This is a story told by cohouser and consensus facilitator Evan Richardson, who lives at Westwood Cohousing in Asheville, North Carolina. Evan coordinates Laird Schaub and Ma’ikwe Ludwig's IFP-Southeast, their two-year facilitation training held quarterly at various cohousing communities and other intentional communities in the Southeastern states, (IFP trainings are held in the Mid-Atlantic states and other regions too.) Evan shared this story with trainees in the IFP-Southeast program.

Evan’s daughter Lila and other 8, 9, and 10-year-olds at Westwood Cohousing began gathering in May, 2008, for a twice-monthly meeting to solve problems, share appreciations, and discuss plans for fun things to do. Generally Even or two other adults facilitate the circle, with the kids setting the agenda.

A few years ago Ecovillage Sieben Linden near Poppau, Germany replaced their consensus process with a new method they developed. It wasn’t because people blocked too much, but because they didn’t! And while Sieben Linden is not cohousing, their method is so interesting I wanted to share it with you.

According to Sieben Linden member Kosha Anja Joubert, too many people were silent when they didn't like a proposal because they didn’t want to stop others from having what they wanted. “Lukewarm” is how she describes their consensus decisions. “We developed a wish for more outspokenness and clarity,” she wrote in Beyond You and Me (Permanent Publications, 2007), the GEN/Gaia Education book on the social aspects of ecovillages.

At Sieben Linden, two-thirds of the members must choose "fully positive” for a proposal to pass.

The following was written by a longtime member of Twin Oaks Community in Virgina, Keenan Dakota. He wrote an email to the community in response to a community member named Burl (not his real name), whom Twin Oaks expelled because of his negative behavior. Keenan gave me permission to share it on this website.

Keenan has written for Communities magazine over the years, and I've long considered him a wise observer of human nature and community life. While Twin Oaks is not cohousing, I thought browsers to this website might benefit from adding Keenan's insights to what we're all learning about creating social and cultural culture in community.   —Diana Leafe Christian

Are We Glue or Shrapnel?

“I trust everyone here,” one of my friends told a new member at Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina, where I live.

“Well, there are people here I don’t trust,” the new member replied with some heat.

The new member had been trained in our consensus decision-making process. Yet soon after becoming a full member she told us that she didn’t trust one of our committees, and — Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! — blocked six times.

This was a useful, though painful, educational process for our community. What had we failed to adequately convey to her in our required consensus training? And why do we assume that new people entering into our decision-making process will automatically trust the community, trust the consensus process, and trust our self-governance process?

If your community isn’t yet doing something you want, make a proposal to create it, as Rob Sandelin of Sharingwood Cohousing has advised for years. I’ve done this several times at Earthaven Ecovillage where I live, and it’s worked well. (Though Earthaven is not cohousing, the same community principle applies.)

You can take this further. Let’s say your community doesn’t want to fund, manage, or offer community-labor credit for a project that many of you want. You can create it yourselves, privately.

One of the greatest rewards of community living, I think, is the near-joyous feeling of moving forward towards the community’s goals. Finally finishing the guest rooms in the Common House. Finally finishing planting the landscaping. It's great!

And there’s probably nothing more demoralizing than getting so bogged down in meetings that we hardly ever do anything. We discuss things endlessly, but rarely take action. We feel defeated in advance. Meeting attendance drops to a trickle. Morale plummets.

Here's how one community, immobilized and dysfunctional for years, finally got itself unstuck.

I just got an email from a friend I met when I did a consultation-workshop for her forming cohousing community awhile back. She wrote that the core group is struggling right now.

“After your workshop,” she wrote, “people were enthusiastic about creating structures, but we’ve gotten bogged down arguing about what structures we want. Some people don’t want any constraints on them, and we don’t have a voting back-up in place.”

She added that they’ve got a Vision/Values/Mission/Purpose workshop scheduled in a couple of weeks. “Maybe that will move us forward,” she wrote. “Wish us luck!”

This is a phrase coined by Kevin Wolf of N Street Cohousing in Davis, California, who told me about their impressive form of consensus, described in my 1/5/09 entry, "Is Pure Consensus Right for your Group?"

Kevin believes that when someone in a community consistently blocks proposals that others support, they have a community-style mental illness. The person would certainly not be considered "mentally ill" in mainstream culture, they would function normally at work and among families and friends. But in a community context, Kevin says, if the person consistently cannot let go of what they personally want in favor of the greater good of the community — as defined by how the other members see the community’s mission and purpose (including its values, goals, and principles) — they are "mentally ill" in a community context.

My friend Tree Bressen is a meeting facilitator and consensus trainer in Eugene, Oregon, who teaches consensus, facilitation, and effective meeting process for many cohousing communities.

Tree values inclusivity in community, so I wondered whether she considers N Street’s six-meeting/voting fallback method, described in my 1/5/09 Blog entry, "Is Pure Consensus Right for Your Group?", to be inclusive enough and fair to everyone.

“It seems like consensus to me,” she replied when I asked her. “And I like how it balances power with responsibility.”

How can the most number of people get the most of what they want, most of the time?

I’m intrigued by how the members of N Street Cohousing in Davis, California practice consensus. They seem to get the best of this decision-making method without any of the exhausting and demoralizing aspects that sometimes plague other communities. This is important to me because, ideally, the most number of people in community would get the most of what they want in community proposals and policies, most of the time.

Consensus Decision-Making — a Double-Edged Sword

Every cohousing community I know in North America (and almost every non-cohousing intentional community too), uses pure consensus as their decision-making method. This means, of course, that if someone blocks a proposal it doesn’t pass.