Ann's very personal, highly biased and incomplete guide to the ecovillage ... in a nutshell, and with only a little no hyperbole. (this time!)
Home for Sale in our next building – ready at the end of December
It’s two bedroom and the affordable price includes a share in all our common facilities, too!
Rental Opportunity
There’s still an opportunity to rent a room within our shared house. Please get in contact if you’re interested.
Community Meeting
We’re meeting more often right now, because we have a lot of ground to cover as we want to be to tell new folks what to expect in moving here – like ... Can I let my dog off leash? How much are the strata fees and what will they cover? What does being a ‘member’ mean?
We’ve made steady progress with answering many of the questions. And we tackled a batch of new ones yesterday- read on!
Work Contribution hours
We know we can reduce our strata fees, if we do some of the work ourselves around here like raking, mowing, painting, answering email enquiries and participating in Team meetings. And we know too, that working together builds healthy relationships within our community. But how much work must we each do, to get the necessary jobs done and have a fair distribution of tasks?
Our facilitator took us through a brainstorming process by being broken into small discussion groups. Everyone gets a chance to contribute this way...even the quiet ones. We’ve come up with an upper and lower range of hours per month, with a required monetary fee if we don’t complete the work.
Our Adhoc team taking us through this, will come back next time with a refined proposal, to help us firm up our procedure more tightly. We’ll start recording work hours soon, and that way we can more directly appreciate all the work that gets done around here!
Nomination Process for next YES Board election and consensus in action.
This next Yarrow Ecovillage Society ( YES) Coop Board annual general meeting will be the first with such a large number of new resident and neighbor-in-waiting members.
We’re putting together a nominating team to inspire the best possible new expanded board, Deciding that at the meeting, was pretty straight-forward, as you’d expect. But something else happened in the discussion which highlights for me, one of the strengths of the consensus system.
We were discussing how we’d elect our board... in a secret ballot? ... with each successful candidate having to receive more than 2/3 support? The majority of meeting attendees were ready to accept the proposal as written, but one member had unanswered questions and another had strong concerns. In a more conventional system, those people would have been ‘out-voted’ and their concerns might have been over-ridden or ignored.
But in our consensus process, we listened to those concerns and deferred a decision about that part until we have them sorted out. It won’t be meaning that a single person could stop a decision or that the proposal must contain necessary shifts towards the one person’s point of view, but it might in some cases. Sometimes one single person can hold a wisdom the rest have missed. And it’s worth the extra effort as we lay important groundwork, to pause and make sure.
Marketing Team Remuneration
Many volunteer hours have gone into answering email and phone queries about our village, to tell new folks about the available homes we have. Many tours have been given. Countless hours of website development have been spent to show off our fine village and its wonderful life style. . At the meeting, the Groundswell group approved a system to pay the Marketing Team with a portion of the sales price of new homes. I hasten to say that home prices won’t increase – marketing is already part of the budget – it’ll just be spent in a different direction.
Full disclosure time. I’m on the Marketing Team and will be on the receiving end of some of this mullah. All I can say is, “Thank you”
Next meeting : February 27th – you’re invited.
Poem of the Week
Having Come This Far --- James Broughton
I've been through what my through was to be
I did what I could and couldn't
I was never sure how I would get there
I nourished an ardor for thresholds
for stepping stones and for ladders
I discovered detour and ditch
I swam in the high tides of greed
I built sandcastles to house my dreams
I survived the sunburns of love
No longer do I hunt for targets
I've climbed all the summits I need to
and I've eaten my share of lotus
Now I give praise and thanks
for what could not be avoided
and for every foolhardy choice
I cherish my wounds and their cures
and the sweet enervations of bliss
My book is an open life
I wave goodbye to the absolutes
and send my regards to infinity
I'd rather be blithe than correct
Until something transcendent turns up
I splash in my poetry puddle
and try to keep God amused.
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