Cohousing-L Mailing List: Children in Community

[Eva (Parker) Passalacqua (eva]

We're in the process of putting together a group for the younger  
people in our community. We're hoping that we can set up a forum for  
our children to voice their ideas, develop projects, solve  
problems... and whatever else they can dream up.  This can hopefully  
also be a place where they can learn about conflict resolution and  
articulate their sense of how they want to get along together. I'm  
hoping that this group can eventually be organized and facilitated  
entirely by the younger members of our community.

As we begin planning this project, I'm curious to find out what other  
communities have done to get their children involved in community- 
building, consensus-making, conflict resolution, etc... basically, to  
give the younger members of a community more of a sense of active  
involvement and sovereignty, as well as the sense that their  
participation and contributions are valuable to all of us.

Just to clarify, we have a lot of wonderful participation from many  
of our children in activities like common house cleaning, work days,  
common meal setup, and a lot of ad-hoc activities on an ongoing basis  
to bring our kids together. Now we're looking for the next step...

Many thanks for your input!

Eva

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Eva Passalacqua
Rocky HIll Cohousing
Florence, MA