John Baldwin, Managing Director of Co-op Homes, shares reflections on how housing co-ops can keep their founding spirit alive — exploring the challenges of onboarding new members and the tools that can help communities thrive for the long term.
The reasons people form housing co-ops are as much to do with creating a better future as they are about escaping poorly managed expensive housing. That future is about good services, community, connection, security and opportunity.
In wanting more, and making that happen, people are prepared to give up their time and energy to take back control over their housing needs. But what happens when that model becomes stale and people are ‘allocated’ housing in a co-op without having been a founder member?
Research shows that ‘intended communities’ are more committed to making it work as they came together with a shared purpose. Communities created through allocations policies just don’t have that driver.
We’ve had a lot of discussions with our co-ops about this issue and the challenge of interviewing and allocating homes to people who promise to play an active role, but fail to follow through on this once they are housed. This leads to resentment from the people running the coop and volunteers being unable to sustain the level of commitment needed.
Through two workshops run in partnership with CASH - https://ldn.cash/about/ , we have explored this issue, it’s impact and how different co-ops have tried to tackle it. We’ve had lively discussions, people have let off a bit of steam, there’s been plenty of creativity and no shortage of opinions.
We’ve taken all of this richness and boiled it down into some themes, and then we looked at solutions people have tried, new ideas people have shared and added some more just for good measure.
Out of this, we have produced a tool which we hope will be useful for any housing co-op who wants to take a deeper dive into how they onboard people so that they become great contributors and secure the co-ops long term future.
The tool is a customer journey which shows how you can bring to life different ideas that together create an onboarding experience that could completely re-shape the selection process. It’s packed with suggestions, and you can pick and choose which ones you want to build into an end to end journey, or simply take some and try them out.
The tool is free to use and available to everyone and it’s on our website. Go check it out and let us know what you think, and if you use it, let us know how you get on.
We are open to new ideas and if there is enough feedback we will incorporate these and re-issue future versions.
We hope it’s helpful and who knows, perhaps it might also re-ignite some of that founder energy that was thrown into creating your co-op in the first place.
