Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Addressing Conflicts as Community Issues [was Community Mediation in cohousing ?neighborly awareness? from becoming surveillance (with CPS calls)

[Kathryn Lowry (kathryn.lowry]

Sharon,

What you’re describing is a sharp contrast to our community’s response.

When parent concerns for safety were dismissed or delayed by our Steering
Team, the Team responsible for prioritizing topics of community concern for
our monthly Plenary meeting agenda, one of my neighbors who is a parent
initiated a coordinated walkthrough of our common house kitchen to identify
and mitigate safety hazards.

When a neighbor parent independently initiated a coordinated walkthrough
through of the common house kitchen to identify and mitigate safety
hazards,  a long-term resident and Member of Steering Team dismissed this
effort as not possibly amounting to anything more than “speculation or
conspiracy mode” because we (parents and concerned neighbors) didn’t have
access to the policy work she had been doing to craft policies addressing
safety concerns by regulating the conduct of parents and children.

Rather than identifying this as a major breach of community trust, other
Steering Team members applauded the effort to go around this team’s own
inaction and resistance to our efforts to improve safety for our children
and our neighbors.

I’m utterly confused as to how this conduct is in any way an expression of
the ethos of Cohousing.

Warmly,

Kathryn Lowry