Mehitabel (they/them) is a comic artist, history educator, and coop denizen since 2016. They currently reside in Somerville, MA.

hopefully your house meetings aren't like this

The house meeting is a much maligned aspect of co-op living. After dishes in the sink (and your roommate’s poorly trained pet ferret) terrible house meetings are probably the most common sort of co-op horror story. At their worst, house meetings are a synecdoche for all of the worst co-op drama – I get this mental image of a bunch of punks sitting on beanbags who can’t get through two sentences without accusing each other of being poser marxists while fighting in about equal parts over their dysfunctional chore rotation, lesbian separatism, and whether to buy single or double ply toilet paper. And this reputation’s not entirely without merit – over the years, I have heard some truly bonkers gossip about ways that other co-ops are organizing their meetings (“omg, what do you mean you just have to sit there silently and witness the conversation until you’ve lived in the house for more than three months??”). And, horror stories aside, I know a lot of people who live in even pretty functional coops who do not like house meetings or even find them to be one of the more stressful or annoying aspects of group living.

But, despite the bad rap, I do think it is possible for co-op house meetings to be efficient, effective, and perfectly pleasant – and actually a pretty useful tool for making decisions as a household. I don’t know if I would say that I am “good at house meetings,” but I do feel uniquely blessed to have lived for the past six years in houses where our house meetings (or “mouse heatings” in the vernacular) are totally fine. So if you are starting a new co-op and curious about house meetings or in a co-op and hate your house meetings, here is my advice for how to have house meetings that don’t suck.

Why have house meetings?

House meetings can be a big scheduling commitment for housemates to make. So are they actually worth the time? I think they often are, for the following reasons:

Do we need to have house meetings?

If you ask me, probably! Even when I lived in a much smaller housing situation with two roommates, we still had a house constitution and set aside time to meet every month or two to talk it out. But when you get to any size of household above four or five people, I think some kind of house meeting becomes essential; that’s a size where you’re unlikely to have the entire house in a room often just by happenstance, so you probably won’t end up having conversations as a whole group unless you schedule them. And when you get into really large group housing situations, where people have all different sorts of preferences and might not even interact with all of their housemates on a regular basis, then house meetings become a really essential way to get on the same page.

Also, the more you entangle your lives with your housemates and need to make time-sensitive decisions together as a group, the more essential regular house meetings become. If you buy groceries together, cook food together, own property together, do building maintenance together, share pets together, or live in an inter-generational community, all of those situations are going to create more topics that everyone’s going to need to be on the same page about, and may want to meet about and discuss.

How often should we have house meetings?

Ultimately, that’s a question for you and your house. Some people are more efficient about house meetings than others. Some people like house meetings to be a forum for group processing whereas others like house meetings to be wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am efficient. I’ve lived in coops where we very happily met weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. You may also want to ramp up or down the number of meetings depending on how much there is to talk about – I’ve lived in a coop that had a weekly meeting that we’d drop if there weren’t any topics suggested ahead of time. Most co-ops I know meet for about an hour each meeting and sometimes schedule longer meetings for complex topics. I find that longer than that is often just too long for people to stay focused. Some houses also like to schedule retreats, and will set aside a day or a few days every year to meet as a house and discuss issues which need to be given more space – but I know a lot of coops which get on fine without this.

As a general rule of thumb, you probably want to be scheduling meetings often enough that you don’t feel overwhelmed by topics to discuss each time, but infrequently enough that you’re not in more meetings than you want to be. If you’re already at your max number of meetings, and you find you’re not getting through topics, you might want to look into some tools for making your house meetings more efficient (see below). My personal take is that if you’re meeting more than once a week (and there’s not some kind of short-term urgent situation going on), you are probably meeting too much and should look into other pathways to resolve whatever is going on.

How to schedule house meetings?

The larger your house is, the more I find it’s useful to have a regular meeting time, since otherwise, coordinating more than 5 or 6 people’s schedules on a regular basis is just too much. If you decide not to go with regularly scheduled meetings, I’d very much suggest appointing a facilitator of house meeting chair who’s job it is to make sure those meetings get scheduled.

Do we need a house meeting facilitator?

I’d recommend it! If your co-op is smaller (4-7 people) I think it’s sometimes possible to get by without and just all take some responsibility for keeping the conversation on track. But in a larger co-op, it can be really useful to have a designated person who’s job it is to keep the conversation on time, take notes, and handle the procedural side of the meeting. When I lived in a really large coop (30+) people, house meeting conversations were really only possible with facilitation; no matter how well-behaved and conscientious a group that size is, and how dedicated to anarchistic self-organization they are, it’s just really hard to coordinate that many people without it being someone’s specific responsibility.

Aside from a house meeting chair, I also find that in big or difficult, conversations, it can be really helpful to have someone who’s taking specific responsibility for watching the emotional tenor of the room or making sure that everyone’s voices are being heard. This person can be the house meeting chair/facilitator, but sometimes I find it’s really helpful if it’s not, since that person might already have a lot on their plate in a tense meeting. In groups I work with from the Boston Public Schools, I’ve heard people refer to this role in group work as the “voice equalizer” which I think is very cute.

Some co-ops have a single facilitator who chairs each meeting, and some co-ops assign this role on a rotating or volunteer basis. Even if you don’t have a facilitator or “voice equalizer” in your official structure, these are still good roles to be mindful of! One thing which you can always do to make house meetings run more smoothly is to be a little conscious of when these roles are being taken on in a conversation or not, and to step in to unofficially add a little structure or add a little emotional care when you notice that that job’s fallen by the wayside.

Some tips and tricks for running house meetings:

A lot of my tips and tricks for running house meetings are basically just tips and tricks for running meetings. If you’ve ever facilitated meetings for a group project, or at work, or a community organizing thing, you probably already know a lot about how to facilitate house meetings.

Some of these tips are tips for facilitators on how to run efficient, effective, and kind meetings. But a lot of them are also things which anyone can do to help things run a little smoother for their house.

Procedure

I definitely don’t recommend running your house meeting according to parliamentary procedure or Robert’s Rules of Order, unless you live in a gigantic house, and you like to talk a little funny. But agreeing on some sorts of procedures or formulas for conversations can go a long way towards efficient communication, especially when you’re talking about things which everyone has a lot to say about. In an early house meeting for your co-op, it’s good to decide on a few basic procedural things:

How much procedure and structure to introduce to your house meetings is one of those Big Co-op Questions. My general advice is to only introduce procedure if you feel like things get off the rails without it. The more procedure you put in, the more stilted and impersonal your house meeting conversations might feel, and the more time you’ll potentially spend quibbling about procedure rather than what you’re actually trying to talk about – so I think it’s a tool to be used with a light touch. At the same time though, adding more formal structure and procedure can sometimes be helpful to people who don’t feel as comfortable making their voice heard when the only procedures are the unspoken ones (here’s where I obligatorily link “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, so I think in the end it’s really all about finding a balance based on your community’s needs.

Agendas

I cannot recommend enough setting agendas for house meetings in advance. Creating an agenda lets you estimate how much time conversations will take and keep an eye on all the topics you need to get through to make sure everything’s getting its appropriate attention. Sending out agendas in advance also lets people know if they care about the topics being discussed or if they can dip – or if they should send any opinions in about the topics being discussed if they have to miss the meeting.

Proxy opinions

Even with regular meeting times, it can be really hard to get all of the members of a large co-op in a room together. Another thing worth deciding on in an early house meeting is how you make decisions when someone can’t make it to a house meeting: do you assume they consent to whatever was decided, put off having any conversations they care about until they can make it, or something else?

Something I’ve found to be really effective in a few co-ops I’ve lived in is a system of sending in “proxy opinions.” Essentially, if someone can’t make it to a house meeting, they can tell another housemate their opinions. That housemate will be their “proxy,” stand-in to represent their opinions at the house meetings, and be empowered to vote on their behalf. In a situation where not all housemates can make it to house meeting all the time, this can really prevent decisions from getting stalled out because of people’s personal schedules.

Stack tracking

In really large co-ops, or in conversations where everyone has something to say, one of the most useful things I think a facilitator can do is to “stack track” – keep a running list of people who are in the queue to speak. Stack tracking is a low-key thing you can do to make sure that people who want to speak get their moment and aren’t getting talked over. It can be a good way to keep a conversation on its main flow and prevent a lot of back-and-forth on tangents. In the bigger co-op I lived in, stack-tracker was sometimes a separate role from the facilitator in really chatty house meetings.

Know when to keep it to yourself

It’s a consequence of basic math that in a co-op with n people in it, everyone should probably be speaking about 1/n^th^ of the time in your house meetings – so if your coop has more than a few people in it, there probably is not enough space for everyone to share every idea, or even every good idea they have with the whole meeting. When trying to decide if a thought I’ve had is worth sharing in house meeting, I often turn to the wisdom of a pamphlet which I half-remember picking up at the Cambridge Friend’s Meeting: “Is this message meant as a ministry to the entire congregation, or is it a personal message?” The Quakers (who are basically world-class experts in consensus-driven house meetings) have it right in this case; the bigger your coop you live in, the more important it is to consider – before you speak – not just “Am I right?” or “Am I valid to say this?” but “Does every single person here need to hear this, and does this helpfully move the conversation forward?”

“Rounds”

In conversations where everyone’s input and comfort are particularly essential, one strategy which my co-op uses is “rounds”: posing a question to the group and then having everyone go around and quickly say their thoughts on it. Rounds are a good tool for mid-sized co-ops. They can be really nice in conversations where it’s helpful to start with listening before jumping into particular solutions, as well as in conversations where you might not even know where to start the conversation until you know what the range of concerns or ideas out there are. Some places I think a round can be useful in are conversations about what you want a system you are creating to look like (e.g., “What do we want from our kitchen island?” or “What kind of chores rotation should we have?”) or conversations where you might want to start with some emotional sharing (e.g., “How is everyone feeling about that fight that happened on Thursday?”)

Avoiding bikeshedding

Co-op house meetings are infamous for always taking the longest times to talk about the most inconsequential details. As the idiom goes, the discussion topic in the planning of an entire building which will always take the most time is discussing the specs of the bike shed. I’m not exactly sure why this is a thing about conversations, but it can be useful in your co-op to have a way to flag when you feel that you have basically reached the natural end of a conversation and mostly agree and are talking about irrelevant details of implementation which don’t really need to be discussed in house meeting.

In a co-op I previously lived in, people had a procedure called “murring” (long story) where if you agreed with a statement which was being proposed and felt that perhaps everyone else also agreed and the proposal should just be accepted, you could begin to make a purring sound which sounded sort of like “murrrr”. If other people also agreed with you that you should stop the conversation and just pass the proposal, they could also start murrrring. The brilliance of murring was that it was quiet and didn’t interrupt the speaker until it got general buy in, and if you didn’t get the whole group’s approval, you could just stop doing it without interrupting procedure. Not saying that everyone has to make weird sounds at house meeting, but a similar tool could probably be useful in other mid-sized or larger coops.

Scheduling long conversations

Some conversations which come up at house meeting are pretty cut and dry, and some people could spend all day talking about. One of the difficulties of assembling a house meeting agenda can be balancing urgent topics with more long-term ones, and shorter topics with lengthier ones, to make sure everything can be worked through in a timely manner. If a particular conversation seems like one that could take a long time, I’ve found it can be very helpful to block out a particular future house meeting for it. Especially with topics people might want to do a lot of processing about, it can also be useful to schedule a future time to discuss them so people have time to collect their thoughts before bringing them to house meeting.

Schedule time for processing

House meetings can be tough because they are both a space where very concrete logistical decisions get made and a space where people who very intimately share their lives with each other come together to talk about their feelings about how living together is going. Sometimes group or individual processing of emotions can be really useful in house meetings as a way to get on the same page – and sometimes it can derail a lot when there is a logistical question which needs to get answered more quickly than it would take for everyone to get all of their feelings out. If you never talk about feelings as a house, you are not going to have very emotionally intelligent conversations as a house – but feeling like every house meeting becomes mandatory feelings processing hell is one of the things which can really make some people hate house meetings.

To this end, I think it can often be helpful to clearly delineate time for emotional processing and time for decisions in house meetings. For instance, when you’re discussing a tough topic, it can be helpful to start with a round for everyone to get their feelings out and then move into concrete logistical solutions. Or you could offer your housemates an opportunity to talk about feelings before house meeting so people can work through that and come to house meeting with just their concrete asks already figured out. Or you could schedule time for processing after house meeting, so people who still have unresolved feelings have a place to get them out, whereas people who want to be done with the conversation can walk away and not feel trapped in endless mandatory feels meeting. Feelings are important and need their own space too – and when there is a clear space for them, it’s easier to keep the rest of the meeting down to brass tacks.

Remember that you love each other

During one of the most difficult house meetings of my co-op-dwelling life, when things were getting personal and nasty between a few housemates about another housemate’s behavior, my friend said a very wise thing which I have carried with me throughout my entire co-op life: “Can we remember that we are all talking about a person who many of us love?”

You don’t need to love all of your housemates all the time to get along well with them as housemates. But, above all, I think the thing that really makes house meetings work or not is if we remember that the thing that ties our communities together are bonds of love; that choosing to live with other people is a loving thing to do. House meeting conversations can be tense. They can be hard. And when they are hard, the most useful thing you can do for your community is to remind them that they love each other. Sometimes, the solution to a difficult conversation at house meeting is better facilitation or more processing – and sometimes it’s just a freshly baked batch of cookies or sitting down to watch a movie together afterwards. Remember you love each other, take a deep breath, and it’s all going to turn out fine. ***

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