Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: work and expectations

[Jennifer McCoy (jmccoy]

Rob Sandelin wrote:

"I reccomend that communties that are built making a mimimum hourly
requirement of all members, and then charging $10 and hour for those
that do not participate the required hours. Then you can use the $10 an
hour to hire somebody else, or let the non-participant pay someone else
directly the $10 an hour to do their minimum hours for them."

At Lake Claire in Atlanta, we too have been struggling with how to
encourage participation in committee work, regular maintenance chores,
and new improvements to the newly-built community.  The recent
discussion has been very helpful, but also somewhat discouraging.  One
comment was that in a community, one might see 1/3 active workers, 1/3
intermittent workers, and 1/3 rarely participate. We've seen that here
too. While I don't think it's possible to equal out the workload
completely, or even fair to ask everyone to meet the level of the
highest-energy persons, we are looking for ways to get some minimum
participation.

My questions:  At Sharingwood, with the $10/hour penalty for not meeting
minimum requirements, do people voluntarily pay that fine?  I imagine
there is no other real enforcement mechanism. Does it seem to encourage
participation?  For those who post some sort of timekeeping system, is
the peer pressure enough to encourage participation?  

Jennifer McCoy
Lake Claire, Atlanta
jmccoy [at] gsu.edu