Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: question about seniority of "in between" participants

[patjavcc (patjavcc]

At JP Cohousing (Boston) we based the queue on the date when the equity money 
was paid.  Long sabbaticals didn't come up too often but when people dropped 
out for months at a time it was for an 'acceptable' reason and didn't effect 
the queue.  Allowing someone to step back for a while was seen as a way of 
supporting that member and trusting that they would come back after taking care 
of their personal need.
 
We worked with our members who defaulted on their payments and this did not 
effect the queue.  We had a very strong committment to mixed-income and would 
never penalize a household for falling back as long as they were upfront with 
their needs and could hold it together enough to get caught up.
 
The third example - defaulting to the level of becomming an Associate - would 
have caused someone to lose thier senority.
 
It was straight forward:  put in your equity payment (or begin to if you 
qualified for the low/mod income payment plan) and you immediately get your 
number in the queue.  At no time did we face the problem of someone wanting to 
keep senority but intentionally didn't participate and/or keep up with 
payments.  This simply never happend.  We were in development for about 6 years 
and have 30 households.
 
Patti Lautner
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: catya [at] homeport.org
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Sent: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 3:03 PM
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ question about seniority of "in between" participants


Hi Jonnie,

On the first two, we subtract any time "out" from the seniority queue. 
We haven't dealt with the third one.

    - catya

Jonnie Pekelny wrote:
> Hi, folks. Okay: another research question from the North Oakland  Cohousing 
membership team. We will need to come up with a system of  seniority, for 
purposes of unit selection, and I've been thinking about  it in the background 
for the past few weeks. Our group is still new  and, for the moment, it's easy 
enough to simply create a system of  seniority based on who joined and paid 
money first. It's also simple to  make a rule that, if a member or associate 
simply stops being involved  and drops out, they lose all seniority.  But I 
anticipate that, as  we go on, we will have ambiguous cases that will need 
dealing with. For  example:
>   
>   * A member or associate has to take a sabbatical, but maintains their  
financial commitments and stays in touch with the group, expressing  strong  
interested in becoming active again when they come back..  Where does the 
member 
or associate wind up in the seniority structure,  when they come back, with 
respect to new members who've joined since,  and old members who've stayed 
actively involved the whole time?
>   
>   * A member temporarily defaults on their payments because of financial  
hardship, but then regains their footing and gets back on track. How is  their 
seniority affected?
>   
>   * A member defaults on their payments and can't get back on their  footing 
yet, but is hoping to be able to in the future, so maintains  their involvement 
as an associate. Where does this put them in the  associate seniority hierarchy?
>   
>   And so on.
>   
>   I would be interested in hearing from (pre-move-in) groups about how you 
handle similar seniority issues.
>   
>   Jonnie Pekelny
>   North Oakland Cohousing
>   Oakland, CA
>   
>   
> _________________________________________________________________
> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at: 
> http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L/
> 

_________________________________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at: 
http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L/
________________________________________________________________________
Check out the new AOL.  Most comprehensive set of free safety and security 
tools, free access to millions of high-quality videos from across the web, free 
AOL Mail and more.