Brassica Collective

Guidelines for non-participants

The Brassica Collective welcomes involvement by non-participants in a wide range of ways.

Examples include:

  • welcoming guests to attend specific events
  • inviting contributions from Collaborators
  • engaging values-aligned organisations for additional skills, labour, products, and services
  • seeking advice and building relationships with individuals and organisations involved in broader movements for justice.

These guidelines are emerging as we develop a shared understanding of when and how we want to invite non-participants into different aspects of our collective practices.

Attending Assemblies and Workshops

These guidelines were put together by PAS Crew based on discussion with Brassica Collective participants:

  • We are willing to try having non-participant attendees at assemblies and participant-workshops.

  • We think any extra facilitation labour is outweighed by the value of having non-participant attendees.

  • The criteria for who we invite to attend is “people who are interested in participating in and/or have experience of participating in housing related collective projects.”

  • Non-participants will be encouraged to take part in decision making and their input will be collected and recorded separately to input from participants.

  • If the same individual attends 5 times in a calendar year Brassicas will discuss the impact of serial non-participant attendance and other options for participation.

  • If a participant has invited a non-participant who is confirmed to be intending to attend they will please notify other participants in the Brassica Project channel (so we know what to expect).

  • We will roughly limit non-participant attendance to 1 out of 4 of the total number of assemblies and participant-workshops.

Context

These guidelines were developed through discussion between the Brassica Collective participants which occurred in person (at an assembly) and online (on Loomio) as well as via a 1:1 interview process for one participant whose thoughts might otherwise have been missed out on.

These guidelines, like most of our documentation, can be changed to reflect our current collective practices.