Cohousing-L Mailing List: Disengaged households

[Rod Lambert (rod]

An important topic to wrestle with.

Disengagement happens for a number of reasons. I have often heard the 
idea that "if those people would just leave things would be better 
around here" but I have sometimes thought that an opportunity to 
understand how our community works is missed. Here a process was started 
in which the leaving people would be interviewed to learn from their 
experience but it seems to have faded out years ago. If what is 
happening is a homogenation of thinking is that always a good thing? It 
certainly helps decision making go more easily.

In the book "The Big Sort" the author describes how the US is sorting 
itself into a more and more balkanized areas as people move more for 
living with people "like us" then for economic reasons. He feels it is 
bad for democracy because of the polarization and loss or diversified 
view points in these new county/city-sized enclaves.

As I believe Diane Christian said, for consensus to work well it 
requires the decision making processes to be widely dispersed. Some of 
us might say  it is prudent to examine why there is disengagement 
especially if it seems to be several households. If power seems to be 
aggregating in fewer and fewer hands for instance, it might be a wise 
community that does not necessarily assume apathy means consent.
I sometimes think that the disengaging household goes through stages 
(something like Kubler-Ross' ideas of the dying process - anger, denial 
etc) It would be a benefit to all to have a better understanding of this 
process. Perhaps one of the many graduate students who seem to want to 
do thesis work on us will take up the challenge?

Rod Lambert
Village Green Development
EcoVillage at Ithaca, NY

> Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 08:09:29 -0800
> From: "Rob Sandelin" <floriferous [at] msn.com>
> Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Disengaged households
> To: "'Cohousing-L'" <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
> Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP962F87C18259BFCD1BCABA3B30 [at] phx.gbl>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"
>
> Living  in a social community can sound good up front, all the things you
> get from it, but after awhile the costs start to show up.  For some people
> living in community is not a good fit and they withdraw and later move.
> This is pretty normal. It can be painful all around when people no longer
> want to be there. My advice is to give them space, help find replacement
> people to buy their stake, and move on.  I recall once doing an intervention
> for a community where two households were demanding the whole community make
> substantial changes or they would leave. My advice was to let them leave,
> and they did, and those who replaced them were grateful and happy to live in
> such a great community.
>
> Rob Sandelin
> Sharingwood
> Snohomish County, WA 
>