Okay. Here’s yet another thing few new communities want to think about. How and when do you tell someone to leave? Who gets to decide? What does your community agree are grounds for expulsion?
Again, as hard as confronting these questions as you are starting a community is, it would be a lot harder to figure this all out after someone does something that makes at least someone so uncomfortable that they want the person out of the community.
Two of the main things that you need to decide are, first, what are expellable offenses, and second, what is the process for expulsion.
In terms of offenses, violence? Is it violence if everyone involved consents (ie, BDSM)? Non-consensual sexual approaches (rape, assault, inappropriate touching)? Something involving children? Theft? Harassment? Illegal activities? Are there things that would get a warning the first time but potential expulsion if repeated?
In terms of who gets to decide that someone should be expelled, does it take one person? A majority? Consensus minus the offender? Consensus minus the offender and anyone that they are involved with?
There are certain situations where someone has been hurt that you want the offender out of there immediately. Do you call the police? Are there situations where you would give the offender twenty-four hours (or whatever) to get their things together before they have to leave? There may even be situations where things are so unclear that you ask the victim to leave, temporarily, while a decision is being made.
It’s good to not make a policy hard and fast. Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. But, like a lot of these policies, you want something that you can fall back on in situations where emotions are running high and you can’t get agreement.
As difficult as all this is to think about and talk about, having a policy around all this should make everyone feel safer.
Finally, a policy that may be even harder, the final one that I want to look at, is when do you decide to dissolve the community? How do you do it if you need to?
Very few communities start thinking that they’re not going to last very long. Unfortunately, most communities don’t last very long.
What a fun title. Unfortunately, as communities age, so do its members and, at some point, at least some of your members are going to have health problems. If your community lasts long enough, some of your members will die. If you are starting a community, this–like other unpleasant things such as conflicts and violence which we covered in the last couple of Agreements and Policies–is something you want to plan for.
Let’s start with sickness. First of all, communities, much like businesses, don’t want their members working when they are sick. Depending on how formal your labor system is, you may want to write up an illness policy–what to do when someone can’t work, etc. In terms of a community business (if you have one), you want to plan for some folks getting sick occasionally. Especially if you are a small community, you probably don’t need doctor’s notes, limits to sick time, etc. In the unusual circumstance that you think a member is feigning illness, you should start by just talking with them. More important from a financial perspective, you may want to look at this in terms of community income. If members are working outside jobs, what are the illness policies they work under?
Then there is the question of treatment. If it’s just a short cold, get them to stay in bed and make sure they eat and drink. Beyond that, the Affordable Care Act, which is in effect in most states in the United States, means that your community should be able to afford treatment for most illnesses. (If you live in a country with socialized medicine, congratulations. You should definitely not have to worry about affording treatment.) Years ago, the communes worried about affording expensive but necessary treatments for their members and created PEACH to deal with this. Recently the communes have been trying to figure out what to do with PEACH since it seems a lot less necessary. Still, your community should try to figure out how to deal with unexpected medical expenses.
Every community needs to think about how to deal with disabilities from two perspectives. First, how do you deal with prospective members with disabilities? (The community I’m in now believes that most of us have at least some little disabilities but they vary so we can compensate for and support each other where we can’t do things.) The second is what do you do when a previously able bodied person is no longer able to function the same way that they used to? This is something important to plan for. Maybe it won’t happen, but it’s better to have a policy in place when it does, rather than trying to hammer one out when you would be better off focusing on the care of the newly disabled person.
Finally, there is the sad and serious matter of community members dying. Although many of us don’t want to face it, we are all going to die one day. Sometimes the death is expected (after a long illness, for example), and sometimes it isn’t. How do you want to deal with a dying person? Does the community want to have mourning and bereavement rituals? What would be your community’s burial policies? Where does your community stand on the idea of assisted suicide?
These are rough questions but they are important to focus on now, so people can focus on mourning and grieving when the time comes.
Next in our list of unpleasant but necessary policies: Expelling a member.
As I’ve said, these policies are getting trickier and less fun as we go into the harder and harder ones. These are the policies you don’t want to ever have to use, but if the situation comes up, having them in place will make things a lot easier than not having them. If you are in a really difficult situation, that’s definitely not the time you want to have to create a policy to deal with it.
Even talking about violence and abuse in your group may prove difficult. Some folks are going to want to have a black and white blanket policy such as if someone uses violence or abuses another person, they will be immediately expelled. Other folks may want something that looks at the context of the particular situation, or that gives someone a second chance. It’s true that even when you have a blanket policy, if a situation occurs where everyone decides in this instance the person should be given another chance or this situation is different and merits doing something different, that can usually be worked out anyway. However, if one person disagrees in the actual situation and you are using consensus, you may need to default to the blanket policy even if everyone else disagrees in this case.
And even the terms violence and abuse can be tricky. I know of a case where a community’s agreement to nonviolence was invoked because of consensual BDSM that was occurring. There were folks that argued that this was still violence. And what constitutes abuse can be even vaguer. A good place to start is to decide what your community means by the words ‘violence’ and ‘abuse’, and then move on to how you want to deal with these situations.
And, of course, you are not going to be able to write something that will cover every eventuality. One suggestion is to come up with a basic agreed upon policy but also have an agreed upon procedure for exceptions. (For example, if two or more people disagree that the policy should be invoked, then the community will use another outlined procedure.)
I certainly hope that your community never has to use a policy like this, but if something does occur that someone reports or calls violence or abuse, it’s better to have a policy in place that you can say, “We agreed on this,” then to have to come up with something new under very, very difficult circumstances.
Next we’ll talk about policies that deal with what happens if a member is sick, disabled, or dies.
As I said in my last post, we are now into the trickier stuff, the stuff folks don’t want to think about, and conflict is the first of those things. I wrote a piece about Communal Conflict a long time ago and in that piece, and in my piece outlining the Agreements and Policies that we would be covering here, I admitted I’m a conflict avoider. I don’t like dealing with conflict. I suspect that few people do.
But this is all the more reason you want to have a policy dealing with conflict resolution in place. You may hope that you won’t ever need it and, in fact, many conflicts are small and easily resolved, but if there is a major conflict occurring, it will be very hard to get an agreement on a conflict resolution strategy when it is actually happening. You want to have an agreement on how you will deal with conflicts now so that you have it in place for if and when real conflict occurs.
One thing that is useful in community conflicts (especially if the community is big enough) is that there is often a person or two that is not triggered by the conflict, that does not feel like they need to take sides, and who can mediate, at least somewhat.
It’s useful if the community already agrees to a process, like Nonviolent Communication (aka Compassionate Communication) or taking turns listening and then having the other person restate what they’ve heard. I’ve heard of groups that make each person argue the other person’s position. I also knew a couple who when they realized they were in an argument, would continue, only in gibberish. (Humor often helps.) Whatever you can get people to agree to now will be useful later, when things get heated.
It’s also important to remember that compromise is important. Although it is better when each person gets what they need (which may be more possible than you think if you can figure out what the real needs are), there may be times you need to compromise. It’s part of the tradeoff for living with a bunch of cool people.
Finally, there may be a point where your group has gotten as far as it can. This is often the place where calling on an outside mediator may help. An important part of your group’s conflict resolution agreements is to have a list of agreed on people that everyone feels good about being possible mediators. Someone who is not part of your community is more likely to be able to see all sides of the issue, listen to everyone, and make useful suggestions.
As I said, this is not much fun, but it’s very important. And there are harder things than conflict. Next on the list is what to do if violence occurs in your community.
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.
I’m convinced that every community needs a membership process. I’ve seen several communities that didn’t have one (including the one I’m in now) and it’s usually led to some unfortunate results.
A membership process is important to develop but I include it this far along because I am also convinced that a community needs to have a clear vision in place (and also have its financial systems developed) before creating a membership process, because the membership process is built on the community’s vision. I strongly recommend the chapter in Yana Ludwig’s Building Belonging on ‘Membership and Recruitment’. She clearly states, “The more radical and mission-driven your vision is, and/or the more intimate the community is, the more careful you need to be about your membership and decision-making.”
Again, she begins the chapter on membership by saying, “One of the most important tools your community has for keeping our intentional community intentional (and avoiding the dreaded mission drift) is having a clear, caring and robust membership process. You can either have clear boundaries at the beginning, or you can navigate really messy dynamics later on.”
So, start with your vision. What are you looking to accomplish? How can you convey this to people who might be interested? There are folks that might be great community members but if they are not aligned with the vision, there are likely to be problems. (Among them, the “mission drift” Yana Ludwig refers to.) On the other hand, some folks might believe strongly in your vision but might not be good at or even capable of community living. A good membership process screens for both issues, ie, you want folks who are aligned with your vision and who can live communally and contribute something.
Membership begins with some type of recruitment, maybe just talking with your friends or some type of word of mouth, but usually there’s some type of outreach. Most outreach that you might want to do involves what I would call ‘narrowcasting’. If broadcasting involves getting the word out as widely as possible, ‘narrowcasting’ involves targeting your outreach. Why advertise in places where very few people understand what you are trying to do, let alone be interested in being part of it? I talked a lot about the process of how to find people in my first “Starting from Scratch” post, including a list of useful places to advertise.
A good next step is to have people visit. Someone can sound great on paper or on a brief phone or video call and turn out to not be good at all at community living. Many communities require a three week visit with the idea that this will give folks a better idea of what this person is like to live with. After the person leaves, the current community members can gather together and try to figure out if it’s worth pursuing the process with the person further.
If so, the next step for many communities is some kind of provisional membership (or trial membership–different communities may have different names for this phase of the process). Here someone begins living in the community and has certain rights and responsibilities but not as many as a full member. Usually the person’s membership is evaluated after a certain period and the full members decide if they would like the person to continue on to full membership.
These decisions are not always easy and are one of the most important reasons to use consensus decision making. While I don’t usually advocate blocking as part of decision making, it’s important that everyone feels happy about living with someone. If a lot of people like someone and one person just doesn’t, it’s worth more discussion, since this will tell you a lot more about your current membership and the needs of those involved. Also, maybe that one person is sensing something no one else has picked up on yet. Hopefully, with a lot more discussion, a decision can be made that everyone feels good about. (The only time I ever remember blocking a decision was, ironically, about the co-op house membership of someone that I actually liked and would have liked to live with. There was one person in the group who wasn’t willing to block but wouldn’t let the process go forward because they were uncomfortable with the idea of living with the person. After a couple of weeks meetings where we weren’t able to come to a decision, I realized they were unlikely to change their mind, and it was better for the person requesting membership–and the co-op which was trying to fill a house–for any decision to be made, so I blocked the person, which allowed us all to move forward.)
Once a person is a full member, it doesn’t mean that they are there forever. As Yana Ludwig points out, everyone leaves the community eventually, and it is usually one of three ways: by choice, by request of the community, and by death. I will explore all these possibilities in future posts, starting with Exit Agreements, which occur when someone chooses to leave, which is by far the most common way that full members leave.
If you are trying to create a community, once you have your labor and financial systems, if you hope to be an income sharing community, you will need to think about how to deal with the things that members may want but don’t need. Some communities (especially small communities) have given their members the discretion to buy whatever they want–often as long as it’s under a certain amount of money. More often, communities decide that some things are necessities and some things are luxuries, and they give their members a set amount of money each month (or week) to buy the things folks desire but don’t need. You can call this a stipend, you can call this an allowance, or you could just refer to it as “Mad Money”, but it’s for those non-essentials that members want–and generally what those things are vary from person to person.
Often, the community doesn’t care or perhaps even want to know what this money is spent for. It’s discretionary–you just get the money and can spend it for whatever you want. For some folks, these things go to support whatever they are addicted to: alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, drugs, etc. Some folks spend it on books or comics or videos or art supplies or who knows what. And some folks save it up–sometimes for a big expense, like travel, and sometimes just because they like saving money.
I’m not sure what the current amounts are in the bigger communes; I think that Twin Oaks recently had something like $75 or $90 a month but I do know that at one point in the past, they were giving something like $30 a month, leading one member to remark that this was one place where you could really say, “Another day, another dollar”. I remember at Common Threads (in the 1990s) each adult member got five dollars a week and our two kids got a dollar a week and so once a week everyone got their ‘Allowance’.
The point is that every person is different and wants different things and having a fund for their desires makes income sharing a little easier. This money should never go for things someone really needs, the community should provide for those things. Rather this is for those little things that make a bit of difference for each person. If you are trying to plan a new community, you may want to consider this as a way to accommodate individuality. Of course, how much money each person gets is going to depend on the community’s budget–which is why you work on financial systems first.
Next, we’ll look at one of the most important things you can design for a community: the membership process.
Your commune can be as communist as you like; but if you live in the United States, you will have to deal with the capitalist system, and that means, your community will need money.
My suggestion is that after you figure out your labor system, you work on your potential community’s financial system. No matter what kind of community you start, you will have food to buy and bills to pay. If you are starting a non-income-sharing community (a co-op house or cohousing community, for example), you will still need to figure out how everyone will share expenses. Who is going to pay the bills? How will they be paid back? Does everyone pay the same for everything? (Examples of people paying different amounts include paying different amounts on the rent or mortgage depending on the size of each person’s room or apartment and creating a sliding scale for expenses depending on each person’s income.) Is there a certain date everyone needs to pay by?
In an income sharing situation, things are both easier and harder. They are easier because all income generally goes to a specific location and one or two people are responsible for paying for everything (and usually these are folks who like thinking about money). It’s harder because it requires a certain degree of trust and some coordination (the more people, the more coordination is needed).
The first thing you need to know about setting up an income sharing system is the difference between income and assets. Income is any money coming to anyone in the community after they join the community (as well as any money going to the community as a whole). Assets are things (including money) owned by folks before they joined the community. An example is if someone has (say) a million dollars in the bank (or actually any money in the bank) before they joined the community. Unless they want to give money to the community, that money is theirs but they can’t touch it while they are in the community (because that would give them privilege over others who don’t have as much). However, any interest that they get on that money once they’ve joined the community is income and should be communal and treated as any other source of income.
Income in a commune generally comes from one of two places, either income from individuals which is pooled together or income from a community business, and sometimes both. Most of the older communes get all their money from their businesses (East Wind’s nut butters and sandals, Acorn’s seed business [SESE], and a large variety of Twin Oaks businesses, including hammocks, tofu, and SESE Seed Rax–and several more). Starting communes usually pool their money together, sometimes while developing a cottage industry. (Glomus, for example, had a combination of money from their farming business as well as what individuals made through other means or at least that was the situation while I was there.)
I think that it’s important to have at least two people (who are not a couple or close friends) who will manage and keep an eye on the money and to have a transparent system that anyone can look at. Regular reports to the community are important as well. One thing to note is that many people in communes don’t want to have to think about money, which is fine as long as there’s at least a couple of people who do (as above). Unfortunately, I know of two really bad situations where there was just one person doing all the financial work and, in one case, that person embezzled a whole bunch of money before anyone noticed, in the other, the person handling the money became depressed and didn’t look at the cash flow for months and when they did, the commune was in such dire financial straits that it didn’t survive. You really need to have more than one person in a community watching and handling the money.
All this is to say that once you have your labor situation figured out, it’s time to think about how you will handle money. Set up a simple system that anyone can look at (spreadsheets or Quickbooks or some clear way of watching income and expenses), have a couple of people who will do the financial work, and do regular reports on how the community is doing financially. If there are problems, this is a time to get the whole community involved because a group will have more ideas and resources than any individual.
A last piece of the money situation is how to deal with “unnecessary”/”luxury” expenses. In a commune, everyone’s ‘needs’ are met (although there are often disagreements about what is a need and what is a luxury). But it’s important to find ways that individuals can also get things they want that they don’t absolutely need. Call it a stipend or allowance or mad money, it’s what I will talk about in my next post.
Every community requires work. Most communities try to divide the work up equally or compensate those who do more work.
Here’s where there is a big difference between the communes (income-sharing communities) and the rest of the communities. Within an income sharing community, money is irrelevant (although it certainly matters when the commune is dealing with the outside world). In an income-sharing community, work is the currency. This plays out in how labor and work function within these communities.
In non-income-sharing communities(co-op houses and cohousing for example), there is still a need to get work done. I haven’t lived in cohousing but my understanding is that a lot of this gets done through committees. In co-op houses, work becomes chores. Since most folks work outside of the house for pay and use that to pay the bills, chores are necessary to get the work that the co-op needs done. Cooking is a chore, shopping is a chore, and cleaning is a chore.
Chore wheel examples
How these chores get done in a fair way varies from co-op to co-op. Some use the infamous chore wheel (above)–one week you need to clean a certain area, the next week it’s your turn to shop, etc. Since cooking is needed several to seven nights a week, usually everyone has a different night to cook. Many co-ops these days use fixed chores. One person takes care of the trash and recycling, while another is responsible for cleaning the yard, for example. The advantage of fixed chores is that you get to focus on an area (perhaps one that you are good at and/or enjoy) and if something isn’t being done, it’s obvious who is responsible.
I often say that chores don’t exist in a commune. Since no one works for themselves, it’s all community work. Work that earns money benefits the commune. Cooking, cleaning, etc, benefit the commune. Generally all work is equally valued and often you get to choose what you want to do and when you want to do it.
In the bigger communes (the Kat Kinkade communes so to speak, Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn) they track labor hours. At Twin Oaks they use labor sheets and keep careful track. Acorn was more loose about it although I know that they were recently (at least a couple of years ago) experimenting with labor sheets and more careful tracking of hours. Last I checked, Twin Oaks and Acorn required 42 hours of work a week and East Wind required 35. However this work could be anything the community needed: work that brought in money, cooking, cleaning, building, laundry, road and path maintenance, fixing things, etc. (Although I think that East Wind has a requirement that a certain amount of the work be done in a money making area.) All work is equivalent–an hour of work is an hour of work no matter what the work is.
Filling out a Twin Oaks labor sheet
Twin Oaks justifies its 42 hour requirement by pointing out that if you are in the mainstream and work 40 hours at a job, you still need to cook and clean (and often fix things or pay for it) for yourself and that is quite a few more hours. At Twin Oaks, you don’t need to cook unless that’s what you want to do for your hours, and you don’t even need to do laundry if you participate in their communal clothes system.
The smaller communes do things a bit differently. My understanding is that Sandhill didn’t track hours and they certainly don’t at Glomus Commune and we aren’t doing it in the little community that I am now part of. Of course, we want to be fair but there are other ways of making sure that work is at least somewhat equitably distributed.
When I was at Glomus we used three different ways of paying attention to the distribution of labor. The first (and generally what we do here) was in a small commune, it’s not hard to know what everyone is doing. Secondly, there was a section of the weekly meeting where folks reported what they had been up to. And third, and I think key, we had a yearly ‘Roles and Goals’ report where people talked about what they saw as the work they were doing and what they hoped to achieve over the next year. (We recently looked at all our different roles here and it was very helpful to see what each person was doing.)
Something that I also noticed at Glomus and is true here as well is that you don’t need to worry about people doing the work if people are doing stuff they really want to do. The farmers worked long hours because that’s what the farm required and they were dependent on each other–and they all really wanted to farm. I’ve noticed it here as well. Each of us is doing the work we are committed to, because we are committed to it, not because we have some predetermined set of hours.
Glomus farmers at work
I am going to recommend this for anyone trying to start an income-sharing community. Tracking is necessary in a larger community but no community starts off large. If you are starting as a small community, trust and paying attention to each other is what’s important in a labor system. Talk about what each person wants to do and see if that makes sense. Look at the gaps–what things still need to get done. Who will do them? How do you make sure that it’s all fair, that no one is overworking and that no one is really slacking off? As I said, it’s hard to really slack off in a small community without other folks noticing. And if someone really doesn’t want to work, they probably don’t belong in the community.
Unfortunately, community building and community maintenance is work, sometimes hard work–but I think that it’s also satisfying work. If you are starting a community, talk about your labor system. Figure out a way to get everything the community needs done (including bringing in enough money to survive) and figure out who is going to do what. Write it down. This is the beginning of your labor policies.
I will look more at money and how communities deal with it in my next post on Agreements and Policies.
This is my second post in a series on Agreements and Policies. If you want to create a community and you’ve found some people, your next step is to make sure you are all on the same page. Communities start easier when there are already agreements and policies in place.
Your first and most important agreement is on how you make decisions. Once you’ve decided that, the next thing your fledgling potential community needs to do is to vision together, to create a Vision or Mission Statement or (preferably) both. Why?
At one point in my community creating journey we were talking about a community I called the “Bus Community”, because we were in a city area and I got on buses frequently and on many corners several buses would come. How would I decide which bus to get on? I would look to see where the bus was going. If I didn’t look to see where the bus was going, I could end up anywhere.
Likewise, when you get folks together to create a community, most of them want to do more than live together. It’s good to make sure at the very beginning that you are all looking for the same thing and it is very disconcerting, after you’ve been working together for a while, to discover that many folks are looking for different things.
However, even if folks seem to be generally looking for the same thing, it is useful to spell it out right at the beginning because almost all of the other agreements and policies flow from this. Having Vision and Mission Statements are especially important for membership policies (and for finding new members) but they can also help shape labor and financial systems (if income sharing is part of your mission, for example, labor and finance are going to be very different from a community where everyone works separate jobs and has independent finances) as well as legal structures and ownership agreements which depend heavily on what you want your community to look like.
I’ve written already on Collaborative Community Design, which can be the prelude to writing your Vision and Mission Statements. Knowing what everyone’s bottom lines and deep desires are can help shape Vision and Mission. What’s important is the collaborative part. You want to make sure that these reflect contributions from everyone. Having buy in on your Vision and Mission is essential. As I said in my Collaborative Design post, you don’t want it to be one or two people’s vision. A real community incorporates the visions of many folks. When everyone has a part in creating the Vision and Mission Statements, everyone will feel a part of this new community.
So what’s the difference between Vision Statements and Mission Statements? (In all honesty, I had to look it up.)
A Vision Statement is aspirational, focusing on the goal(s) of the community. It’s why you are creating a community. It is usually a rather short statement, often a sentence or two. A Vision Statement might read, “We are creating this community to support each other and work toward a better world.”
A Mission Statement is more of a roadmap, focusing on what you intend to do. It’s how you hope to achieve your vision. A Mission Statement might include the line, “We will create a community business that will fund our day to day community as well as our social change efforts.”
Yana Ludwig’s book, Building Belonging, has a whole chapter on “Visioning Your Community” and includes six actual mission statements from a variety of community endeavors that the author felt were good examples of clear, concise statements.
Her biggest piece of advice is to avoid what she calls Rorschach words, words that can mean a variety of different things, depending on who is reading them. These include words like sustainability, affordability, diversity, respect, safety, and even the word community. (I often tell the story of an early attempt at community building that I was part of where we slowly gathered a group of folks and had events and meetings, and when we thought we had a good solid group we suggested talking about living together. We did not expect anyone to be surprised by that idea, but most folks seemed to be. We asked, “What did you think we meant by community?” and found there were four different ideas of what various people thought the word ‘community’ meant.)
It’s not wrong to use any of these words, but make sure that they are clearly defined. Yana includes a story of one of her attempts to create community that became something she didn’t expect because the three organizers were really looking for three different things and didn’t realize it until they had gathered a group which had three different visions. There was something created out of this, but she says “it never really became a coherent community…”
As I said, everything should flow out of your Vision and Mission Statements. You should spend a while crafting them and they should reflect the desires and goals of everyone involved.
Once you have decided what you are doing, you will probably want to look how you are going to get it done. In my next post on Agreements and Policies, I will look at Labor and Work.
commune life 