Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Accountability for doing community work or workshare

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

At Sharingwood we have ONE mandatory work task, a monthly deep cleaning of
the commonhouse. You either do 3  hours of work, or you pay. Each person
each month is charged a $5 a month cleaning fee. This is refunded to you
when your month comes and you do your task, or the money is used to pay
someone else to do your work. Since the money is collected automatically it
is never really an issue.  All other work is volunteer, we have regular work
parties and many people show up. We have a set of tasks that people sign up
to do, we pay one person to be our accountant. Teams accomplish much work as
well. Often our work parties are oversubscribed, too many people show up and
so the coordinators have to find things for them to do.  Sometimes work
parties have a specific limit...e.g. we need 6 people to do a trail blitz
for the upcoming woods party. Even clean up after dinner sometimes is done
festival style, meaning everybody pitches in and it gets done. Other systems
for after dinner clean also have a jobs focus (with a sign up job sheet) and
the other way we do it is that a couple people sign up and do the cleaning.
Flexibility.  

We don't worry about accountability, we worry about people being happy. If
somebody is unhappy that they are doing too much, we encourage them to let
go of some things.  The important stuff generally gets done, and we don't
sweat the less important stuff too much, it eventually gets done
also...usually 


Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood Community, Snohomish  County, WA
Floriferous [at] msn.com
Writer, Naturalist  The Environmental Science School
Snohomish County, WA