Re: Preventing cohousing “neighborly awareness” from becoming surveillance (with CPS calls)
From: Hafidha Acuay (hafidhaaogmail.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2025 14:23:39 -0700 (PDT)
Kathryn,

Having myself been through a heartbreaking and prolonged neighbor conflict
where children were involved, I suggest asking yourself whether you and
your family are being *harassed*.

This situation could be resolved within a community that has a sound
foundation of trust, good relationships, skillful communication, and
*courage*.  However, even a really lovely community may not have the
capacity, structures, or tools to hold this. Waiting for them to figure it
out is a recipe for protracted distress. If the community isn't equipped,
they can't take the lead or offer protection to anyone being harmed.

Without knowing all the sides of your story, I will say that if my
neighbors called CPS on me multiple times in bad faith, I would consider it
harassment and proceed accordingly.

Also: As much as I love community life and processes, trying to usher the
community into better processes is not a role I should ever play *while I'm
being actively harmed.* Maybe later, long after the situation is resolved,
I could support the community by helping to come up with better conflict
resolution protocols, but for the moment, my focus must be on protecting my
family and myself from false reports of abuse or neglect that could lead to
state intervention or worse.

The biggest lesson I learned from my experience was that I have to stick up
for myself. A lot of pain I felt was in asking why my neighbors weren't
sticking up for me or resolving this. The simplest answer is that they
weren't any braver than I was!

Hafidha


On Sat, Oct 11, 2025 at 1:19 PM Kathryn Lowry <
kathryn.lowry [at] daybreakcohousing.org> wrote:

> I requested mediation with each individual involved in March after
> attempts at in-person conversation became unilateral criticisms of my
> parenting.  The first CPS call was made three days later.
>
> There’s now a pretense that mediation is happening being presented by the
> specific Team constituted by these neighbors, the Team responsible for
> setting meeting agendas, ensuring effective governance, educating residents
> about our governance structures.
>
> But what’s really happening is a lot of discussion of scheduling
> mediation, scope, and restrictions on who may participate.
>
>
>
>

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