Cohousing-L Mailing List: Forming group crippled by new members

[Melanie Mindlin (sassetta]

The problem of self-selection bringing in people who “don’t fit” into an 
existing group is a serious one that goes beyond the forming group stage. In 
other types of intentional communities with a different ownership structure, 
one can decide whether or not to accept members into the group, but not within 
existing communities with fee simple ownership, the form of most cohousing 
communities.

However, during the formative stage, your group is not yet an HOA. Our group 
formed an LLC during the development process. An LLC is a business organization 
which can decide whether or not to add additional partners. Up until the time 
you form your HOA, you can use whatever decision-making process you like to 
onboard new members. Our forming group started with just the founder and a few 
friends. They defined the goals of the group and created a membership process 
in which people became provisional members until they were admitted as full 
members. While the primary qualification for becoming a full member was 
financial, it did require consent from the group. 

During our formation period, lasting several years, we had a small number of 
provisional members who really were not a good fit. Our process was that if you 
had concerns about someone joining, you would have a private conversation with 
them about it, similar to an NVC clearing. Since the person having these 
clearings was usually me, I can report that it wasn’t easy, especially as this 
was my first time doing this kind of process. However, all but one of the 
people I talked to about the challenges of their involvement chose to 
discontinue. For the “one” who was deaf to my/our concerns, we had a long and 
difficult conversation before Not Consenting on their membership. As you can 
imagine, this conversation circled around issues of inclusion and the meaning 
of self-selection, but ultimately, most were convinced that trying to work with 
this person on many complex decisions, which is required by a group building a 
multi-million dollar housing project, just wouldn’t work.

Before creating our community, I experienced being a member in two other 
forming groups in my town. I started our original group by inviting a small 
number of folks I had met in those failed groups to join me in creating the 
core of a new group that didn’t go public until we had a pretty clear idea of 
our vision and process. 

After creating our cohousing community, I later tried to help a group of 
seniors start a cohousing group. That group was unable to solidify into an 
organization that could work together due to different visions. While the early 
issues of my forming group had mostly to do with land—urban or rural, the 
senior group stumbled primarily on issues of including people without 
sufficient financial resources. They also started out in a very public way, 
which meant there were a lot of people in the room that didn’t know each other. 
This makes it quite difficult to form a coherent leadership core.

Hope this helps,
Melanie Mindlin
Ashland Cohousing Community