Antidotes to Five Common Kinds of Community Conflict

Half Day Workshop: Fri 1:30 – 5:00

Price: $60, including playful insights

With lively exercises, humorous musical skits, and vivid anecdotes about real problems and their successful solutions in healthy, thriving communities (and cautionary tales from those that failed), Diana Leafe Christian focuses on skills for building trust and connection and reducing conflict in existing cohousing communities as well as in forming groups. Based on her 15 years’ experience in the communities movement, her work as a consultant to cohousing and other communities, and her own experiences living in community, she identifies and briefly discusses six crucial organizational structures that, when missing, create “structural conflict” and lead to failure in forming-community groups or wrenching conflict in existing communities. She covers the significant, mutually influencing relationship between mission and purpose, decision-making method, and new-member policy; creating communication agreements; helping people stay accountable to group agreements; instituting a graduated series of consequences; creating a sense of trust and connection; and dealing with “the challenging group member.”

PRESENTER: Diana Leafe Christian is author of Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities and Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community (New Society Publishers, 2003 & 2007). She hosts a blog on the Coho/US website with frequent postings on communication and process issues as well as how to join a cohousing community. Editor of Communities magazine for 14 years (1994-2007), she now publishes Ecovillages, a free online publication. Diana speaks at conferences, and leads workshops for and does consultations for cohousing communities, ecovillages, and other kinds of intentional communities in the U.S. and Canada. She’s been interviewed by Time, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, AARP magazine, NPR, and the BBC. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina. Her website is www.DianaLeafeChristian.org.