Becoming Full Members?

by Emlyn Hagan (& Chris Walker)

So, it’s been two months since the blog we wrote just days after being accepted as Prospective Members of Chaco and here we are just days away from submitting our application for full membership with the follow-up blog that we promised.

What an eventful two months it’s been: we’ve continued to meet new people; attended lots of social events; an aborted trip to a network event in Lancaster/visit to Lancaster co-housing; Chris (along with Christine, Ali and Mary) has visited a kitchen supplier; I attended our first members meeting and we had a wonderful (mostly wet) week touring the Outer Hebrides in our campervan (see picture above).

We’ve been working as a team throughout, Chris is away a lot but we’ve attended lots of socials, etc together and I attended one on my own in her absence which was a real challenge to my confidence/the anxiety I feel when meeting new people. Chris has been more active in task groups and has really enjoyed being part of the kitchen design group. I know that I’ve struggled at times, mainly due to the limitations caused by my mental health difficulties, I find high speed, multiple person email threads hard to follow, I also find it hard to commit to things during the week as my work is very demanding and often means all I’m capable of in the evening is chilling out. I know that effective/inclusive communication between members is one of the challenges faced by any group and for me our adoption of “Slack” as a tool could really help.

If our application is successful our next step will be to pay our deposit to secure our spot. Also on the horizon is Chris’ further involvement in some of the interior design decisions and we’ll hopefully be attending an 8 week course at Oblong with a group of Chaco folks covering: communication skills/active listening; working together as a team; managing conflicts and running successful meetings, starting in January.

All along our determination to apply for full membership, despite both having had little wobbles, has remained intact. My intention has been to try and not invest too much into Chaco emotionally and be the voice of reason when Chris’ excitement is building too much (be the boring one you might say). However, I was caught out last month during a brief conversation with Bill about the shared workshop and what it could contain and be used for. The excitement suddenly surge within me, oops. I travelled home from the Bill and Ali’s house full of ideas and new hobbies I was sure to take up once I had access to this new state of the art workshop. Good grief, where’s the voice of reason now?

Chris and I spent an afternoon a few weeks ago looking at finances again and came to the conclusion that assuming we could get a mortgage we would be in a position to commit to buying 80% of the property we wanted. The rest of the afternoon was spent scrutinising property plans and kitchen designs, cross referencing them to the site plan, to find a layout that worked for us. Now that felt exciting! The conclusion? We knew what we could afford and which units would work for us, we could now apply for full membership.

So here we are, the application is a work in progress and we’re back to selling ourselves.  Once our application is complete it’s in the hands of the full members, all of whose opinions and judgement we respect completely, which I guess is one of the reasons why we want to be part of the community. By the time the meeting that decides our fate takes place we’ll be on holiday in Gran Canaria so at least if things don’t go our way we can ease the pain with a cold beer in the sun.

As before we’ll write more as our journey continues…………

Emlyn & Chris