Do you have a questionnaire for potential members? New Member Process?

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Hi, I’m part of a forming community and we have had a lot of interest from potential members so we are working on creating a process for adding new members. I have looked through the websites of some communities and seen what their process is so I have some ideas but I’d love to hear more. Did you have one process when you were forming and another once you were established? I would really love to know if other communities use some sort of questionnaire and if they can share it with me to give me some ideas. Thanks so much!!!

Here’s a little more about the community we are forming.

We are several families with young children looking to live on a farm within 45 minutes of St. Paul, MN. We hope to include families with young children as well as individuals and couples. In addition, we want to host exchange students and others doing cultural exchange programs or living in the US temporarily. We want to live with people with diverse skills and interests that complement our own.

We value the spectrums of the human experience, including gender, sexuality, disability, race, ethnicity, and religion and work to dismantle the systems of oppression in our society. Through community involvement we work together to foster sustainability and justice in our world.

Group decisions are made using a consensus process to come up with our best decision.

We anticipate buying land and needing to build our housing and community buildings. Possibilities include individual homes, shared housing, semi-permanent structures such as yurts, mobile homes, and guest houses. We also hope to have shared buildings for cooking and eating together, barns, and other outbuildings. We will build with the environment and sustainability in mind. Our dream land would include woods and a creek for the children to play in, maple trees for making maple syrup, and wildlife.

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Hi Beka, I am in a similar situation and also interested in learning if others used questionnaires and what they looked like.
Love your community project and wholeheartedly embrace your vision and goals. Best of luck! Christine
(based in the Catskills, NY)

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I think this would look different for finding cofounders and finding members. Cofounders need to be people who are able to always be “on” in regard to the hard work that needs doing in community, whether that is hard physical work or hard planning work or hard meeting and process-related work, not each person will be good at all of these, but cofounders will likely be good at at least one of these areas and need emotional stammina. Obviously one wants to make sure that core community values line up, the smaller things and aspects of life don’t have to be perfectly alligned at all, just the basics of community vision and goals.

For joiners/members later on once infastructure is happening well I’d say these ideas can be relaxed somewhat, sure anyone who joins needs to be in allignment with basic core community values, but they don’t need as much social or physical or emotional stammina as founders do, as long as they’re enthusiastic and can stick to agreements they make then they can be good fits. And of course they need to be the kind of people who _want community with others, have learnt how to agree to disagree, want to work collectively and cooperatively within whatever the community framework is, etc.

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