Moishe House Portland's Lessons Learned

Please describe an instant where your house has had an issue (e.g. trouble with events, house dynamics, logisitics etc.) and discuss how the house resolved the issue, and what was learned.

Hi Moishe Houseniks Int'l--

At Moishe House Portland, we need to work on our coordinating, among other things, so this is Becca here speaking and not the Moishe House collectively. The last couple times we pooled ideas, but this end of summer and approaching High Holiday time is a little crazy. Anyhow, if we switch off over time, you'll get all of our input, and I hope my input is still valuable!

Here are some of the obstacles we've run into:
* Coordinating: scheduling conflicting events, struggling to find times to meet
* Teamwork: overall is pretty positive, but we've had trouble supporting each others' events and working styles
* Recruiting: for a while we had a gender imbalance, and we've had lulls in our recruiting, although overall we do pretty well
* House management: cleaning, accountability for various chores and tasks, working things out with Landlord, etc

I'm proud to say that we are working on all of these issues. We know we have trouble syncronizing our schedules, so we try to get ahold of each other in advance. This also involves understanding each other as leaders. For example, I know Jodi needs advance notice for even a 15 minute discussion. Or we can talk about it while lounging on Shabbos. :) I know Jeremy's available in late evenings, and that Rachel usually gets home around 5pm at which point she is fine with talking about anything. My roommates probably understand that I'm good with email. Since there's only 4 of us, it helps to approach each individual according to what they respond to best.

Our teamwork has come quite a ways. Although I don't have the luxury of this perspective, the current state of Moishe House is bliss compared to even a year ago, but times have changed. Yay! Throughout our meetings, we've each been very honest with each other about our strengths and weaknesses. I'd say we all impress each other with our strengths, and yes, we may be a little disappointed with our weaknesses, but we promote a healthy sense of self-awareness, I believe. Like, if I said, "Rachel, I thought we talked about this over email," and she said, "Oh, I thought we talked about this at the meeting with the calendar," we'll both just realize our lackings and resolve it. From there I learn to be more aware of the calendar and be more concise in my emails and she learns to try to track the Moishe House emails better. I think we're able to talk about things in a constructive way without getting defensive.

This self-awareness has grown organically between us over time, and from our efforts at bonding. We had a bonding weekend and that was a lot of fun. We played games aimed at trusting and just had a great time. Although we've had conflicts, that's natural. I'm impressed that we're really able to resolve them in a healthy way.

I think I've addressed a couple of the most important ones. Gotta save something for the next blog. ;) I'm proud of us as a group and hope we keep moving forward!

L'shannah Tovah to you all!