Cohousing-L Mailing List: Dimensions of Diversity & Need for Policies

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

In an off-list discussion this morning, I started thinking about diversity.
The topic under discussion was how explicit do policies need to be and the
discussion was with a cohouser from a smaller community than Takoma Village.

My point was the greater the diversity of the group, the greater the need
for making policies explicit. But like business plans, it's the process of
developing the policy that is important, not the piece of paper.

Understanding each others assumptions is the key and writing policies is
what gets people's attention. Otherwise they don't focus. And we have a very
wide range of people here. For example:

Many of our households are owned by people who have never owned a piece of
property before or run a household larger than themselves and room-mate
similar to themselves. They have no concept of what maintaining the
landscaping requires or why monitoring sewer systems is important.

We have members who work for the World Bank, who demonstrate against it, AND
who serve in the Army Reserves to police the demonstrators and protect the
workers! 

One of the people on our waiting list who is also active in the community
works for Army Intelligence while many of our members work for non-profit
groups that monitor and work against government and military actions.

Some of our members assume that our bylaws and condominium
contracts are just for the bank to get mortgages and that we didn't have to
abide by anything in the documents, and an administrative law judge who
hyperventilates when we don't follow them.

Some of  our members want the community to be open to the world all the time
as a demonstration project, others have no intention of living in a fishbowl
and don' t even like it when we make lists of all members phone numbers and
email numbers to distribute to other members lest it fall into the "wrong
hands."

Some think children should be under strict parental (or adult) supervision
until they are 12-14, and others want their children to be free in the
community and to walk to school with other children, not adults.

Before we moved in these issues were dormant. We are working it out very
well but the policy discussions are the way we get to the heart of things.
Changing a word may seem tedious to some, but that word change means the
world to someone else.

Do other communities have such a range of diversity? (I don't think we have
any Republicans, however.)

Sharon
Who is on to work on all our minutes. We also have reams of minutes.

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