Cohousing-L Mailing List: how many people for common meal...just starting

[Shelly (shelldemeo]

Hi--

Here at Rocky Hill Cohousing, our tiny little meals committee is trying to 
coordinate how we will successfully start our meals in our beautiful new, 
almost finished, common house.

I have read some of the old messages and will reread the article in the 
cohousing mag but wanted to ask two questions.

1.  How many people are committed to either cooking and/or cleaning on any 
given meal night?  The head of our committee wants to schedule SIX people for 
each meal.  She was thinking three to cook and three others to clean up.  While 
I do think that lightens the load on that particular night to have so many, I 
think it might use too many people and will cause burn out and possible failure 
of our meal planning of two meals a week and one brunch on the weekend.  We are 
26 households with four other associate members.

2.  We are about to "sell" the concept of everybody is expected to cook/clean.  
Unfortunately, this was not set up ahead of time but judging by the meal 
surveys we received back from our members, almost everybody would consider 
this.  We think that if we make this a voluntary thing that eventually the 
meals will just dwindle away.

Do you have any advice or anecdotes to share about what contributed to the 
success of your meals or otherwise?
Getting this successfully up and running is a little daunting.

Shelly DeMeo
Rocky Hill Cohousing
Florence, MA