Process: Membership: Questions You Should Have Asked Before Joining

Laird Schaub

All groups must face decisions in defining who they are and what it means to be a member, including: 1) how to handle feedback among members; 2) level of engagement in each other's lives; 3) rights and responsibilities; 4) grounds for involuntary loss of rights; and 5) how people join and are integrated into the community. We'll explore why it's a potential disaster to delay answering these questions, and why do most groups do it anyway. We'll also look at a pair of challenges specific to cohousing: limited control of who buys homes; and establishing governance based on home ownership instead of residency (or worse, both).

Laird Schaub has lived 34 years at Sandhill Farm, an income-sharing rural community in Missouri which he helped found. He is also the main administrator of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, a network organization he helped create in 1986. His specialty is conducting up-tempo meetings that engage the full range of human input, teaching groups to work creatively with conflict, and at the same time being ruthless about capturing as much product as possible.