Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Getting Buy-In on Decisions

[Tree Bressen (tree]

Hi,

> As time goes on, we are experiencing less and less interest in Membership
> meetings.  To practice the community consensus way of making decisions and
> have the decisions be representative of the wishes of the community, it is
> best to have a quorum.
> [snip]
> To solve this problem, we have adopted a procedure whereby all decisions
> made in our Membership meetings, whether or not a quorum is present, are
> sent to the Board of Directors for ratification.  Does anybody see any
> reason why this is bad thing to do?

If participation is low, rather than focusing on legalities, i'd think a 
more useful inquiry would be how to improve the quality of the meetings so 
that more people would choose to participate.  Do people listen well to 
each other at the meetings?  Is the tone one of kindness, respect, and 
thoughtful consideration?  Are the topics discussed at the meetings 
relevant to the lives of people in the community--are you talking about 
things that matter--or are they mostly items that should more properly be 
handled at the committee level?  Do people find ways to appreciate each 
other's contributions?  And so on.

It might be that the community is holding meetings too often (Norm 
indicated "almost weekly" in another message on this thread), but usually 
if that's the case a well-functioning group quickly figures that out and 
reduces the frequency . . . it sounds like there is more to the story here.

Peace,

--Tree



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

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