Light
How much light do you need? Can you live in a room that doesn't get much light? Or must you have sun streaming in all the time? Are you likely to be home only when it is dark out? Do you need to have sun in the morning in order to get up?
Sources: Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates
Contributors: Annamarie Pluhar
Recommended Books: Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates
Cleanliness
It's an unavoidable fact of life that unless we pick up the sponge, mop the floor, and vacuum the rugs, a dwelling will get dirty. This is one area when Home-mates really have to see eye to eye in order to maintain the space all want to live in. What do you like? What can you tolerate? What will you maintain?
Sources: Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates
Contributors: Annamarie Pluhar
Recommended Books: Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates
Cigarettes
For smokers, cigarette smoking is often the first consideration. Non-smokers don't want to live with smokers. Smokers, most likely, don't want to live with non-smokers. If you smoke, don't tell yourself that you will quit if you find the perfect, but non-smoking, situation. That's like buying a shirt that's three sizes too small, promising yourself to lose thirty pounds; it's just not going to happen.
Sources: Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates
Contributors: Annamarie Pluhar
Recommended Books: Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates
Strategy
There is often a need for specific analysis and strategy about the local area.
Ask yourself:
- What are the vital issues in this town, state or region?
- Who holds the power?
- What is already being done?
- Where do we start?
Doing such an analysis of your own situation with your BUD will often lead to connecting to other like minded people who are working on the same issues you have isolated in your research.
If you have developed a Strategy based BUD and figured out a way to work in your local community and unify efforts please let The Transition know and apply to be a Volunteer/Consultant.
Sources: Building Social Change Communities
Contributors: Peter Woodrow, The Training/Action Affinity Group of Movement for a New Society
Recommended Reading: Building Social Change Communities