Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Guiding principles for dealing with leftovercontingency funds

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

Large group meetings are good places to understand the range of issues and
options. They are terrible decision making venues for most groups for
multi-faceted issues like this.

When you have a variety of options and opinions a good method is to straw
poll and see what comes out. A simple way to straw poll this issue as you
described it would be a survey with the choices you listed on  it.
1. Refund the excess
2. Donate to community approved capital improvements
3. Whatever other options that are reasonable. (donate some  ___fill in
amount)

Then take the survey door to door, gather the results from individuals. Then
you KNOW for sure how much money you will have in option #2, and also those
that want the excess back can get a check, the rest goes into whatever you
do for capital improvement funding. There is no meeting time required where
people have to be embarrassed about their choice, its a private donation,
the end result is a chunk of money for capital improvements, assuming
anybody chooses #2.

Large group meeting time is one of the WORSE places to try and decide stuff
like this. As much as you can, I would encourage you to take this kind of
stuff offline to small groups and individuals. There is no reason to have
much more large group discussion on this issue for your group, you seem to
have found the issues and ranges, now you just let individuals decide how
what they want to do with their chunk, no pressure, no audience, its a
personal choice.

In general, I would encourage to think about, what kinds of things are good
uses for large group meetings, and what things would make more sense decided
by small groups or individuals. The most common mistake in my opinion that
cohousing groups make, is they make force too many decisions to the large
group process, and they spend hours and hours and hours dealing with stuff
that a team could and should deal with.

I would council you to prioritize improvements by timeliness. What can be
put off to later? This is a great place to use a shelter scale technique.
http://www.ic.org/nica/Book/Techniques.htm
Using this technique you can make a list in 10 minutes if you set your
criteria up ahead of time. For example, you can set a threshold number of 6
on a scale of ten and then average all the responses, those at 6 or above
are first tier, all those below 6 are second tier. (This will make no sense
until you understand shelter scale process. Sorry)


Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood
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