Cohousing-L Mailing List: Extending Membership

[Lynn Nadeau / Maraiah (welcome]

Extending membership: 
In our long-built community, membership, with its rights and responsibilities, 
is defined by property ownership here. We now have a situation where a new 
household -- very participatory -- includes one partner who doesn't happen to 
be a legal co-owner of the property. We are looking at coming up with a policy 
that an Owner/Member can "sponsor" eligibility for membership rights for one or 
two people who live on their property and want to participate. Being thus 
designated by a Sponsor would qualify the Sponsored Member to participate as an 
equal in decision making, count in a quorum, have full use of common 
facilities, hold office in the organization, etc. as long as the Sponsor 
continued to support that, as long as the residency continued. Seems like a 
good solution for domestic partners, enthusiastic renters or housemates. We 
will be discussing this, and I wonder if anyone would like to point out 
potential glitches we should think about? 

As far as getting people we wouldn't have chosen, this is already the case with 
our open-market real estate: we do our best to inform potential buyers, but in 
no way can prevent Just Anybody from buying a resale and joining us. So adding 
the possibility of someone's girlfriend or housemate not pleasing us doesn't 
seem like a major risk. 

Our assessments are per household, and such sponsored members would be 
considered part of the Sponsor's household. 

Maraiah Lynn Nadeau
RoseWind Cohousing, Port Townsend WA
www.rosewind.org
where our coho and the neighboring EcoVillage will be just minutes away from 
the newly-forming Quimper Village Senior Cohousing project which is making 
solid progress!