Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: bullying

[Kathleen Lowry (kathleenlowrylpcclmft]

Fern, thanks. Is there a way to learn about both your email process and 
decision making policy? Kathleen

> On Aug 6, 2022, at 3:38 PM, Fern Selzer/US/CA/95003/NBC via Cohousing-L 
> <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,In our community I initially had disappointment and frustration 
> because of one member who since the beginning was negative and disruptive.   
> But talking to people in other cohousing communities, it became apparent to 
> me that every community has problematic individuals.  Speaking for myself, 
> most of us can become problematic at times.
> I appreciate the suggestions put forth in this thread of how to handle 
> "bullying" behavior 
> In our community, we have our facilitation team we call "community connection 
> committee" and we observe  the pulse of the community and ourselves.  As 
> needed, we address issues by bringing it to our regular plenary meeting to 
> share in discussion and come up with next steps.     For example, we needed 
> some rules around email communication when people were using it for emotional 
> venting that was hurtful.   Though the time-consuming policy-making around 
> email communication was prompted by the behavior of a few people, the actual 
> outcome from the discussion and coming up with policies benefitted the whole 
> community.  
> 
> "Bullying" isn't a specific term in my opinion.   Some sweet people lose it 
> and yell every once in a while and it doesn't intimidate anyone.   People who 
> quietly threaten lawsuits,  shun, sulk or interrupt the progress of things 
> are more scary for me.   We had to change our decision making policy because 
> of one person blocking most decisions -  and that was a lot of work.   But 
> looking at it now, years later, I see that our new process is  better and our 
> decision making process would likely have needed to change at one point or 
> another anyway.  And that is just ONE example of how one person in our 
> community has unintentionally improved our group agreements.  Fern New 
> Brighton CoHousingAptos, CA
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