What challenge inspired this recipe?
Our volunteer apartments always bring together long-term ESC volunteers with very different backgrounds, life rhythms, habits, and abilities to set boundaries. All this has a great impact on how well the group of volunteers manages to take care of their home and also keep good relationship within the group of flat mates. For many volunteers, the ESC experience is their first time living separately from their family, to share a room with someone or having to actually take care of a home.
Taking this into consideration, we find it very important for us, the coordinating organization, to be there for the first flat meeting and help create a good climate within the group, as well as to make sure their responsibilities as residents in the apartment are well understood. Once this meeting has taken place, we also assign a specific contact from our ESC coordinators as the contact person for the apartment and encourage the volunteers to ask for our help in case any issues arise that they can not solve between themselves.
Ingredients :
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A channel of communications between the residents of the apartment + the coordinator
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Common time (min 1 hour, usually rather 1.5 hours, depending on the number of volunteers)
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One copy of printed general house rules
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Pens + smaller papers (for common agreements)
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At least 2 sheets of flipchart/A3 paper for the common rules
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Something to attach the poster/paper on the wall
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A coordinator with good communication skills + some experience in facilitating similar meetings
Step by step guide
First, we find a time where everyone can be home (which can be tricky at times, as all residents usually volunteer at different placements with different schedules). For this, we use the apartment WhatsApp chat with all the volunteers living there + the coordinator.
Secondly, we gather for the meeting at the common space of the apartment. EstYES usually provides some snacks for the meeting from our part. During the meeting, we..
1) do a little round of some warm-up questions about their day.
2) Then we ask the volunteers to share a bit how they are feeling in the apartment for the moment – what are some challenges and which things they enjoy about living with a group.
3) After this, we go over our general accommodation rules established by EstYES (we ask the volunteers to read them out in turns and explain a bit how they understand each rule). In this set of house rules, there are some of the very basic things we need to make sure the volunteers respect.
4) From the general rules, we move on to establishing the group’s common agreements. For this, we first ask them to reflect on their personal needs and write them down on a paper – which agreements they would need and propose themselves. Then we ask them to share these in pairs (if there are 4 or more people) and find things in common. From there, we share in a big circle while the coordinator writes these proposals down on a flipchart/bigger paper. From these, we try to find 5-7 agreements that cover the most urgent needs, write them on a clear paper and set them up at a common space of the apartment.
5) We also find a way to set up a cleaning schedule. For this, the volunteers propose different options themselves and we find the one that suits for most of them.
Finally, a follow-up of the meeting should be done in a month or two. We also encourage the volunteers to organize their own house-meetings on a regular basis, as tensions and misunderstandings can be a natural part of living together and taking the time to discuss these all together can help a lot. Although we encourage them to try and solve these problems between themselves and learn much needed communication skills by doing so, we do also remind them that they can always ask the coordinator to come and help facilitate the meeting.
Important to highlight!These meetings have proved to be useful based on the feed-back of the volunteers themselves, according to which after the first meeting facilitating by the coordinator, they later had more courage to bring together the next meetings them selves and to express their needs to their flatmates. We also evaluate it as a crucial part of making sure the volunteers do their best to respect each other and their common home. It can definitely be upgraded by regular follow-up meetings in the apartment. We have managed to have them in some cases, but rather when there is a problem in the apartment or within the group. |
Before you start cooking, keep in mind…
One big challenge can definitely be finding the common time. The coordinator might need to attend the meeting at a week-end.
