Elderberry CoHousing: Whoooda thought a budget meeting could be fun??

Monday, November 2, 2015

Whoooda thought a budget meeting could be fun??

I must admit that of all the things we do in community - working together, shared meals, salons, music nights, full moon gatherings, trail hiking and all the rest - attending meetings is my least favorite thing to do! So I wasn't exactly looking forward to our meeting on Nov 1 when we had to figure out, among all the wonderful things on our wish list, which things to fund and which things would have to wait. This exercise sounded painful, and it seemed there would be a lot of potential for conflict! Instead, I found myself more than ever loving and appreciating the awesome people in this community! Over a full day, we prioritized 63 funding requests, found creative ways to fund almost everything that people wanted to do, sang some songs during lulls in the work, and came to agreement on a handful of principles going forward. For lunch, we had planned a simple meal of soup, bread, salad and dessert. But the salad was forgotten, and somehow we ended up with a wild array of desserts: carrot cake, lemon merengue pie, two different brownies, blueberry scones, apple cake, choco chip cookies, tapioca pudding and I may have forgotten one or two. Maybe it was the sugar that kept us going all day! That, and having a great facilitator - Joe Cole. Anyway, we have a budget for 2016 and an exciting list of funded projects to get started on. For our regular monthly meeting on Nov 8th, we've decided that the main agenda item will be to have fun. We deserve it for what we accomplished this weekend!! Visitors are welcome to our meetings - Let us know if you have interest in joining us on the 8th and seeing our progress.

Joan, Richard, Anne and Jeff (you can JUST see the recently moved chicken houses and the new metal-working barn out behind the common house)

Joan and Barb!

There were 63 funding requests - each on a separate paper, which were spread out on the floor and sorted by the full group into 3 categories.

Our sorting categories..... We pretty easily identified what we really needed to have and what could wait until after 2016. But deciding how much to spend on our PASSIONS was the real challenge of the day.