Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Consensus Training

[Denise Cote' (denise]

Mac Thomson wrote:

>Our group is looking into doing some consensus training in order to 
>prepare for the big decisions that lie ahead.  Have other groups had 
>formal consensus training or did you just kind of work it out as you 
>went along?  Who trained you in consensus and would you recommend them?  
>Are you glad you had the training?

At Geneva we never had a formal training, but Buzz Burrell and I took a 
workshop with Carolyn Estes on facilitating consensus that was inspiring. 
We were able to share what we learned with the group and use that 
knowledge to fine-tune our decision-making process.  We also had 
consensus facilitator-in-training Diana Christian facilitate a couple of 
meetings to help us get a feeling for a more structured process than what 
we had been using.

I highly recommend Carolyn Estes as a trainer.  She is a wise woman who 
has been living with consensus since before most of us were born.  Her 
workshops are long and intensive, so you may want to send just a couple 
of members, but apparently she also does less intensive seminars for 
larger groups--I hear she did one recently at Nyland.  Carolyn lives at 
Alpha Farm, Deadwood, OR  97430, (503) 964-5102.

Denise
Geneva Community, Lyons, Colorado.  
There's a public meeting tonight in which we inform our neighbors of a 
proposal to put two-thirds of our land into a conservation easement in 
exchange for two additional homesites in a low-impact housing 
cluster--wish us luck!  If this pilot project is successful, other 
landowners in the county will have incentives to develop in an 
ecologically sustainable manner and to create conservation easements 
without losing value.  It's a win-win!

Denise Cote'
Boulder, Colorado
denise [at] diac.com