Cohousing-L Mailing List: When only part of the group wants to discuss issues.

[Sharon Villines (sharonvillines]

> relating to community work.  A few people decided not to attend.  One of
> them told me that in cohousing we don't have any business discussing
> people's values, or defining common ground around this or other
> issues.  
> It's my sense that this harks back to a fear that if we discuss "values",
> it somehow entails an effort to *impose* values, or that perhaps
> this might lead to writing some kind of a manifesto next...

Others on the list must know more about this than I do, but in family
therapy this problem is found all the time. If a family therapist waited
until all members of a family agreed to participate in family therapy, there
would be much less therapy.

What they do is begin with those who are willing to begin, and keep the
doors open to the others. When the ground starts shifting, either the others
work out their issues without attending the sessions or they begin to attend
to see what is going on.

Sharon
-- 
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
Where the watering brigades are out to save the sod and all the new plants
we have, the 40 or so bikes are gradually being stolen or tucked away, the
final construction details are being taken care of, we survived our ribbon
cutting with great fanfare, hosted the neighborhood house and garden tour,
used the dishwasher several times, got all the security systems (sort of)
working with 86 different codes (parking gate + commonhouse), passed our
first budget in an excellently executed process, and may actually soon have
recycling bins large enough to hold all our recycling for a once a week pick
up. We must recycle 3 times what most apartment complexes recycle. It
overflows, and overflows, and overflows. Now the total capacity of our
recycling mini-dumpsters is the same as our trash dumpster, though the
trash/garbage is picked up twice a week.


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