Membership: getting in, and getting out

The stages, what a fair membership agreement contains, and why a good process protects you as much as them.

Communities describe their membership process in the language of welcome, and it is genuinely meant. But it is also a screening process on both sides, and reading it that way makes it far more useful.

The four stages

Guest. A short stay, usually paid, on the community’s terms. This is a look, not an application. Most communities have a fixed guest programme precisely so that being interested does not oblige anybody to anything.

Visitor. A defined period, often a few weeks, during which you live roughly as a member does: on the work rota, at the meals, and usually in at least one meeting. This is where most of the mutual assessment happens.

Provisional or associate member. Months rather than weeks. You take on real obligations and usually a financial commitment, but not the full stake, and either side can still stop. Whether provisional members may vote — and on what — is one of the most revealing things about a community’s constitution.

Full member. The stake, the vote, and whatever the agreements say about exit.

The durations vary enormously and there is no standard. What is fairly consistent is the shape: a short look, a longer trial, a probationary stretch, and then commitment.

There being no standard across the field is not the same as there being no standard inside a community, and it is worth not letting the first excuse the second. The useful question is never how long is a provisional period usually? — nobody knows, and the answer would not help you anyway. It is how long is yours, what am I being assessed on, and who decides when it ends?

A community that can answer all three has a stage. One that answers none has a waiting room — and the person kept in a waiting room longest is rarely the one with the most objections against them. It is usually the one nobody is quite comfortable enough to reject.

RCOS · Layer 1

The RCOS Standard writes that into a structure. Four membership states have to exist — applicant, trial or probationary, full, exited — as a minimum rather than a maximum, so a community may add its own. What it may not do is leave somebody between them: no individual may hold more than one state at a time (§3.1.4), which makes “sort of a member” an unavailable position rather than a common one.

A probationary period is mandatory, and must state its duration, its evaluation criteria and a clear transition decision process (§3.3.2). Failing to transition has to trigger a defined exit or extension rather than simply continuing.

The clause to hold up against a real agreement is §3.4.4: no obligation may be enforced without a corresponding, documented right. Rights and obligations must be symmetrical and proportionate to the state (§3.4.3) — and note what that does and does not say. During probation, rights may be limited while obligations must still be explicit (§3.3.3), so the asymmetry a trial member feels is permitted. What is not permitted is the undocumented version of it.

RCOS Core v0.1 — §3.3 Trial and Evaluation

A published process, in full

Generalities are cheap here, so it is worth reading one real process that a community publishes rather than describes.

Twin Oaks in Virginia runs a three-week visitor period. During it, prospective members are interviewed by the Membership Team, covering their life history and questions about how they handle conflict and disagreement. After the stay, visitors leave for an input period, during which every member of the community gives their assessment in one of three forms: accept, visit again, or reject. The Membership Team then makes the final determination.

Three features of that are worth noticing, because they are what a well-designed process looks like anywhere.

Everyone gets a say, but the decision is held by a body. A whole-community vote on a person can turn into a popularity contest; a small team with the whole community’s input has to give reasons. This is also why admission is one of the few places where communities using consent often deliberately do not use it: a single unexplained blocking concern against a person is nearly impossible to appeal, and is the mechanism by which a community quietly stops admitting anyone unlike itself.

“Visit again” exists. A process with only yes and no forces a premature answer. A middle option lets a community say we don’t know yet honestly, which is usually the truth.

The decision happens after you leave. Nobody has to deliver a verdict to your face over dinner, and you are not sitting in the room while people work out how they feel.

What a fair membership agreement contains

The checklist

What you pay, when, and what it buys — the entry sum, the monthly charge, and which of the four legal shells you end up in.
What you are expected to contribute in labour or meeting attendance, stated in hours rather than in spirit.
What you may decide, alone and with others, and what needs the group.
How the agreements change, and whether your consent is needed for changes affecting your own stake.
How you leave voluntarily — notice period, how your stake is valued, and how long payment takes.
How the community may ask you to leave — the grounds, who decides, what warnings come first, and what you receive.
What a suspension is, and how long it may last — if you can be stood down from a role, a meeting or the rota while something is worked out, whether that has an end date.
What happens if you cannot pay, whether through illness, job loss or a change of circumstance.
Where disputes go when the two of you disagree about any of the above.

A community that hands you a document covering all nine has done the work. Missing items are not necessarily a red flag — many are simply young — but each gap is a decision that will be made later, under pressure, by whoever is in the room.

Rejection

You may well be turned down, and it is worth deciding in advance not to read it as a verdict on you.

A good refusal is timely, specific enough to act on, and does not pretend. “We are not able to offer membership, and the reason is that we have decided to prioritise households with school-age children this year” is a real answer. So is “several members felt the fit was not right, and we are not going to elaborate further” — blunt, but honest about its own limits.

What a bad refusal looks like is the absence of one: an application that stays open indefinitely, invitations that quietly stop, a decision nobody will confirm was made. Communities do this out of conflict-avoidance rather than malice, and it wastes months of your life. If you have been in a process for a year without a stage change, ask directly where you stand and give a date.

The reverse also matters. You may withdraw at any point, and doing so at the provisional stage is a success of the process, not a failure of it. That is what the stage is for.

Leaving

Most people who join a community will eventually leave one, and the terms are decided long before that day.

Notice. Communities commonly want more notice than a tenancy does, for a practical reason: your departure may require them to find both a buyer and a member, and those are two different searches.

Valuation. How your stake is priced, by whom, and how long it takes to be paid out. The gap between a formula price and a market one is the exit number, and it is worth working out before you sign, not after.

Being asked to leave. Every community has grounds; most have not written them down. Twin Oaks states its plainly — repeated unacceptable behaviour, with consistently not doing enough work and violent behaviour given as examples — and describes attempting resolution through several steps first, noting that people often leave voluntarily once the difficulty becomes clear. That combination, stated grounds plus a graduated response, is the thing to look for. Grounds without a process is arbitrary; a process without grounds means the group cannot actually act.

What to ask on a visit

Deep · what the process is really screening for

The membership literature is unusually candid that communities are not primarily selecting for shared values.

Diana Leafe Christian’s Creating a Life Together — the standard practical reference on forming communities, published in 2003 — devotes a chapter to selecting people to join you, and the theme running through it is emotional maturity rather than agreement. Shared values get a group through the first year. What determines whether it survives the tenth is whether its members can be disagreed with, can hear a criticism without escalating, and can stay in a room with someone they are annoyed by.

This is why the interview questions in a good process tend to be about conflict rather than about beliefs. “How do you handle it when a decision goes against you?” predicts far more than “what do you think about consensus?”

There is an uncomfortable corollary. A screening process that selects for people who are easy to be around also selects, without intending to, for people who are like the existing members — in class, in background, in manner, in the specific register of politeness a group has grown used to. Communities that care about this build in explicit counterweights: written criteria rather than a general sense of fit, a body that has to give reasons rather than a whole-group vote, and a periodic look at who has been turned away and what they had in common.

The honest summary is that the process is doing something necessary and something risky at the same time, and that the communities which handle it best are the ones that say so out loud.

Sources & further reading

1 Twin Oaks Community — FAQs — the three-week visitor period, the input process, and the stated grounds for asking someone to leave
2 Christian, D. L. — Creating a Life Together (New Society Publishers, 2003) — the standard practical reference; chapter 18 covers selecting people to join you
3 Foundation for Intentional Community — directory listings, many of which set out a community’s membership process in full
4 RCOS Core — Layer 1: Membership System — the four membership states, and the requirements on trial periods, exit and suspension
5 Owning, leasing, renting — what your stake actually is, which decides what leaving returns to you

Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written

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