Last spring, we provided ideas to Board of Directors on how to keep engaged with your membership during the first wave of COVID-19 cases. As we are navigating through another COVID-19 surge, we would like to provide you with another fun guide of ideas to help your membership continue to stay connected. As a Board of Directors, it is important that you not only keep your membership abreast of cooperative issues, but also continue to keep the morale of the membership up.

Personal injury lawsuits typically arise in housing cooperatives when a member, a person of a member’s family, or guest are injured on the Cooperative’s real property. Injuries can range from slip-and-falls, physical confrontations or fighting, to criminal assault and battery. Since the range of different types of cases in which a Cooperative may be defending claims seeking liability and damages, this serves as an important reminder to Cooperatives, of the legal responsibilities that Cooperatives owe. Specifically, this article focuses on those duties owed to non-members, such as guests.

Many of us already know that housing cooperatives are made up of the entire membership. By this token, cooperatives are inherently diverse. Since a cooperative’s Board of Directors typically consists of a group of members elected by the entire membership, its Directors are usually equally diverse and important as the entire membership that makes up the cooperative. There are several important characteristics, traits, and duties that each director holds as a position of trust and fiduciary to the corporations they serve. It is important for Cooperatives to understand these duties and the extent upon which they bestow obligations to each director. A good approach to doing this is for a cooperative to adopt certain ethics, conduct and confidentiality policies, and for their Directors to execute agreements avowing their fiduciary duties and obligations to the cooperative. These policies and agreements should strengthen the sense of loyalty and ethical conduct of the Directors, and add a sense of transparency. In addition, they may also insulate the Cooperative from potential liability from legal claims and challenges to official Board actions.

Members elected to serve on the Board of Directors hold special and unique positions as fiduciaries to the housing cooperative corporation. A Director holds a position of trust, fiduciary and good faith to the housing cooperative to which he or she serves. While members elected or appointed to serve as a Director may not always be the savvy corporate type, it is important for Cooperative’s to establish certain policies, sometimes best contained in an Agreement, for each Director that will spell out that Director’s responsibilities and duties pertaining to ethical corporate conduct and the handling of sensitive, confidential information.

All housing cooperatives either have a requirement that all members of the Board are to also be members of the corporation, or, that at least a majority of the Board must be members of the corporation. Not all housing cooperatives, however, have any requirement when it comes to how the members themselves are qualified to be on the Board of Directors.

In the past, many cooperative housing providers prohibited pets. This policy resonated with its members who were tired of living next door to other members with barking dogs or caterwauling cats. Yet, federal and state law now require cooperative housing providers allow assistance animals. Assistance animals are animals which a disabled member may keep in a cooperative housing situation, as long as a medical provider is persuaded that the member needs the animal in order to overcome a specific disability and that the animal will ameliorate that disability.