Practice democratic principles - part c

Living in a house this year, with dishes to clean and meals to cook, each one of us in the house has had to learn to work together in order to make sure that everything gets done and that everyone is at least decently happy with how things are going. We do several different things to ensure that things are going smoothly. First of all, at the beginning of the year, we all sat down and created a "Kenwood Konstitution" which outlines how we will do things like buy groceries and when we will eat meals together. At times it was difficult and tedious. We all had different ideas, for example, about what kinds of food items should be community. Even though we were able to create a set of guidelines at the beginning of the year, we have also been able to be flexible and adapt so that things might go better.

Each Sunday night we have a house meal, which is supposed to be mandatory; however, it is quite difficult getting 9 peoples' schedules to correspond. At the house meal, we often discuss problems within the house or things that we may need to keep in mind. For example, the past several house meals have been spent trying to plan an open house "Kristmas at Kenwood." Despite all of our busy schedules, I thought that we did a good job of planning this event. We formed three committees, each with three people in order to pull off this event. We also have nonmandatory house meals three other times during the week, which are also times that we discuss things that are happening within the house or just have fun together.

At the beginning of the year we also formed a chore wheel so that our house could stay relatively clean. Each week, the wheel is spun so that we get a new chore. Theoretically, if you did not do your chore for a particular week, you are supposed to contribute 25 cents to a "fun fund" which we haven't actually established yet. Despite the lack of punishment for neglected chores, we have also done a decent job at keeping up with the housework. One snag that we ran into regarded the cleaning of our two bathrooms. The plan was that one male and one female would be on bathrooms for each week, though as the wheel was spun, this didn't always work out. Then one bathroom or the other was not being cleaned. So around midterm, we formed a new chore chart, which has separate options for bathrooms to ensure that both the male and female bathrooms would get cleaned.

Even though living with so many people can sometimes be frustrating, it has definitely been a good experience to learn how to make decisions as a group and to adapt plans that may not be working as well as they could.