Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Exclusion of a Member (Louis-H. Campagna)

[Leah (drsweetie]

We had a participant early in development that had some challenges regarding 
communication skills and ability to follow our process. Not wanting to be 
exclusionary, we welcomed him into our group and he attended meetings for quite 
a few months without forming significant relationships or meeting the specific 
outlined steps for becoming an associate or equity member. It became an issue 
when we realized there were other members that had been attending meetings for 
a shorter period of time that would be "competing" with him for a unit. We had 
a meeting of equity members that was fairly stressful for many of us in which 
we agonized over the idea of not wanting to exclude anyone versus not really 
wanting this person to be part of our community. A few people remarked that 
they would be OK with him being in the community but they wouldn't actually 
hang out with the guy. Finally a decision was made to tell him that it wasn't 
going to work, and someone in our
 group was nice enough to volunteer for that unattractive task. He did not take 
it well. He also had a disability and decided that this was the reason we had 
made the decision, and immediately started calling members and telling them 
that he was going to the newspapers, government agencies, etc. to report us. We 
had another meeting to strategize about this, but his "reports" didn't get much 
attention in the end and it finally died down. In the end, I think people left 
with the feeling that we should have been clear about it early on, but I am not 
sure that would be possible. While it was obvious from the start that things 
were likely to go atypically with this individual, we did not have enough 
information about his ability to be part of our community until some time had 
passed.

--- On Tue, 10/21/08, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org 
<cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

From: cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org <cohousing-l-request [at] 
cohousing.org>
Subject: Cohousing-L Digest, Vol 57, Issue 25
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Date: Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 3:16 AM

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Today's Topics:

   1. Exclusion of a Member (Louis-H. Campagna)
   2. Re: Exclusion of a Member (Rob Sandelin)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:50:18 +0000
From: "Louis-H. Campagna" <lhcampagna [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: [C-L]_ Exclusion of a Member
To: "cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org" <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Message-ID: <BLU107-W58A4CC33441BEE0CA134B3DD2C0 [at] phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Hi,

I'd like to hear your experiences around the issue of excluding (banning) a
member of a project group, or of an established cohousing if applicable.

What happened ?  What were the issues ?

How did the group handle the situation ?  

What method was used ?  Was it done fairly ?  Did it involve internal
procedures, legal suits, etc. ?

Was the end result (departure of a member) satisfactory ?   Did it resolve the
group's problem ?  Was exclusion the necessary solution to improve the
group's dynamic ?

All contributions welcome.

Regards,

Louis-H. Campagna
Cohabitat Qu?bec--Coop?rative d'accession ? la propri?t?
Quebec City QC  Canada
 
_________________________________________________________________



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Message: 2
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:00:10 -0700
From: "Rob Sandelin" <floriferous [at] msn.com>
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Exclusion of a Member
To: "'Cohousing-L'" <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP15B2471004190CBFE4FA03A32F0 [at] phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"

Once upon a time I got called in to a community to facilitate the process of
either reconciling with or helping the group remove a member who was seen by
the group as being far out of sync with everybody else to the point where
people did not to be around or work with this person. I approached it as a
sharing circle of feelings, holding a very tight facilitators grip on HOW
people communicated their feelings in order to allow for the most
constructive feedback. To everyone's surprise, including mine, the person
in
question was stunned that he had alienated so many people by how he
communicated.  It was the FIRST time in his whole life anybody had ever
given him such feedback and he was open enough to realize that some of other
failed relationships in life were due to how he communicated.  His angry and
confrontational style served him in his business life, but ruined his social
relationships.  When I left, the group had made an agreement to make him
provisional based upon behavioral and communicational improvements.  About 4
years later I ran into somebody from that group and I asked about
"Bill"
(Not his real name) and I heard that Bill had become a core member and was
loved by everybody.

This particular group was willing to invest a lot of time and energy (and
money to hire me) to preserve and continue a relationship to a single
member. Of course this outcome is perhaps not common and in such cases, the
disaffected person leaves.  But the lesson I learned from that experience is
that a good system of direct and honest nonjudgmental feedback can help a
great deal to improve damaged relationships.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood Community
Snohomish County, WA




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