TBH has a post about how tired she is from all her cooperative commitments. Like TBH, Pann and I are members of lots of cooperative organizations. We’re members of two cooperative schools (one for each kid), a food coop, and a babysitting coop. I feel sure I’m missing at least one organization, but that may be all of them at this point– Our kids also went to a cooperative camp but have since outgrown it. And I’m actually deliberately leaving out two organizations that are structured as co-ops but don’t have an explicit work requirement for all members (although we do participate anyway).

I should be clear that I love these organizations. I don’t regret joining them. My older daughter’s school, in particular, is a real source of community for me, and I also think they provide great value– more on this later.

That said, I feel TBH’s pain. I’ve been thinking a lot about the energy we put into co-ops and whether it’s worth it. Making this work for a family is sort of a martial art, something you get better at with time and hard practice; it was a lot more overwhelming a year ago. I think we’ve gotten a little better at this.

Here’s a quick braindump of some of the things I wish someone had said to me when I first got involved with so many cooperatives around the time our kids reached toddlerhood.

1. Have a time-management system. I think lots of parents, coming from working a single job and being the master of the rest of their time, are not prepared at first for the number of evening and weekend commitments you start to have once your kids are in school. Being part of coops magnifies this. You’ve got to have a good system for keeping up with all those commitments, to make sure you can be in the right place at the right time, to make sure you don’t double book yourself, to help you predict your own energy levels, and also to make sure you’re covered for your own kids.
   
   Pann once accidentally committed to coop at two schools at once, but beyond that we’ve also run into a few situations where we both needed to be somewhere (cooping, a meeting, whatever) but we never got around to making arrangements for our own kids while doing that. (We’ve gotten better about this one, but we still mess it up occasionally).
   
2. Find out whether your cooperative organizations have options where you can do work with your family or kids, instead of taking additional time away from them to do coop work.
   
   My family spent 2 hours picking vegetables at the local cooperative farm this morning, for credit at our food co-op. Although we had to get up REALLY early, it was something we were able to do as a family, and get 4 hours of credit (for two adults) in two hours of time. And the kids hung out with us and had a good time too!
   
3. More generally, can you choose the work you do? If so, this goes a long way toward making it all less draining. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, but sometimes you do. I’ve tended to move my school cooping commitments toward administrative and technical stuff, which is valuable to the school, but takes less out of me than chaperoning on field trips. I still go on field trips when I feel like it, but it’s not because I have to do it. Schools have other needs– If you’re a writer, can you fulfill some of your obligation to the school by writing an article about the school and getting it published in a local newspaper? Or something else that uses your unique skills?
   
   One parent at my older daughter’s school recently shared with me that he started out doing fundraising, and then switched over to helping the art teacher keep her materials organized. He hated the fundraising, but he loves working with the art teacher and has now been doing it for nearly 10 years (two kids in the school through 8th grade); the change of job made all the difference in his satisfaction with the cooperative organization.
   
4. For babysitting coops in particular, consider the age of the children and what they’re going to be doing in addition to simple logistical concerns.For me, there are certain plum sits I’ll take anytime they come up, and others that require a lot more thought. For example:
   • Sits which start after I’d get home for work, and end after bedtime. Assuming the kids are reasonably good about going to bed when they’re supposed to and reasonably okay about having a babysitter put them to bed, these can be great because once the kids are asleep, I can get my own work or reading done.
   • Having a kid the same age as one of mine come over for a “playdate”– the kids do a lot of the work. Sure, there’s supervision involved, but I find this takes a lot less energy than many other kinds of sits.

   These aren’t the only sits I’ll take, but for other kinds of sits, it takes a lot more consideration– how badly do we need that credit? Am I likely to be really exhausted at that time? Will it be taking me away from something I want to do with my family?

5. Is the coop work distributed equitably in the family? For the coops we’re part of, Pann and I try to participate somewhat equitably. This really helps avoid burnout on the part of either parent. It isn’t always possible– for example, our younger daughter’s school requires classroom cooping around once a month from 8:30 to 12:00, and while my work schedule is flexible; it would be really hard for me to do half of that, so I end up doing it once or twice a year and Pann does the rest. However, I make up for that by doing other parts of the commitment for that school.
   
6. Are you taking on too much? Sometimes these organizations need specific additional help, and they just know you’d be the best person for the job. If you don’t have the time or energy for it, it doesn’t matter how good you’d be, you shouldn’t take it on. Doing so can only lead to burnout. And ultimately, if you’re burned out, the job doesn’t actually get done well.
   

At the end of the day– is the value we get from the co-op worth the energy we put into it? Co-ops allow us to save money on a product or service by performing some of the labor involved in delivering that product or service. In other words, they allow us to trade time for money. There are other ways to trade time for money (”work”, “do it yourself”, and also “doing without”) and sometimes those other methods provide better value than the co-op does.

On the other hand, sometimes the cooperative organization provides qualitative value that can’t be purchased elsewhere (community, better quality food, better quality school, babysitters who aren’t teenagers, etc.) so that has to be taken into account. But my personal store of energy also provides me with qualitative value that can’t be purchased elsewhere, and I need to consider that every time I take on a cooperative commitment. It comes down to honoring our own energy, something that can be exceedingly difficult to do as a parent.