Cohousing-L Mailing List: Cohousing Conference-Work Participation

[Becky Schaller (bschaller]

Today I finally returned from the Cohousing Conference and I now have a
little time to write a bit of my reflections about the conference.

First, I'd like to thank the members of The Cohousing Association of the
United States (I hope I've learned the name correctly.) for putting on this
conference. Obviously a lot of people put a lot of time into it.  I found it
inspiring in many ways.

One of the issues I wanted to learn more about at the conference was about
work paricipation.  This is not a report about what I learned from the
conference.  Rather, it is a  compilation of reflections I've had on the
subject since the conference began.  It is based on what I learned at one of
the sessions at the conference, the tour on Thursday, personal
conversations, a book I just finished on classroom discipline, and a few
miscellaneous thoughts of my own.  For reasons of simplicity, I'm not giving
credit here to anyone.  I'm open to being corrected on this.

One of the things I've learned in the last few weeks is that the question,
How do you encourage more people to participate in community work with more
joy and less resentment? is one that has many answers and there is probably
not a best answer for every community.  I have begun to place different
answers into different groups.   For purposes of easier communication, it
seems convenient to name these different groups.   Therefore, I'll call the
first group The Proactive Response.  The second group, I'll call the Neutral
Responses.  I'll call the third group the Negative Response.

The Proactive Response includes actions a community can take to encourage
everyone to participate.  It includes things such as the following:
** Develop a culture of appreciation so that people feel their work is
valued by others in the community.
** Develop a sense of each person being a valued member of the community.
** Develop a clear process of how various decisions are to be made.  This
will help prevent people from doing things they think are in the best
interest of the community only later to find others think they did not go
through the proper process.
** Find ways to make community work as enjoyable as possible.
** Be clear about what authority committees have to make decisions and to
act on those decisions.
** Be realistic in terms of what the community expects of people. (I think
this  was addressed more in depth a few weeks  ago in one of the messages on
this listserv.)
** At various times, some communities will have one or more people who need
to be excused from the regular community work expectations.  Be clear about
how this is done.
** Be clear about what is considered community work and what is something
else like being a good neighbor and how each is viewed toward work
participation.


The Neutral Response includes actions that I think are not necessarily
proactive or negative.  It includes things like the following:
** Designate one community job as The Nudger.  This is a job that rotates
about every six months.  This person's job is to go to different people who
are not participating and asking them what's going on. They then talk with
the person to find ways to help them meet the work participation
expectations.  This might mean changing the amount of work, the type of
work, providing some kind of group childcare, or something else.
** Devise a method of keeping track of the work people do.  Depending on how
this is done, perhaps it could be in the Proactive Response Category. It
probably could also be in the Reaction Response Category.  There is a wide
continuum of how this might be done.  At one end, people are simply asked to
keep track of the work they've done.  They may keep track in their own homes
or their own minds.   At the other end of the continuum, you could put up
some kind of chart in the common house where everyone could see how much
work each person has done.   Somewhere in between on the continuum, you
might have a notebook which would be kept by The Nudger and would not be
open for anyone to view.  Or you might choose to keep the notebook in the
common house where any community member could look at it,  but it wouldn't
be on one of the walls in the common house.
** You could relate work participation to money.  One way to do this is to
raise everyone's homeowner's fees.  Then those who do the required amount of
work would have their dues lowered accordingly.   One   difficulty with this
is that for some people it will be a hardship to pay the higher fees and
others will be able to afford to do so on a regular basis.

The Negative Responses includes things that are probably more uncomfortable
for those involved.  It includes things like the following:
** If there is no improvement after The Nudger or some one else talks to the
person, then several people meet with the person to talk about the fact that
they are not contributing work to the community.   Then you could have a
committee talk to the person.  Then you could discuss the situation at a
general meeting.
** You could ask the person to leave the community.   This doesn't mean the
person will, but I think simply asking the person is a fairly drastic act.

Clearly, most of these points could be elaborated upon and some of them are
more desirable than others. I wanted to give an overview of different
responses I've heard.  But the main point I wanted to make is that finding
ways to increase work participation may not necessarily mean rewarding and
punishing people for the amount of work they do or don't do in the
community.  There are a lot more ways to look at the issue.

It seems to me the more we can strenghten the first two groups, the less
likely we'll have of needing the last group.  But if we're totally reluctant
to visit the last group, at some point we may need to be prepared to live
with people who simply choose not to contribute to community work.

Becky Schaller
Sonora Cohousing
Tucson, Arizona



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