โฉนดชุมชน Chanot Chumchon Form of Community Ownership

I understood most of the words in the videotape I took (I'll get it up eventually, still waiting on advice on the translation). I didn't necessarily understand how they all fit together. Then there were words I didn't understand. A couple were easy to look up, but โฉนดชุมชน didn't quite make sense. I understood ชุมชน (choomchorn)** or community (though that word has a variety of meanings in English, but it's a word used often here to describe the collective spirit and physical place of the villages my NGO* is associated with.)

โฉนด is defined by thai2enlish.com as

title deed ; title deed to a piece of land

Try to think of a word to use to put those two together. As I discussed this with Swe yesterday over strawberry smoothies, the idea that seemed closest to something that we know in the US was a condo association, where people own the individual condos privately, but own the building, grounds, swimming pool, etc. collectively. Everyone has to agree on some sort of organizational fee to pay for the collectively owned parts of the property. They also have to agree on maintenance and new developments they might want to build.

Well, today, Mi (photoshopped a bit in the pictures) was in the office and I showed him the video and the words I was having trouble with.
He started drawing and writing to explain what chanot chumchon means. And it is something like a condo bylaws/agreement. So let me try to flesh out what I understood him to be saying. (That means, take everything you read next with a grain of salt.)

He started drawing a picture. And then he said a Chanot ChumChon needs five things:

1. Land - they need a piece of land for a group of families I asked how many but it seems to be flexible. He drew 11 on the picture, but said it could be from about 50 to 100 families. Smaller ones exist. So each family has rights over its own piece of land but there are also community rights over the whole larger piece.

2. There's a committee which has the responsibility to look after the everything. The members are representatives of all the farmers who maintain the agreement of the farmers, and are representatives to deal with the government. They develop the plan for what the Group is going to plant, for things like irrigation, and other communal needs. If there is a bigger Group, there might be three committees, a main committee, a management committee, etc. Committees have five to ten people.

3. ระเบียบ this translates as rules, order, regulation. If we use the condo association analogy, it would be something like the by-laws that govern how decisions are made and the structure of the organization.


4. A fund. The Chum Chon needs money to take care of the communal expenses. The group gets money through

• ลงขัน Member contributions - I just wrote about this term at the end of the post on Tricky Translations.
• ทอดผ้าป่า Another tricky term. It literally means "fried clothes forest." (Besides 'fry' ทอด can mean to cast or drop which is the meaning here, as in leaving cloth in the woods. People often make offerings of material, especially for monks' robes.) Swe helped explain it to me today. If a wat (temple) wants to build a new addition. They might send out letters to everyone asking for donations of any size. And you would get your name somewhere at the new structure depending on how much you gave. So this category is for fundraising activities and I suspect it's not too different from fundraisers that any US house of worship or school might have including things like cookie sales and raffles. The ChumChon would do Thai versions of these sorts of money raising activities.
• Money from local or federal government funds (such as the land bank) for specific projects. This might be support for schools and a health clinic as well as information on various agricultural techniques.

The money is used for communal improvements - irrigation systems, water and sewer, etc.


5. Government support - Like any local community, the Chum Chon needs assistance for schools, health care (small government health clinics), and ways to assist when prices drop below a basic price. Of course, public schools and public health clinics are things people in local communities in the US expect from government too. And US farmers are also protected by various price support programs.


So that's a general overview of โฉนดชุมชน Chanot Chumchon. Don't rely on this too heavily, but it should give you a reasonable head start on understanding this concept.

*I've explained this numerous times on the blog, but I realize there may be people who don't know this acronym who haven't been here before. And I don't like documents full of acronyms. It stands for Non-Governmental Organization and would be called a non-profit in the United States.

**Trying to write out Thai words in western script is tricky. There are different standard phonetics systems, but they only are helpful if you understand the sounds each letter is supposed to represent. So I've tried to make it as close to what would make phonetic sense to a US English speaker. Choom rhymes with 'room.' Chon rhymes something between 'tone' and 'torn.' Of course it also depends on who's speaking. In the tape, the speaker says something that sounds like choomachon.