Agreements and Policies #1

by Raven

1: How to Decide How to Decide

Yes, I am starting a new series.  

The second most popular post on this blog over the last couple of years has been my post on Four Steps to Building a Commune.  In it I said, “Step Two is about working on vision and agreements together.”  I later wrote a post about the process of making agreements.  Recently, as I ended my series on Starting from Scratch, I wrote a whole piece on Agreements and Policies, outlining what I think are the most important agreements and policies a beginning commune needs to make.  In this series, I am going to go over each of them in more detail, starting with what I think is the first thing a fledgling community needs to do: you need to decide how you are going to make decisions.

What most people in this society are used to is deciding things by voting.  While voting is certainly better (and more democratic) than having decisions made by one person (king, queen, or dictator) or a small group of people, there’s a big problem with voting.  It creates winners and losers.  While I am not particularly an advocate for voting in general, this is a lot more problematic in community where you have to live with the losers.  If you have a community of say twenty-one people and eleven of them vote in favor of something, that means that there are ten folks (nearly half the group) that don’t agree with the decision and they will all be living with you.  That may not be fun.

There are, however, a lot of alternatives to majority voting.  I am a strong advocate of consensus decision making, however it is not the only way to go.  There is a large range of decision making structures between majority voting and strict consensus, including things like supermajority voting (you need to get 60% or two-thirds or three-quarters of the vote, etc) on one hand and consensus minus one, or two, or three (so that one or two people can’t block a proposal) on the other.  There are also things like Sociocracy and Holacracy that often work better for larger groups.  I do believe, however, that consensus works better for smaller communities, especially income-sharing communities and co-op houses, and I’ve seen it work well in both of these.

The problem at the very beginning is that you haven’t agreed on a decision making process and in chicken-and-egg fashion, how do you make a decision on a decision making process if you don’t have a decision making process in place?  

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you make this first decision by consensus, even if the decision is to use another decision making system.  I’ve seen groups use consensus to decide to use a different way to decide things from then on.  (And none of these agreements are locked in place.  Really, you can use any form of decision making to decide to decide differently.)  The advantage of using consensus to decide on a decision making system is that at least everyone knows that you have all collectively decided that this will be the way that you make decisions.

Once you have done this, congratulations!  You are on your way to making many agreements and policies.  

Now, you need to decide (together, using your newly agreed upon decision-making system) what your group is all about.  That will be the focus of my next post on Agreements and Policies: writing Vision and Mission Statements.

Starting from Scratch #9

by Raven

9: Agreements and Policies

As I said in my last ‘Starting from Scratch’ post, I’ve just moved into an already functioning community. One of their major challenges was that they didn’t start with much in the way of agreements. In this post I want to look at a list of agreements and policies I think every community should have and I will briefly say why I think each of them is important. For many of them, I will write future posts detailing the particular agreement or policy. (I’ve written about agreements before, but mostly about why they are important. Here I want to list most of the agreements and policies you want to make. And as I mentioned in my previous post, I developed this list from my time working with Cotyledon and Glomus Commune as we were developing policies, as well as watching communities like Compersia struggle to create policies, and also after reading Yana Ludwig’s book on Building Belonging which has a good list of policies that starting communities should think about.)

Here is my list, along with a bit on why.

First of all, you need to decide how you will decide things. This is the first thing you need to do, because you need a way to collectively make decisions in order to create these policies and agreements. I will talk more in a future post about various methods of decision making.

Next, I believe, your group needs to create a Vision/Mission Statement. This is key because I believe that everything else, all your community’s policies, flow from this statement. Again, I hope to devote a whole post to this.

After this you can begin to create your community’s policies. Here’s my current list of what I think are important policies to have in place.

A Labor System: Everyone is going to need to work, at least in some capacity, to keep the community going. This is a lot more important in income-sharing communities, where work is the currency, but every community has some work involved, and to be fair, everyone needs to do some. How do you decide who does what and how much should each person do? Yes, this will be another post.

Financial Systems: How are you going to get money? How are you going to track the money you get? How are you going to budget? You can be as communist as you want but your community still has to survive in a capitalist system.

Stipend/Allowance/Mad Money: Income sharing communities take care of each members needs but it’s also good to have some money that each person has that they can spend on little extra items they might want, money that they can spend, no questions asked. How much? How often do they get it? How do you decide what’s a necessity and what’s a luxury?

Membership Process: How do you decide who is a good fit for the community? (I’ve seen communities try to go without having a membership process and I’ve also seen it backfire. Badly.) Like the decision making, this is tricky at the beginning. What do you do about the initial group of people? Make them go through the process or just grandmother them in?

Legal Structures: You have to deal with the outside world as a community and it’s good to have some kind of legal entity. Welcome to the world of LLCs, 501c3s, 501ds, housing cooperatives, and home owners associations. It’s as much fun as it sounds like. And yes, you are probably going to need to consult with a lawyer at some point. Hopefully only briefly.

Land Ownership: Who owns the land, the buildings, the property? In an “egalitarian community” it’s all supposed to be equal–either we all own it or no one owns it. (You can have a community where everyone is a renter.) Two interesting possibilities are land trusts and permanent real estate cooperatives.

Exit Agreements: It would be nice to assume that everyone is going to stay forever, but the reality is people come and go from communities. How do you make it easier for someone to leave if they decide to or need to? We take care of each other while we are living together and I think it’s important to take of someone when they leave, particularly if they’ve been a member for a while and put quite a bit into the community.

And those are the easy policies. Here are the ones that are trickier but you absolutely want in place because things will be worse if you don’t

Conflict Resolution Structures: Most people don’t like conflict. (I’m an admitted conflict avoider.) Having some kind of agreed upon way of managing conflict before conflict happens makes things a bit easier.

Violence Policy: Hopefully it’s not going to happen, but you don’t want to try to figure this out when you are dealing with a really difficult situation.

What to do if a member is sick, disabled, or dies: If your community is around long enough, it’s going to happen.

Finally, the two you really don’t want to think about and you really need to have in place: a Member Expulsion Policy and a Community Dissolution Policy. No one wants to think about expelling members and even less about dissolving the community but, like the violence policy, it’s going to be even more horrible if you are trying to come up with a policy under the high stress of one of these happening.

The good news is that these don’t have to be permanent policies. You can revisit them or change them over time. When we dissolved the Common Threads community, we had a policy in place which we basically ignored because another solution made more sense at that point.

Policies aren’t there to bind you if everyone can agree to something else. They are there as a fall back when you can’t agree. Fortunately, you already have something in place as a default. Having policies already can make a really hard time just a bit easier.