Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Confict Resolution, cont.

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

You wrote:

> So, the question of the hour is - have any of you developed a process
> for
> expelling a member while the group is in the development process?
> Putting the development together requires everyone to pitch in
> with both a lot of effort and money, while putting all of it at
> significant risk.
> It's a very vulnerable time, and it seems better to deal with
> unsolvable conflicts during development, before people actually own
> homes.
>

We (N St Cohousing) have a process for removing the voting rights of a  
person with whom the community has an unbridgeable conflict.  I'm going  
from memory here, but I believe that it requires consensus of every  
single person in the community besides the person in question and their  
immediate domestic partners.  If I recall, it requires the active consent  
of everyone, not just the people that show up at a meeting - someone  
must go around and consult every community member who is in town at the  
time.  This process has never been used, but we agreed on it after a near  
miss experience taught us that we might need it someday.

Stuart Staniford-Chen
N St Cohousing.