Cohousing-L Mailing List: Screening Potential Members

[DCS (cdm]

The wonderful thing about cohousing is the commitment we make to each
other: a commitment to care, to build, to TRUST.  We open our hearts and
our homes to each other and the result is an incredible, precious
connection to each other.

Wow, I'm really sticking myself in it with the rest of this note:

Any group that opens itself up to the upside of trust leaves itself wide
open to the downside of being taken advantage of by the rare individual
who might be overly interested in taking from the community. I believe
this can take the form of emotional bondage to one person's "continuing
saga", or in the form of downright fraud or criminal activity.

In regards to "emotional bondage", I saw this happen in our Unitarian
Universalist congregation several times over several years and it never
diminished my commitment to the community, but it did teach me that
commitment is an action verb. (People who are committed to the community
usually give to the community in some way other than obvious,
self-serving ways.) Even people who have no conscious intention to strip
a group of its energy, faith, money, time, etc. sometimes do. I'm not
talking about a person who falls gravely ill or those times in life when
things just can't seem to take a right turn and you really need support,
love, caring and patience from your community. (Most people only have
life together in intermittent bursts anyway.) But there are some people
who have just never left behind the politics and drama of junior high,
and due to the closer-than-average bonds many cohousers make with each
other, I think our neighborhoods provide a ready stage for the play. But
I doubt there's a whole lot you can do about screening for that. It's
all a learning experience anyway.

As far as criminal activity and especially abuse of children goes,
screening for felonies is probably legal where you live, and your county
probably has a sex offender registry in place, and it's perhaps even
accessible via the web. In the end, regardless of whether it's ethically
right to find out if someone has molested children in the past, and
regardless of whether your group adopts a policy requiring screening,
there's probably nothing preventing individuals in your neighborhood
from doing the research themselves and then bringing it up as an issue
to the HOA. 

I don't envy you if it turns out a potential buyer has been convicted of
a sex crime, a member brings that bit of info to a meeting, and you are
put in the position of saying "Yes, I want them to move in anyway - I
value their rehabilitation and I want to support their attempt to
change. And, I'm willing to bet your children and mine that they won't
backslide." You'd get into how long ago was the conviction, how old were
the children or adults, what was the nature of the crime. What about
people who are arrested but not convicted because lack of evidence? What
about people who are unjustly convicted? Yuck, we don't have a screening
policy and never discussed it - ignorance must be bliss (she said
ironically.)

What about convictions for crimes that don't pose an outright threat to
your community or its members? What about a parent convicted of child
abuse who finally has her children back and could use the support
network to stay on the path? What about a person who writes bad checks?
What about a convicted drunk driver? What about a shoplifter? What about
the person whose husband died under mysterious circumstances, and now
she's finally got enough money to live in that cohousing neighborhood
she's always dreamed of? And then what if he mysteriously reappeared and
.. oh, wait, that was a movie. Never mind.

It is true that in the end the best protection for your kids is that
they feel loved and secure with you and will tell you when they feel
uncomfortable. You can't protect them or yourself from everything, and
Cohousing is not Utopia.

Christine Della Maggiora
Not Necessarily Representing the Views of
Eno Commons Cohousing
Durham NC