Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: More-equal advertising

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Chris Biow wrote:

>This all depends upon context. If your goal is diversity and you
>advertise in diverse ways, then there is certainly nothing wrong
>with any one ad in a medium that fails to cover a Fair Housing
>protected class (race, color, religion, national origin, sex,
>familial status, handicapped status, per Civil Rights Act 1968 as
>amended 1988). However, if your advertisements were exclusively
>or disproportionately in such media, and you had expressed the
>intention of using this tactic to fill a coho development
>primarily with, say, families with children, I believe this would
>constitute "discriminatory advertising". It could certainly earn
>you a ruinous government investigation.

So to extract something practical from all this  it seems that 
recruitment committees need to hold their cards close to their chests 
so to speak when selecting how to recruit the people you want.  The 
only way anyone is going to know how and where you advertise is if 
someone tells them.  So the practical advise might be to not announce 
recruitment intentions at general meetings, keep that to the committee 
detail, with a broad goal of diversity for the large group.  This way 
the odds of problems in this regard, which are pretty small to start 
with, actually get smaller with the smaller number of people who know 
about or are involved in the actual recruitment "plan."  This makes 
good organizational sense anyway.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood