Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: revisiting decisions

[MelaSilva (MelaSilva]

Are you fer it or agin' it, Marci?

What about the committees? If a committee has real problems with a decision,
they can formulate a new approach and bring it back to the group. Often they
will begin by saying "We are tired of the conflict we keep having to hear
about/extra work we have  due to this policy".

 Or,if it is really a new proposal, we sometimes take it on conditionally,
with the presenter saying "We will try it for a period (6 months, 2 weeks)
and then revisit." We have one member who, when a group decision is not to
his liking, often asks that we "revisit" the decision in a year to give him
time to whip up support.

If your community is plagued by making the same decison over and over, try
breaking it down into little parts and seeing where the problem lies. Maybe
it wasn't really a consensus decision, but made by default - there were no
good options presented.Or perhaps 2/3 is right on, but 1/3 is unduly
regulated or seems unfair to some folks.

Sometimes with a lot of new people, you need to "revisit" in small group
discussion instead of changing the policy. New people don't always know or
understand the reasons behind a policy.Many times they don't realize that we
already tried other options. Sometimes they are right - we tried things early
on, and we couldn't do it. But now we know each other better, and that idea
might work just fine.

Mela Silva
Southside Park
Sacramento CA