Agreements and Policies #7

by Raven

7:  Exit Agreements

I’ve written a whole post on this before, why you should create Exit Agreements, and how we were structuring them at Glomus. Here I would like to provide some context and some ideas and learnings about these agreements.  You should probably click on the link and read the old post before reading this.  I don’t intend to repeat myself much here.

In the list of posts that I said I would write on Agreements and Policies, we are at about the halfway point.  The earlier stuff was easier but important, mostly because in this second half I will be building on the earlier things.  For example, Exit Agreements builds on Membership which in turn builds on Vision.  Now we are into the trickier and more difficult stuff–much of it more difficult to think about let alone talk about.

Exit Agreements aren’t that difficult to talk about but they are something that most people who are starting a community don’t want to think about.  You’re just starting a community and trying to get people, why should you talk about folks leaving? Unfortunately, everyone who lives in a community leaves at some point, either because they want to, or because they have been asked to leave, or because they get sick or die, or because the community actually dissolves and leaves them.

Exit Agreements involve the easiest of the transitions–yes, things get a lot more difficult from here.  But, my hope is that you are creating a community (and especially if you are creating an income sharing community) because you care about people and want to do well by them.  Besides, it’s easier to get people into a community if they know they can leave at any point.  Making it easier for folks to leave actually makes it easier for them to stay.  (I’ll leave the details on disgruntled people for you to read in the linked post.)

Now, the details.  What would folks need in order to leave and do well after they leave?  I talked about what we came up with at Glomus.  I left Glomus and it was very easy for me, partly because I had money saved and money coming in, but also because the agreement I asked that they use the farm van to drive me and my stuff to my next house.  And they did.

A good place to start on building Exit Agreements would be for each person (even those who plan to stay ‘forever’) to imagine what they would need in order to leave the community and start over.  Of course, some things may be difficult for a new community to do, especially if they don’t have much in the way of financial resources.

The Exit Savings (see the linked post) may be the easiest to implement.  You can build this into your community’s financial structure.  It’s a basic savings plan for each member and builds equity for each person.  What I like about it is that it treats someone who stays for two months quite differently from someone who stays for twenty years.  Each person gets from the community in proportion to what they’ve given to the community.

Every community will need to figure out the details of this policy together, since a lot will depend on who’s in the community and what the community’s resources are.  And, of course, this will change over time.  Your Exit Agreement policy, like almost all of your community’s policies, should be looked at and updated. But the point is for you to figure out, collectively, how to do well by each other.

In the next piece on Policies and Agreements, I will talk about how to deal with disagreements, how to set up a Conflict Resolution Policy.  This is more stuff folks usually don’t want to think about but often regret it if they don’t.