How can a community help develop and maintain a culture of equitable and empowered membership? How can we make decisions effectively as a group? No matter your governance system, from Sociocracy, to majority vote or consensus, or whatever hybrid, there are many tools and which can be applied to help empower and balance voices, participation and decision making.
This presentation is an introduction to some basic principles of effective egalitarian governance and ways to inject or build that culture in community settings. The presentation will include a balance of group participation and presentation.

Welcome Conflict! How do we do that?
• Listen with honor and respect
• Don’t shy away from people who are ‘different’.
• Discover common values.
• Be curious about finding common ground.
• Interactive with Q&A along the way

This talk explores how cohousing communities activate a sense of interdependence which cultivates a way of living where disabled and non-disabled individuals alike co-create a system of accessibility which organically and reciprocally meets the needs of community members.

A conversation about reconnecting and restoring relationships after a difficult conflict or fracture in the community. Conflict occurs in every community, and some of those conflicts have lasting impacts across the community. Everyone is welcome to come and share their experience, learning and thinking about how to navigate the grief, loss, and disappointment that can remain after the primary conflict is resolved.

Creating a cohousing community? What about a dynamic and effective system of decision making which is also a form of self governance that allows everyone’s voice to be heard and creates solutions that are within everyone’s preference or at least range of tolerance. Sociocracy in action from a forming community.

We will learn how to hold moving targets accountable for their roles in a conflict. The target becomes a bystander, the instigator becomes the victim, the ally becomes a bully. Run of the mill disagreements in a community is not like the criminal justice system where there is a bad guy who must pay for their actions.

At this point, many people want to be taking concrete steps to dismantle systemic racism and white supremacy in cohousing, but many, especially white allies, struggle to know where and how to start. This session convenes a panel and invites participants to suggest specific steps that cohousing groups can take.

A conversation about co-existing with our differences as society opens up after covid and vaccines are available. Everyone is invited to participate and share their experience, learning, and thinking about what it takes to co-exist peacefully and lovingly while holding different perspectives on health, safety and community.

There is a good bit of complexity in collaborative decision-making. This session will review many elements to consider when deciding who will make decisions and how those decisions will be made using a tool Karen calls “Decision Bingo”. Before you watch this session you might want to print this bingo card and bring your dry beans or paperclips for markers. This is going to be fun!

A Menu of Offerings to Keep Ourselves Connected: I will present a comprehensive view of how connection in community can be sustained through a formalized system of social/emotional offerings. Attendees will gain a sense of how the community is being cared for from both the point of view of individuals in distress and of the community at large. This presentation is for anyone interested in how we attend to the emotional pulse of the community.

Many people aspire to make the lessons they’ve collected over the course of their lifetime available to others, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be asked, or will be able to find a suitable venue to share it. Ouch! In this workshop we unpack the dimensions of Eldering through these subtopics: Dearth of Ritual, No Broom to Jump, It’s a State of Mind, It Takes Patience, Don’t Wait for the Phone to Ring, Turning Over Your Work to Others, Downshifting, Know What You Don’t Know, Low Threshold of Delight, The Dynamics of Social Capital, Intergenerational Challenges

The attendees will participate in structured sharing in groups of three and in the large group as a way to deepen relationships. We will explore different kinds of questions and structures, based on the work of Peter Block, Community: the Structure of Belonging,
that enable people to experience closeness with each other.