Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Bylaws, Policies & Agreements

[R Philip Dowds (rpdowds]

At Cornerstone Cohousing in Cambridge, MA, we’re in the process of updating our 
entire governance system.  We’ve already amended our consensus process; we’re 
revising our committee activities; and we will soon be putting new Bylaws on 
file with the State.  We don’t yet have everything nailed down tight, but in 
general, we are going this direction:
Bylaws are formal legal instruments that are hard to change.  We are making 
ours more general, like the US Constitution: a framework that will support a 
wide range of governance practices that may continue to evolve over time.  How 
we do consensus, for instance, has been pulled out of the Bylaws, and appears 
in other documents.  This is legal in Massachusetts, although I am imagining 
the rules vary from State to State.
Yes, we have lots of Policies, which usually means Agreements.  Some are major, 
like about smoking or guns in the units; some are lesser, like maintenance of 
the community bulletin board.  Many of these Policies are more than a decade 
old, and refer to practices we’ve abandoned, and/or projects long completed.  
We are working to clean this up.
Policies are typically consensed by the entire community in a General Meeting 
of all the members.  Generally, members understand that Polices must / should 
be observed by everyone — they are the agreements or covenants we make with 
each other — but enforcement is lax, memories are short, and buy-in is 
sometimes grudging.  In any event, our amended consensus process now allows for 
something else we call ...
Guidelines.  Guidelines are recommendations for “best practices” issued by a 
committee. Frankly, most of us feel that the entire community should not devote 
dozens of person hours to forging an agreement about how to use the bulletin 
board.  And that many of our Policy agreements are better understood and 
configured as Guidelines.  This idea, however, is new for us, and isn’t getting 
enough play yet.  Dissemination of culture change takes a while.
So that’s how we’ve sorted out terminology.  We continue to work on breathing 
life into the conceptual framework.

RPD

> On Nov 10, 2014, at 6:43 PM, Kathy Icenogle <kathy.icenogle [at] gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> Do any cohousing communities have anything called Policies?
> 
> It doesn't seem like a community should have to amend Bylaws or get
> consensus on an Agreement every time there's a need to formalize something
> like a business policy.
> 
> Our Condo Declaration (CC&R's) gives our Steering Team the power to adopt
> Policies, with due notice and comment of the community at large... So, I'm
> wondering where policies fit into the cohousing picture...
> 
> If you have Policies in your governance, how they are different from
> Agreements?   ( Given the difference in how they're created, it's important
> to be clear on the difference. )
> 
> Thanks,
> Kathy
> Washington Village (washington-village.com <http://washington-village.com/>)
> Boulder, CO
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