the community pulse on issues like meal times, kid food, 
participation guidelines, exceptions to the guidelines, and developed 
proposals to bring to the group.  While those versions of the committee 
no longer exist in that form (i guess the doers never met and so drifted 
away, and the talkers ran out of things to talk about :-) ) they explicitly 
acknowledged that there are different kinds of work, that people contribute 
in different ways, and that everyone's contributions are valuable.

*Our "sweat equity" contribution to construction was to do the landscaping 
for the entire site. Our site was low, so the developers had built up the 
ground with solid clay from another area of the subdivision. They 
left the site "rough graded" which means that we moved into a sea of dirt.  
Now, this was to our benefit.  They had a landscaping budget, but it would 
have been minimal, so we took the money and used what we saved on labor to 
put in more elaborate landscaping, buy tools, and provide seed money for our 
shop.  We all agreed to a 54-hour per adult requirement (using that term), 
many people did double that, or more.  Others made their hours and quit.  
Still others were stingy with their work, and generous with their 
self-reported hours. We dug ditches for the irrigations system 
in August, when it hadn't rained for over 3 months, with picks and shovels in 
the shadeless 100 degree heat.  We ground our roto-tiller blades to 
nubs on concrete-hard clay, then we used wheel barrows to move yard after 
yard of soil amendments around the site, then we tilled it in.  It ceased 
being a "character building" experience early on.  The s**t hit the fan when 
someone posted a record of work hours on the common house door.  And the 
undercurrents of the anger, resentment, and community-rifting that engendered 
still remain (terms like "free-rider" are sometimes bandied about) .  Even 
now, three years later, it's still difficult to get a work day together, and 
people have become very jealous of their time.  We've ended up paying for a 
lot of work around the site rather than using those opportunities to save 
money and build community.  There's something of a lesson in there, even 
though our particular circumstances may make this experience unique.  I don't 
mean to overemphasize the negative; our site is beautiful, and we're very 
proud of what we accomplished; but I do believe that the experience 
deeply damaged our community. Maybe we shouldn't have taken on such a big 
task.  Maybe we expected too much of ourselves.  Maybe we should have 
realized at the beginning that what's equitable is not always the same as 
what is equal (e.g. work hours).

enough rambling.

David Hungerford
dghungerford [at] ucdavis.edu

 
   
 
 
 



(note: is there a word for people who are participating in these 
net discussions, e.g. "netters"  or "talkers" or "we" since the 
discussion is something to which we all contribute, which could 
substitute for "people . . . in this forum" in the previous sentence?)