Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: The whole picture (was disengagement)

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

This message was actually written by Fred ...

I second Jesse Kome's observation that a distinction needs to be made for
community members in good standing for whom life has intervened to to
preclude active participation for a period of time.  Presumably these
people may become active later if life permits. They may well maintain a
relationship with a few community members so they have indirect contact
with the community effectively with a "buddy" system.  It might be useful
to make the "buddy" relationship known amongst the community.

A couple of other examples come to mind:

 Cohousing is a long term commitment and over time people's lives change
 and at different times different levels and kinds of involvement in the
 community are possible and reasonable.  John, someday maybe you'll find
 time to be more involved with your neighbors.

 The cohousing community Fardknappen in central Stockholm is unusual in
 that it is specifically for people over 40 years old who dont have
 dependents living with them.  They do get criticized for this from people
 who feel excluded but there are other communities they can join.  The
 folks who started Fardknappen wanted to concentrate on people in the
 'second half of life'.  BTW they have children around - visiting grand
 children.

 They find that their members  naturally cluster into three
 subcategories. ...  See original message at:

http://lists.cohousing.org/pipermail/cohousing-l/msg11516.html

Another similar lifelong activity for some people is amateur radio
( *ham radio" ) avocation. Some hams get their license when they are you
and most hams maintain it (it has to be renewed peeriodically) thruout
their lives but their activity level may be suspeded for long periods.
Some hams are inactive during their working lives so they migh be active
from say age 12-20 and 65-80.  More typical is just considerable
variability in level of activity as their life cycle permits. General info
about ham radio, see:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_radio

Now I'll switch to list manager perspective a bit...

BTW the variable level of participation applies to Cohousing-L as well.
A number of long time subscribers have told me they read less and seldom
post.  The same is true of me, I currently browse messages but dont read a
high percentage.

A person unsubscribed yesterday and responded to my request for feedback:

 The reason I am unsubscribing is that I am in the middle of so many
 things in my life that I don't have the time to actually open the emails
 and read them! It has nothing to do with not being happy with it. Perhaps
 when my life is more settled, I will resubscribe, as I am very interested
 in co-housing.

As a way of staying minimally connected, I sugested this person consider:

The C-L-sum [at] cohousing.org mailing list sends just one message per week
which summarizes the messages distributed by cohousing-L in the past
week.  The message lists the threads (subject lines) and senders.
Messages of interest can be read in the archives.
See http://l.cohousing.org/c-l-sum.htm

Fred

--
Jun 22: Robert Reich's Rx for  real health care reform
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/20/healthcare/print.html

Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
Communications for Justice -- Free, superior listserv's w/o ads:
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612-588-9532 (7am-10pm CST/CDT)   Email: fholson at cohousing.org