Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Work or Pay -- Your Choice

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

We do a version of this with our monthly commonhouse deep cleaning tasks.
People are charged an extra $60 per year,($5 a month of their assessment)
which they can earn back by doing a 4 hour commonhouse cleaning shift once a
year, or simply pay. Each year you are assigned a month to clean, and each
month there is a deep clean task list. Those that chose to pay and not work,
then in effect hire others who are willing to do their shift. We have a list
of those who are willing to do this work (2 people, who make about $300 a
year each).

The commonhouse gets deep cleaned, which is a set of tasks not normally done
with dinner clean up (wash windows, clean gutters, wipe down walls, etc.)
and people get to choose. If there were no community member willing to do
the chore, we can hire an outside cleaning service with the money, although
we have not yet done this.

We did a similar system, pay or work, with a big patio installation project
and it seemed to work out well in terms of getting people out to do a big
physical work task.

I would think this kind of system would work out well with any kind of
building maintenance work. I think the key is bidding it out to see how much
it costs for somebody else to do the job so you know how much to charge.

Rob Sandelin
South Snohomish County at the headwaters of Ricci Creek
Sky Valley Environments  <http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm>
Field skills training for student naturalists
Floriferous [at] msn.com


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