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

[Wayne Tyson (landrest]

Sharon and CoHo:

The specifics are most illuminating Sharon! On balance, would you say that 
your "coho" is contented or discontented?

Social organization is characterized by shifting dominance and leaders 
acting upon the consent of the governed. That feature rarely exists in 
present forms of government, from monarchies to "democracies."

WT

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sharon Villines" <sharon [at] sharonvillines.com>
To: <eris [at] erisweaver.info>; "Cohousing-L" <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2011 12:44 PM
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Common House Use Proposal




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




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