The “Make It So!” Method for Getting What You Want in Community

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.

At a workshop I did at Rocky Hill Cohousing recently, I learned that some residents had wanted neighborhood dinners in their Common House to happen more often and more consistently. So a group of Rocky Hill members brought an idea to a community meeting — they would simplify the Common House meal schedule, create a Sunday Supper open to all residents, and provide an evening meal once a week. They've been enjoying a weekly evening meal together ever since.

The action-oriented cohousers at Rocky Hill didn’t wait for the community as a whole to do this, even though dinners with neighbors several nights a week was what many of them expected when they founded the community in the first place. They didn’t resent or complain — they just up and did it themselves!

If you and your neighbors want a bike shed, for example, but your community doesn’t want to fund or manage it, please build the shed yourselves. You’ll need approval for a proposal for the bike shed’s location, of course, but if you and your fellow cyclists plan to build and maintain it, the proposal is much more likely to pass.

The same is true if you and your friends want certain new facilities for children in your community, or a new program in your Common House, or a new committee to deal with issues related to the current economic downturn or climate change. If the community says No, don’t despair. Get together with the project’s supporters and fund and manage it anyway.

Is it “fair” that your group should have to do all the work and pay for it too? Shouldn’t the community – since it calls itself a “community” – be doing this instead?

Please don’t get stuck in issues of “fairness” when it comes to creating the community you want, or fall into resentment towards those who won’t participate. I think resenting others because it seems they’re not being “fair” is an emotional black hole that can lead to sour, self-destructive feelings and feed yet more resentment. Better, I think, to not waste time resenting others and simply focus on what you do want. Replacing resentment with action seems to be a recipe for enjoying life in community.

At Earthaven groups of members — not the community itself — have created a sauna, an Internet café, a study group on Nonviolent Communication, a home school education program, three small organic farms, and an ethanol fuel/livestock feed project.

This works! So, please, if there’s something you’re yearning for in your cohousing community but the whole group doesn’t want to fund or manage it, do like the folks at Rocky Hill and Earthaven, and — like Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise — “Make it so!”

—Diana Leafe Christian    Diana [at] ic [dot] org