Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: competing special needs

[Joanie Connors (jvcphd]

What a difficult dilemma! How frustrating for you!

On the easy side, you might arrange to have the service dog bathed just 
before meals and meetings. The most common allergen is pet dander.

A deeper solution would be to have the parties involved (allergic people and 
service dog owner) meet and decide together on a solution.

If you put yourself in the role of eternal fixer, you may find that no 
solution is satisfactory. But when the people involved have to come up with 
(affordable) solutions, they are less likely to complain.

Joanie Connors
Silver City Eco-Community
(forming in Silver City, New Mexico)




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joelyn Malone" <JKMalone [at] comcast.net>
To: <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 5:20 PM
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Non-standardized houses?


> We are unfortunately coping with competing accessibility issues right
> now. We have many members that have asthma and allergies, and we've
> worked toward getting the main house/commons house free of allergens
> (remember, this is a huge 1924 building we are talking about!).
>
> Now we have a potential new owner who needs a service dog, to be with
> her most of the time. She would be shut out of Commons House activities
> if we continued to prioritize the people with allergies. While the new
> person's dog is one of the "allergy-free" breeds, one of our members has
> broken out in hives when being around that breed. She feels allowing the
> service dog in common space would completely shut her out of use of the
> Commons.
> This isn't a light matter, as the new buyer lives in Georgia and left
> her dog in Georgia for this visit (Is handling her disability with
> medications  right now, but that's not a long-term solution.) So we
> can't  just have the allergic person spend time with the dog to see if
> it would work.
> We've thought of  "dividing  up the common space",  but that would
> exclude one or the other from community meals. And in this old
> building,  air flow is such that  anything in the building is most
> likely to be everywhere in the building.
>
> Solutions, ideas, anyone?
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