Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Social participation (was How do we hold each other accountable?)

[Moz (list]

(sorry, hit the wrong button before)

Sharon Villines said:
> On Jul 28, 2010, at 12:49 PM, Naomi Anderegg wrote:
this was actually me (moz):
>> I think that's mostly from fear, presumably of being forced to do
>> more work than they'd prefer. Which is a whole discussion of itself

> Interesting to me was that when we had this conversation before move-
> in, a number of people were seriously afraid of not being able or  
> competent to do whatever was needed. They felt very insecure about  
> being able to contribute.

We're having that a bit already, and we have only just barely begun.
Partly because some of the early stuff is tricky - you need to be
quite self-directed when no-one knows exactly what has to be done. We
on Australia and there's a heap of subtle differences between our
situation and others (even more similarities, but those don't trip us
up as often).

We do have that core of people who don't really care whether they
already have the required skills or not but are willing to have a go.
And occasionally look like idiots (I just did a preliminary costing
where some of my numbers were out by a factor of 2 or 3, and I forgot
about 30% of the total costs. I learned a lot).

> So you might go at it from a different direction -- make a list of
> things that need to be done or ask people what they would like to do.

I've been doing that, and I've set up a public ToDo list that seems to
be gathering momentum. We

> They have moved into cohousing because they think it will make their
> lives easier. It can make them richer, but I'm not sure about
> easier.... there are also added expectations that people just don't
> seem to factor in.

I think some of us are hoping to trade off wider community
expectations for a (hopefully smaller) set within the coho. If nothing
else, being able to have community group meetings at home will shorten
the commute. Having fewer household residents (we have 6 in this share
house) but many more wider community residents will hopefully reduce
the effort we have to put in to keep the household running, even
though it means more work to make the coup run. Amusingly, we already
have a bit of a group of men who like being unsociable together but
dislike meetings and social gatherings.

We do have a wee bit of positive media already:
http://www.thefifthestate.com.au/archives/14626

Moz