The Ownership and Membership group
1. Ownership
- We notice the Park population is unbalanced in regards to age, many people having lived here already a long time. We hear the joke go round that when the elderly die out, the Park Ecovillage will disappear. We wonder whether in the field of ownership things could be done to make our population a bit more balanced.
1. Renting out affordable housing makes it easier to select who can rent (we could favour young people and young families)
2. It is difficult to control house sales, the Land Sales Group has only limited possibility to say “no” to a sale (based on the Deed of Community Conditions).
3. There could be clever ways to make forms of house ownership possible where we can select the house owners
We also want to investigate how the current situation of house ownership and renting out of homes functions.
1. How engaged are new house owners who haven’t done Experience Week or have done only a few Foundation programs? Is there a “watering down” of our values or bring they instead valuable input?
2. Should we have stricter selection of house owners IF POSSIBLE AT ALL or would the cure be worse than the disease?
3. We wonder if there could be more of a focus as part of the interview process on asking the applicant what they expect they can contribute to the Community, and that it be stated to all applicants that Community involvement is a part of the role of being a home owner in the Community.
4. What ideas live amongst the residents about those topics?
We encourage proactive suggestions and recommendations from residents on solutions for these issues.
We would discourage any feedback that encourages further divisiveness within the Community.
2. Membership
Now that the Findhorn Foundation is withdrawing from the Park, the residents of the Park Ecovillage are going to carry more responsibility.
Our group picked out Membership as an important element. We are exploring what this new membership would be. Relation with coming buyout of the Park, likely by either new BENCOM organisation or PET
There are many questions to explore and here are just a few:
- Should only people living in the geographical area of the Park be members?
- What decision making powers will members have?
- Will all Park residents be member (which is all the titleholders, renters and mobile home owners)
- Which benefits and which duties will be attached to this new membership?
- Need there be criteria to be eligible to become a member?(apart from the geographical criterium)
- The “new membership” can’t be the same as NFA membership, because NFA membership is for a larger area (radius of 50 miles around the Park)
We are aware that the above is largely covered by the Governance and Decision Making Group as well as by the buy-out group.