Legal vs Community Documents
In my experience, most communities have both legal documents and community documents and it is worth doing some thinking about how and when to use each. Different communities approach this differently. The challenge comes when different members of that same community approach this differently. That tends to be a recipe for strong disagreements and hurt feelings.
I’ll start with a true short story that demonstrates the range of thinking about legal documents. A cohousing resident was concerned about the thousands of dollars her community was spending on attorney fees each year and the impact of the legal advice on community relationships. She called a nearby cohousing community to ask about their attorney. “We don’t have an attorney.” they answered, “But we have had a therapist.”
It should be noted that I am a community process consultant, not an attorney, and that bias is likely to show in my thoughts below. That said, I do think legal documents are important and that it is worth the investment of legal fees to make sure they are written well and do what they are intended to do. My opinion is that legal documents are intended to provide legal protection for the community and its members. This protection may be needed in financial matters, especially at the building stage of a community. All communities need to be protected should a lawsuit occur. The thing to notice, though, is that they are designed to function in our legal system, which is an oppositional, winners and losers system that functions on very different principles than cohousing.
This is the reason I don’t recommend that communities rely on legal documents for their day to day interactions, communications or decision-making. I believe the goals of cohousing, to live in relationship with neighbors and to share resources, are best served by practices and policies that are designed for communication and collaboration. I recommend that day to day operations of a community be guided by community documents, by whatever name a community chooses.
These documents may be modeled on examples from other communities, but they should be built by the community. In the end it will be the relationships between neighbors that determine the experience of living in cohousing. Those relationships are best supported by policies that reflect the best of people in relationship: trust, respect, listening, and compassion. It may be noted that fairness is not on my list. (Fairness is the purview of legal documents.) A relationship is rarely fair by any measure, and far less so by the measure of a person who is in it. What they are is fulfilling, joyful, and growth-stimulating.
My suggestion is to draft all of your documents carefully and with great thought to the intention behind them. Then hold tightly to your care for one another, hold loosely to your community documents, and throw your legal documents into a clearly labeled box where they can be accessed if you should need them.
I’ll start with a true short story that demonstrates the range of thinking about legal documents. A cohousing resident was concerned about the thousands of dollars her community was spending on attorney fees each year and the impact of the legal advice on community relationships. She called a nearby cohousing community to ask about their attorney. “We don’t have an attorney.” they answered, “But we have had a therapist.”
It should be noted that I am a community process consultant, not an attorney, and that bias is likely to show in my thoughts below. That said, I do think legal documents are important and that it is worth the investment of legal fees to make sure they are written well and do what they are intended to do. My opinion is that legal documents are intended to provide legal protection for the community and its members. This protection may be needed in financial matters, especially at the building stage of a community. All communities need to be protected should a lawsuit occur. The thing to notice, though, is that they are designed to function in our legal system, which is an oppositional, winners and losers system that functions on very different principles than cohousing.
This is the reason I don’t recommend that communities rely on legal documents for their day to day interactions, communications or decision-making. I believe the goals of cohousing, to live in relationship with neighbors and to share resources, are best served by practices and policies that are designed for communication and collaboration. I recommend that day to day operations of a community be guided by community documents, by whatever name a community chooses.
These documents may be modeled on examples from other communities, but they should be built by the community. In the end it will be the relationships between neighbors that determine the experience of living in cohousing. Those relationships are best supported by policies that reflect the best of people in relationship: trust, respect, listening, and compassion. It may be noted that fairness is not on my list. (Fairness is the purview of legal documents.) A relationship is rarely fair by any measure, and far less so by the measure of a person who is in it. What they are is fulfilling, joyful, and growth-stimulating.
My suggestion is to draft all of your documents carefully and with great thought to the intention behind them. Then hold tightly to your care for one another, hold loosely to your community documents, and throw your legal documents into a clearly labeled box where they can be accessed if you should need them.
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