Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common House Use Proposal

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On 11 May 2011, at 1:43 PM, Eris Weaver wrote:

>  The community seems to feel that reworking the agreements and talking about 
> it all will magically get people to increase
> their participation. 

Praise the Lord and pass the potatoes!

Also, people have such widely varying measures of work. One person thinks they 
haven't done enough when they have done 20 hours a month (minimum) and others 
think they work all the time when all they have done is a ½ hour a week 
watering the plants in the commonhouse and consider it someone else's business 
if all the plants are dying.

Some think the only work that should count is physical labor because that's all 
we "have" to do. I just spent from 9:00 this morning to 2:30 this afternoon 
writing and revising a policy on our decision-making process. Non-stop, no 
food, no breaks. That's not considered work by these people because it's 
"unnecessary." But when they come to a meeting to discuss this policy for one 
hour (after not even having read it), they think that should count as work.

We could hire out all the physical labor, but not meals, policy work, 
organization of celebrations, loving our plants, etc. That's the real work of 
cohousing. As much as I appreciate the maintenance work, it isn't essential 
that we do all that ourselves — it's actually relatively cheap to hire out. And 
it takes professionals a quarter of the time it takes us. I would much rather 
our time be spent on a well-organized Memorial Day dinner with afternoon games 
on the green. Or a plan for more bike storage.

Workdays have really helped us because many people aren't self-starters or do 
much of it at work they just want to show up and be told what to do. The 
problem is that the people who work hard other times, also have to show up to 
tell them what to do. That isn't too difficult for most of the self-starters 
because they enjoy seeing the work actually get done, but it takes its toll.

I don't want this to sound horribly negative. I count Takoma Village as very 
fortunate that we have NO units that don't participate in anything, and every 
new member we get is more or as active as the one who left. People participate 
in one way or another, even if only with some subset of people. Everyone can be 
called on to do the one-time tasks, although some are not as reliable as 
others. 

It's really the ongoing tasks that require self-starting, even remembering, and 
the taking of initiative in planning tasks that are hard to get people to pick 
up.

Right now, for example, our water heaters are all 11 years old. Their expected 
lifetime is 10. Two or three have already failed. It would be good for someone 
to research water heaters and negotiate a group price so we could replace them 
before they all go up in floods. That's the kind of thing we have done often 
but once someone coordinates half the toilets being replaced or gotten 
architectural approval and purchased screen doors for the people who want them, 
they don't want to do it again. We need someone else to take on the water 
heaters.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org