Most important thing to remember: You can do it!
There are four major steps for group process evolution as developed by Bruce Tuckman: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing. Bringing the formative ideas and people together, brainstorming and working through all the ideas that come up to create a design for the coop, develop household agreements that meet the needs of the members and support the design, and finally live with those household agreements while regularly analyzing and optimizing them.
To begin all you need is yourself, pen & paper or a computer to record your thoughts and go down the steps listed below.
- Identify the most important factors to you in a living situation:
- These may be values, tenants, ideals, standards, beliefs, choices/preferences/needs, etc and range from moral based values like political positions to practical issues such as cleanliness or both such as some specific shared food choices.
- When brainstorming these factors determine for each if it is a primary or secondary factor.
- Primary factors are central to the identity of the coop house. Care should be taken to limit and clarify the primary factors since they provide limitations to the makeup of the coop as those that agree and champion those factors will want to live there and those that don’t agree with them won’t want to live there.
- Secondary factors are not central to the identity of the coop house. They do not need to be championed by the membership but may be helpful in coloring some of the implicit values of the community.
- Secondary factors should be limited to things that can easily be agreed to such as the Seven Cooperative Rochdale Principles. If a value is not a primary factor and would fall under the secondary factor category and would reduce the potential membership then you might want to consider omitting it.
- How will your chosen set of factors limit the makeup of your coop?
- By choosing a value you are implicitly excluding people that do not identify with that value.
- Ideological or political differences in have made many a cooperative experience unpleasant and can cause enough conflict to end the cooperative.
- Be aware that not all factor choices fall uniformly across racial, gender and sexual identity, age, etc group lines.
- Helpful activity: Create a Venn Diagram. Make a circle to represent each factor you have chosen as primary. Think critically how these factors may overlap with actual people who belong with each. Example here.
- Determine and record if those factors help define physical variables such as location, rent range, date to move, pets, number of bedrooms, etc.
- Create a very brief outline of your vision for a new coop house including the primary and secondary factors and their physical variables.
- Seek out a small core group of people (2-3) that identify closely with your vision.
- Distribute the very brief outline widely with your contact information.
- Engage in as many one-on-one conversations where you share your brief vision and ask them their thoughts and listen carefully to what they share with you. Ask them who else you should be talking to.
- Refer the Finding New Members page.
- Repeat steps 1, 2, and 3 with the core group to create a more flushed out coop outline document.
- Consider becoming a member house of a larger coop development organization such as Boston Community Cooperatives or NASCO Properties.
- Solicit for additional membership.
- Find a home and move in together! I know there are a lot more steps to finding a home but they do not fit within the scope of this website.