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It’s the Name – Strata Community Association – which is totally misleading. The organisation should be called Strata Managers Association.
In our community of 30 apts and 2 retail tenancies, our founding vision was for intentional community i.e. we would be good neighbours to each other and work collaboratively together. Luckily we attracted a number of owners who are committed to both this vision and to effective communication. We set up a Slack forum even during the build stage so that we could share info and concerns. We ask owners and tenants if they want to be in it, and they supply their email addresses for that. It was quite disappointing when Slack changed their business model and now (unless we pay an exorbitant amount for a bigger plan) our exchanges “time out” at three months old. Once we moved in we started producing and distributing regular community newsletters as well.
This year the management committee drafted a comms plan so that we could see where our communication gaps were. As people have widely varying needs and styles of communication, we wanted to make sure we had enough “channels” to reach most people with most messages, and also that we were safely storing information for future reference.
This is all driven by active owners, as the strata manager keeps only the official and financial records and issues only terse legalistic messages. They are also subject to staffing changes, and the corporate memory is lost with every replacement.
I think it’s a bit risky making training an entry requirement – it could lead to monopolisation of the committee by people who have done a course but have barrows to push or personalities not suited to working collaboratively in a team. But I think it should be encouraged, especially for committee members going on for a second year or more. And the training cost should be covered.
The next step to consider would be an annual allowance once the training is under the belt. That said, I don’t know what training would be available here in Tasmania.
We set up a Slack forum, which is structured with a number of Channels (which are like Folders) to help organise the discussions. We were hoping that this would provide a community library of useful documents and information as well as a social chat forum. Sadly, Slack introduced a new business model and the free version now only shows items up to three months old. As time flies (!) information that has been shared disappears quite quickly, and the community information source aspect is basically gone.
The cost for ongoing viewing of all posts in the Slack forum is more than our Committee wants to consider (several thousand $$ pa). We looked at a few alternatives, but they were also pricey. We looked hard at WhatsApp but decided not to go that way either (one big reason is that someone entering the group new cannot see any previously shared documents, so the information library feature doesn’t quite work).
Now we are looking at storing relatively less private and sensitive documents in Google Drive and sharing that link to all residents and owners. Critical, private and sensitive documents will still be held by the Secretary and our strata manager.
This is excellent news. For those who do not agree, I suggest you read “The Big Switch” by Saul Griffith. We need to transform our infrastructure, update our grid and adapt our households. So it is essential to move residences away from fossil fuelled heating and cooking as fast as possible. It’s a no-brainer to commit to this for new builds.