What is a coliving community manager or facilitator?
A community manager 🕴️
Is a staff member responsible for onboarding, day-to-day interactions, plus resolving issues including disagreements between members themselves. They organise and perhaps even lead some of the events but due to other responsibilities may not participate.
In smaller properties, this role also coordinates back of house operations such as cleaning staff, ensuring quality of service, thus less focussed on socials than a facilitator.
A community facilitator 🧚
Is an embeded member of the community, responsible for connecting everyone, making sure they've got things to do and frequently participating themself. May look after some management if no one else is responsible, frequently the case in smaller properties.
Because they reside on site, they can unfortunately be pestered at any hour (gosh, a bit rude!) yet members are more likely to become friends and tag along with the person facilitating some of their social life and activities.
Key events 🎪
A manager is more likely to organise skill shares, talks and tours, whereas a facilitator is usually more hands-on doing karaoke, potlucks, and hikes. (Yoga and movies are arguably a bit banal and can be found even in spaces with neither of these roles.) The following are best practices in coliving, and less likely with a manager, more a facilitator because of availability.
- Family meal
- A simple social get-together, ideally a sit-down meal at the dining table. Sometimes provided by the space as a brunch, usually a combination of potluck contributions from everybody. The facilitator or manager must chase everyone to encourage attendance, ensuring there's contributions. This is also a key moment to get to know new arrivals, so there may be a round of introductions.
- Activity planning
- A gathering to listen to each other's ideas and solidify organisation should anyone want to participate. The facilitator or manager should make suggestions based on their local knowledge, and of what has or hasn't yet been done amongst the group. The results of this will usually be written up on a notice board and/or posted to the group chat.
In smaller properties these will be combined, whilst in larger they'll be independent on different days to increase the liklihood more members can attend at least one.
Comparing the usual differences
| manager | facilitator | |
|---|---|---|
| primary | management | community |
| secondary | community | some management |
| residence | offsite | onsite |
| availability | working hours | anytime(!) |
| participation | drop-in | embedded |
| social cues | is management | is one of the gang |
| ideation | by management | by members |
| resolutions | often | sometimes |
| engagement | employed | volunteer or founder |
Combined roles
Can be problematic because it's difficult to be friends and socialise with the person handling (or heaven forbid, ignoring) issues that anyone may have. When well managed or small this is no worry, yet inevitably there will always be issues of some kind, and in the worst cases without clear responsibility, members may split into groups on conflicting sides.
John Ho (Alt_) advises that management and facilitation roles should not be combined, however their spaces are larger, at lower capacity it does not matter much as everyone gets to know each other quite well.
Either may be responsible for complaints and their resolution however it is better for these to be handled separately by upper management, though this depends upon the signficance, i.e. a minor issue could be addressed immediately.
Management are often not present on site, which can result in issues appearing to not have a timely resolution, badly affecting member experience, therefore either role should ideally be empowered for resolution. In the case of facilitator this can be more difficult being embeded thus they are more likely to need to refer to upper management.
Notes
- These roles are used in many sectors, this page only considers as coliving. The most closely related is in coworking, however in this case it is almost never as a facilitator unless very large. In these situations the proximity and embedding of the roles is reversed, i.e. a community manager is the centre of a group directly around them, whilst a facilitator is within a looser and wider network group.
- The roles are also used in online communities, where it often significantly comprises moderation, also a component in coliving spaces having a chatgroup.
- Member, guest and resident are used interchangably, guests are short-term implying hospitality orientation, residents stay longer, perhaps even as tenants, members is the more inclusive and can refer to both.