Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Meals

[Kathy Tymoczko (kathy.tymoczko]

Our meal program works as follows:

   - If you want to cook, put a sign-up sheet with the menu in the meal
   notebook in the Common House, with meal date and time listed and cutoff
   date and time for sign-ups.  Meals are typically dinner, but also
   breakfast, brunch, lunch, cocktail party.
   - If you want to eat, sign up for the meal, indicating number of adults,
   number of under 5, number of 5-12 (for billing purposes).
   - Everybody who eats helps clean up, cooks exempted.
   - Meals cost $5/person, $2.50 for 5-12, and under 5 eat free, and the
   cook is reimbursed for actual expenses up to $4.50 (more or less) per
   person, with the excess going into the Meal Program budget to keep the
   kitchen pantry stocked.  If you sign up for a meal, and don't show up, you
   get charged anyway, since the cook shopped and prepared for the number of
   people who sign up.
   - It's a "pay in advance" system, with someone on the Meal Program/Food
   Team keeping track of payments and meals eaten for each household, and
   expenses and reimbursements for the cooks.  I use an Excel spreadsheet and
   it takes one to two hours each month, depending on the number of meals that
   month and the number of people who sign up.

We have 30 households, with 55 or so people, and typically have 20-30 at
most meals.  Until the hot weather hit Portland this summer and nobody felt
like cooking, we had been having 8-10 meals a month, nearly all dinners.
Some people come to almost every meal and some come to only a few a year.

We also have lots of potlucks and holiday dinners that aren't part of the
meal program.  Pretty much any holiday warrants a potluck (indoors in the
winter, outside barbecue in the summer); I think we had more than a dozen
of those during the past year.

On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 3:52 PM, Ann Zabaldo <zabaldo [at] earthlink.net> wrote:

>
> Are there any cohousing communities out there that allow members to pay
> only? And not cook or clean?
>
> Under what circumstances do you allow this? For instance if a person has a
> new baby, is elderly, has a serious conflict etc.
>
> Do any of you have a system in which only some people cook and clean and
> other people only pay?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ann Zabaldo
> Takoma Village Cohousing
> Washington DC
>
> Sent from my iPhone
> _________________________________________________________________
> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
> http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L/
>
>
>


-- 
Kathy Tymoczko
Daybreak Cohousing <http://www.daybreakcohousing.org>
Portland, Oregon
765-307-1083