Cohousing-L Mailing List: re CH cooking rotation

[HeidiNYS (HeidiNYS]

Dear Becky,

We have meals 3x p week; two are 'team meals', and one a pot-luck.  It's 
about four yrs since move-in, tho our CH was built after move-in. 
Wstarted to have that kind of tracking system.  We still track, tho don't 
enforce any cooking requirement.  We do continue using sign-up/sign-in 
sheets, and these were being tallied monthly.  We naturally developed away 
from this.  We tend to often have great meals!!  Our biggest turn-outs are 
for our weekly sunday evening dinners.  Some folks are more available to 
cook, we have folks here who are retired, for example.  Some folks love 
cooking for group in commonhouse.  What we found was that when some folks 
were encouraged to cook tho they don't love to...... their efforts could 
perhaps be better used elsewhere.  
Not sure this is a whole lot of help!!    
Four years after move-in, we are likely to expand.  We started w 12 
households, and may expand to 18.  this will mean cooking for perhaps half 
again as many folks, and we may be asking for advice/recipes in cooking for a 
larger crowd!

One thing we do, w such questions, is to have quarterly Community Living Days 
on one particular topic.  This gives a chance to chew thru topics needing 
more time than a piece of a regular meeting.  Our next, for ex, will be on 
the question of work/money/aging in community in relation to ability to work. 
 We will be working in small groups and each group will have time to work on 
several scenarios pertaining to one topic.  Kind of like improv theatre.  
Then we'll re-gather and see where we are.  This was inspired by a specific 
issue that came up.
May be a way to decide similar big questions for youse!
best,
Ruth Hirsch
Cantines Island, Saugerties
In a message dated 5/28/02 1:01:35 PM, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org 
writes:

<< 
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 26 May 2002 18:49:22 -0700
From: Becky Schaller <bschaller [at] theriver.com>
To: <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Subject: [C-L]_Keeping Track of Common Meals
Reply-To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org

This fall we will have been eating common meals in the common house for one
year.  YEAH!  The way our system works is for every four times an adult or
adult guest in your household eats, then one person needs to sign up to cook
or  clean up.  The question is, How do we keep track of this?  We could have
one person keep track of it and issue periodic reports to everyone.  We
could let everyone keep track of it themselves on the honor system.  We've
also talked about having some kind of system which people would keep track
of in a notebook kept in the kitchen. They could then double check this
notebook themselves to see if they've forgotten to mark whether or not
they've marked down that they've eaten.

My question is, How do other communities keep track of how often people eat
and work?  Is it the honor system or some other system?

Becky Schaller
Sonora Cohousing
Tucson, Arizona >>

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