Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Community meetings - frequency?

[Tree Bressen (tree]

Hi,

> My question is: Given the following information, what, in your experience, 
> would be a 'next step' in terms of meeting frequency?
>
> Right now we have 1 resident family and 5 families designing and 
> building.  All total, there will be 18 households.  Each family bought a 
> lot and is designing and "building" their own home.  [The kind of 
> 'building' that means hiring a builder : )  ]
>
> There have been monthly,3 hour meetings.  Given our legal structure, 
> decisions are made by the LLC and Board of Directors.  The agenda items 
> for the community meetings are individual mailboxes, party planning, trash 
> collection, and scheduling tractor use.  We are to review our community 
> mission statement and also discuss common land uses.

I'm not quite clear from this description whether there are other LLC or 
BoD meetings that happen beyond the 3 hours/month community meetings?  The 
agenda items you listed (mailboxes, party planning, etc.) sound pretty 
light for a community meeting, if that's all there is to discuss then i can 
understand some people suggesting lower meeting frequency.  Reviewing the 
mission statement and discussing common land uses sound more substantial to 
me.

Basically what i'd wonder is: what are the main areas of sharing in the 
community you are developing, and have those areas been worked out 
sufficiently?  For example, with a lot development model, presumably you 
don't need to talk over individual unit design, but you might still need to 
discuss common house functions, food sharing, or pets.  While some details 
may make more sense to work out once residents are on site together, other 
things can be really hard to put into place if you don't agree beforehand 
and start immediately upon move-in--for example, if your group wants every 
adult to help cook in common meals (as they do at Doyle St. in Emeryville), 
that's a hard agreement to create later.

Is your process clear, do you know how decisions will be made, and are you 
building skills for working out conflicts with each other?

>One person proposed 90 days between meetings and greater communication on 
email or bulletin board.

Email might work fine for scheduling tractor use and other purely 
logistical matters.  I suggest avoiding it for topics that people have 
feelings about.

In addition to the great community-building ideas others sent in, i'd add 
having regular sharing circles where people can unburden their hearts about 
the challenges of the building and development process.  This phase of 
creating community is hugely stressful and i think it helps to offer people 
social support to get through it.

At my home co-op (where we hold meetings weekly of our 9 residents), every 
3rd meeting is what we call a "floofy" meeting.  Floofy meetings are 
designed to either help us get to know each other better or work through a 
big issue that doesn't easily fit into regular meeting agenda time.  The 
position of "floofymeister" rotates evenly through all members, and that 
person mostly determines what that particular floofy meeting will consist 
of.  I see these meetings as very successful in helping create more 
positive energy in the group; recently i noticed a time when i was feeling 
rather ornery and disconnected from my housemates and then after the floofy 
meeting i felt much more content.

Cheers,

--Tree



-----------------------------------------------

Tree Bressen
1680 Walnut St.
Eugene, OR 97403
(541) 484-1156
tree [at] ic.org
http://www.treegroup.info