Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: the individual/group teeter totter

[Rob Sandelin (Floriferous]

Denise raises two related questions in my mind: First, how does a
community avoid meeting overload? Even a meeting junkie can get burned
out in coho decision making, big time, real fast. We've all heard the
horror stories. Is there a way to avoid this?

Robs broken record: Yes, get trained as a group in how to run effective 
meetings. Most groups are very bad at group meetings, all they need to get 
better and actually good, is training, tips, tricks and skills.  This skills 
are all learnable and have a dramatic impact on improving your meetings. If it 
takes three meetings to make decisions, you could use some training on how to 
run effective meetings.

(BTW, my definition of effective meeting is where people feel excited about 
the work and the group, get work accomplished, feel safe and respected and 
willing to take risks because they trust the group, and leave the meeting 
feeling delighted to be part of the group.)  When you have effective meetings, 
people look forward to the meetings, they don't dread them.

Secondly, does the condo model lend itself to more efficient cohousing
decision procedures? Evidently not in all cases: Denise's condo-type
community is evidence that a seemingly simple and straightforward task
of selecting a name can drag on and on and on ... What hope have we
for ever resolving more sensitive issues in more tightly knit
organizations?

The condo model has nothing to do with it. Effective groups resolve all manner 
of sensitive issues. Ineffective groups struggle and struggle and struggle 
because they do not have the tools to work with and they suffer from poorly 
trained facilitators. 

My preferences lean toward the private-property, private-enterprise
end of the spectrum. But I want to live in community, out in the
country, clustered around a group of non-residential amenities like a
school, a preventive medicine health center, a cafeteria/restaurant,
and an organic CSA farm. Yes, this is a dream, but I wonder if anyone
has come close to it and can help others move in that direction?

Given that, what can we do to plan and develop a coho/ecovillage that
avoids the extreme of the isolationist business-as-usual subdivision
and the extreme of total community immersion where one has to go to
committee for every little thing? How can we plan, develop and operate
community amenities (school, health center, telecenter, eating
facility, farm) and avoid death by committee?

You can't avoid having teams make decisions if you really want to live in a 
community, However those teams can be easily empowered to have control over 
what they do, with some oversite board keeping track and pulling in other 
interested parties as needed. But to set this up, you do need trust, which you 
will not have unless you run effective meetings and have an excellent 
communications program.

Is there a mixture of private ownership/enterprise and community
commitment that works? Got any living examples?

Pick up the currently issue of Communities Magazine, this issues theme is work 
in community and its full of examples of what you are talking about.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood
Northwest Intentional Communities Association