Cohousing-L Mailing List: Making Community: Essential Ingredients

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Jack Sherwood  asked:
> In your experience with planning, designing and living
>in CoHousing, what are the ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS for establishing a caring,
>viable, energetic, cohesive, joyful community of people....?

1. A willingness to give service to each other individually and to the 
community as a whole.  Do things for each other, just because you want 
to.  Make cookies and give them out.  Give things away, and to the 
community without fanfaire or need for recognition.
2. Creating opportunities to share lives and history.  Talk about the 
events which made you who you are today, Share your childhoods, share 
your hopes and joys and also your dark side, the fears, the bad things 
which have happened to you.  The more you know about each others 
personal lives and history, then more you understand the little things 
which come up between you.
3. Create celebrations and events both for the community and for 
individuals. Don't let a birthday slip by unnoticed.  Have lots of 
parties. A rule of thumb: there should be twice as many parties as 
there are meetings.
4. Recognize peoples contributions and appreciate them publically.  
Give lots of postive strokes to each other, support and encourage each other.
5. Take a postive attitude towards things.  Take on a "lets try it out" 
attitude about new and scary endeavors.


>What roles or processes or structures need to be created?    What needs to be
done or agreed upon or in place or debated in order for a collection of
people chasing CoHousing as a concept to become a genuine community of
people, who act as a community?

Create processes for recognizing and dealing with conflicts.  Family 
counselors can offer good mediation skills.  Don't let personal styles, 
issues and conflicts get ignored or shoved under the rug, deal with 
them in an upfront and timely manner.

NO PRIVATE BITCHING.  If something is buggin you, you need to talk about it.

Sharing circles, a special environment where people can talk about 
their feelings work well to get things in the open and off peoples chests.